Once More Around the Mulberry Bush

The HR Manger stopped me in the hall this morning and asked, how I'd "gotten so skinny."

Now, anybody who's met me or seen me at a Con can tell you I'm not exactly a skinny person. Never have been. I'm a size 16, moving back into a 14, and this is the weight I've been at most of my life. Two years ago, though, I was coming out of grad school binge eating and binge drinking and over-stressing, and was 20 lbs heavier when I started this job. So, I guess that in comparison, I'm "skinny"(er), anyway.

It's odd that I get annoyed when people make any sort of reference to my weight, now. I don't mind the gee, you seem a lot stronger comments, but the "gee, how did you get so skinny?" comments grate on me. Mainly because 1) I'm not skinny 2) I've been losing and gaining the same 40 or 50 lbs my whole life. I know how transitory this is. 3) I know there's no secret.

Basically, I told her I'd stopping trying to starve myself and started working out more. 20 minutes of free weights 5 mornings a week, two days a week at the gym, two 15 minute walks a day while at work; I take the stairs everywhere. I still drink calorie-laden drinks at Starbucks. I just get the small size. Instead of denying myself everything, I let myself have stuff, which means no binging later.

And I'm still not a small person. That's certainly not my goal. Being "average" and "proportionate" feels very good to me, and that's where I feel I'm at. Right now I'm working toward being stronger. That's the biggest thing for me. As far as weight goes, I'm quite comfortable at this weight. I've been here most of my life. Dropping to a 12/14 would be the furthest I'd ever take it. I physically can't get below a size 10 even if I ever wanted that - my hips, the actual bones, are too big for that. My lowest size barring concentration-camp chic is a 12, and that's going to take more years of training to hit, if I hit it again (likely, I will, if I can take boxing more seriously and get back into it).

I was watching "Supersize Me" this weekend. It's a very slickly made documentary, and it's also one of the biggest modern propoganda peices I've seen in recent years. The fat=unhealthy equation was used throughout, though none of the (mostly women) overweight people he talked to went through the same blood tests he did, so though we could see they were above average as far as pounds go, they could have been healthy as horses. I was a little startled that the graphic and stats he used to illustrate how fat America was was the image of a teenage girl, the average of which is now taller and fatter, of course, than the average woman 50 years ago, who also wore a girdle and didn't participate in any sports.

The best part of this documentary, the one that I was glad got included, was the one about the school lunch programs. In the "real world" adults have lots of choices, and if they want to eat a half pound of fries, great. But school cafeterias get lots of perks from junk food companies, and let me tell you, if I was given the choice between cheetoes and soda and some of the shit that gets dolloped onto cafteria trays, I'd choose the cheetoes. The real kicker? Comparing that food to the organic, healthy choices given by another school that cost the same amount. If it's not a cost difference, what's the deal?

The deal is that big corporations want to get their products into schools. So we live on chips, sodas, and candy bars in school. I remember one of the great things about the cafeteria in college in Alaska was that we had a salad and sandwich bar in case the "hot food" option sucked that day. I lived on a lot of salads and sandwiches. And it was cool to have that choice available.

Watching our protagonist stuff himself silly on McDonald's food that his body obviously didn't want and not walking - in New York City, no less! - in order to achieve the results he was gunning for was a little over-the-top. There were some fantastic points made, but in the end, it was a propoganda peice whose ultimate goal seemed to be to get rid of McDonald's, which is silly. Eating a cheeseburger and small fry a couple times a month isn't going to kill you. An extra 20 lbs on your frame won't even kill you. Overeating nutritionally-devoid foods and lying around on the couch all day might. If nothing else, you'll suffer from malnutrition, which he was, and that's going to cause your body to go into binge mode, which it did.

Eat what your body craves, stop eating when you're full, and exercise. Walk, walk, walk, and you'll feel better. The surprise is you may not ever be thin while doing this. And you know what? That's OK.

But then, it's never really about health. That's not what we're gunning for, and that's what's getting us into trouble.

Off to the Big Apple

Well, I'm off to NY tonight for a nice, relaxing weekend. Spending my time until then going through about 200 pages of line edits and getting some more handwritten stuff transcribed.

Type-a type-a type-a type-a.

This is why there will never be a writing reality show.

Hollaback

Tell me what you hollered back. Don't take his picture.

Tell me what you said. Tell me you told him he was a "limp dick."

Tell me you got into a fight.

I Am a Little Drunk

Good times, good times.

At the Gym

So, I was at the gym tonight, and this huge guy, I mean, broad, not tall (not much taller than me, anyway), with that amazingly defined triangular shape, the huge shoulders, walked up the stairs ahead of me.

And I was transfixed.

Not in a "Wow! That's hot!" way (I tend not to like overly butched up guys) but in a "Wow! I want to be that buff!" way.

Funny.

In Which the Protagonist Drinks Whiskey & Is Happy to Be Alive

Beautiful night. Cold, but good. Just got back from the gym. Jazz playing. Roommates cooking dinner and chatting in the big kitchen. Drinking some whiskey, transcribing some writing work I did this afternoon. Getting ready for a great weekend in NY.

Doesn't get much better.

On Being Better

It's been some time since I talked about being better. I guess you could say I've been too busy working at it to reflect on it.

To be honest, I'm not really sure where I'm at with it. I'm writing like a maniac, at lunch, on the bus, on the train, at home. I'm switching out notebooks soon because this one's full. I have a marketable book that's halfway done. I'm about to drop another waist size as well (in a good way), and my biceps have gotten bigger and denser after many weeks of neglect. I'll be in NY this weekend, and Ohio next week to visit a very, very good friend of mine who I've know for more than a decade. I'm going home for Christmas, paying my own way totally this time. I'm moving to NY next year, and moving again a year after that.

My job pays me a living, I like the people I work with, and I have a bit of breathing time this week before I get dumped with another whirlwind of "real work" terror in December. That's pretty fair.

I'm working out regularly and getting work done. Though you may not think it's on the list, I'm also glad I've had some time for blogging.

There are still things I desperately want, but I'm at the point where I'm actively working toward all of my goals, so there isn't much to complain about except, "Gee, it takes a lot of time to be the person you want to be." And that's not much of a criticism at all.

I am still in constant wonder at the way things are turning out.

I think I'm getting far more than I hoped for.

Thoughts On Meaningful Work

I went out ot lunch today at a local place that sits on the first floor of one of the buildings in our corporate complex. I haven't been here since I had the flu, because after eating their baked potato soup, I promptly went home and vomited.

I've been coming here for two years, and the turnover in the waitstaff is predictable. Most people try to stay out of food service if they can, or use it to pay bills to get through school or divorces. For some, a very few, like, say, my parents, it becomes a career. But not always because you want it to.

It's not usually you're first choice.

You don't sit around in fourth grade and say, "I want to be a waitress with I grow up." And if you do like the work, you're not supposed to.

I've always had a terror of these sorts of jobs, likely inspired by my parents, who dreamed of something like what I've now got: my ability to walk out of college and at the very least get myself a 401 (K) plan, health benefits, enough money to pay rent in a decent town, time to pursue other passions, holidays off, paid vacation.

They didn't want me to spend my relative youth the way they did, working 12-hour shifts, weekends, holidays, coming home smelling of burger grease and french fries.

The irony, of course, is that my parents did achieve that comfortable white collar life, the dog and the big house and the (mostly) college educated children, a little something for retirement.

And they did it flipping burgers. It got them where they wanted to be, just a little later in life than they probably wanted.

But when I'm here at lunch, watching a handful of the servers still working food service, paying bills, I wonder - do they have a plan? Do they want to run this place? Or is this enough? And are they OK with that? Am I? Because some people are OK with it.

I wasn't.

Certainly, there are things I like about all of the jobs I've had. I worked harder as a waitress and had less freedom than the job I have now, and I make twice as much money now, only the labor we exert in serving others is seen as a lesser labor than sitting on our asses typing out words and numbers and running paper reports about actual work done by others.

I take some comfort in the fact that the tower crews whose work I report on make more money than I do. You know how they get up those 200 ft cell phone towers?

They climb.

I think I have some guilt about how I work. I have some guilt about being on the other side of the table. I don't understand money. I don't understand the value of work. I look around at what everyone else makes for what they do, for how hard they work, and it boggles my mind at how undervalued the people who actually do things are. We pay managers six figures to run reports and bitch about how they don't know what's going on in the field. You want to know what's going on in the field? Put on a hard hat and get into the field. I spend all day reviewing tower audits, and I've never been to a cell site.

I remember, while working in the corporate office at the burger joint, when the VPs realized the company had grown so big that over half the office staff hadn't come up from behind the grill. They'd never seen a deep fryer up close. My mom helped spearhead a campaign to encourage office folks to get their food handlers' cards and go and help out in one of the burger joints for a day.

For paper pushes, it was an eye opener.

And, I think, for some, deeply satisfying.

We get so divorced from real, tangible work, hunched at our desks, making up reports, fielding information. But at day's end you have nothing to show for it but a paycheck.

For me, hey, that's really all I need.

But I must say, there are days when I'd like to learn how to climb a 200 ft tower and replace an antenna.

They'd pay me more, too.

I'm Going to Lunch

It occurs to me why, after a while, writers don't read reviews.

I'll take my trusted critiquers over random slapdash any day.

"When You Fall in Love With Something..."

Kariya, a former All-American in field hockey at the University of Maine, knew she was going to be a boxer from the first time she stepped through the ropes to spar. It was the typical trial by fire for a fighter at the KO Boxing Gym in Toronto, but with an added twist – since she was a female, she wasn’t particularly welcome in the club.

“They didn’t want me in the gym,” she remembered. “They wanted me to have a try at it and go. I got punched right in my face and I just wanted to get right back at him. Ever since then I knew that I loved it. I’ve always been intrigued by watching boxing and I’ve always been a boxing fan, so going in there, trying it, and understanding the discipline it takes and how difficult of a sport it really is, I wanted to really be the best at it.”

And yea, they've got a mention about her looks (sigh). But let's be happy it was a half-sentence throw-away line, and not the subject of the whole damn article.

Gamer Girl Action

Video games, by and large, assume that whether you’re playing a female character or not, you’re going to want to have sex with a female character, or at least be sexually attracted to a female character (or monster).

Women

In Liberia, when their sons were kidnapped and drugged to fight for rebel factions, and when their husbands came home from brothels and infected them with H.I.V., and when government soldiers invaded their houses and raped them in front of their teenage sons, these were the women who picked themselves up and kept going. They kept selling fish, cassava and kola nuts so they could feed their families. They gave birth to the children of their rapists in the forests and carried the children on their backs as they balanced jugs of water on their heads.

These are the women who went to the polls in Liberia last week. They ignored the threats of the young men who vowed more war if their chosen presidential candidate, a former soccer player named George Weah, didn't win. "No Weah, no peace," the boys yelled, chanting in the streets and around the polling stations.

The women in Liberia, by and large, ignored those boys and made Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who is 67, the first woman to be elected to lead an African country. I wasn't surprised that Mr. Weah immediately said the vote had been rigged, although international observers said it had not been. In the half-century since the Europeans left Africa, its men have proved remarkably adept at self-delusion.

Heidi Fleiss Intends to Open a Brothel For Female Clientele

Fleiss plans makeover for Nevada brothel

LAS VEGAS - Former "Hollywood Madam" Heidi Fleiss says she's bound for a brothel in the southern Nevada desert that she wants to help remake into a resort featuring male prostitutes serving female customers.

"I am moving to Crystal," Fleiss said Wednesday of a desert crossroads 20 miles north of Pahrump and about 80 miles outside Las Vegas. It features two bordellos and little else.

"I am opening up a stud farm," Fleiss declared from her Hollywood home overlooking the Sunset Strip. "I am going to have the sexiest men on earth. Women are going to love it."

Joe Richards, who owns the Cherry Patch Ranch and Mabel's Ranch in Crystal, said he sent a "courtesy" letter Tuesday to inform the Nye County Commission that Fleiss will work for him.

"She's going to be madam hostess of Cherry Patch Ranch," Richards told The Associated Press by telephone. He called her an employee rather than a partner.

There's one possible problem, though. County Sheriff Tony DeMeo said that because Fleiss is a convicted felon, she could be banned from the county's legal sex trade. DeMeo sits with the five county commissioners on a six-member brothel licensing board.

Fleiss, 39, was released from a California prison in 1999 after serving 21 months for money laundering, tax evasion and attempted pandering.

Fleiss was convicted in 1995 of running a prostitution ring in which models-turned-prostitutes were flown around the world to meet wealthy actors and clients who paid as much as $10,000 for a single meeting.

DeMeo said he'd heard several reports in his three years as sheriff about Fleiss' plans, including a failed proposal by an Australian firm that hired Fleiss in 2003 to promote a 50-room brothel-hotel.

"This is different," Fleiss insisted Wednesday, describing movers packing her belongings and her plan to arrive in Nevada later this week. "I'm moving."

Nye County is among 10 rural Nevada counties in which prostitution is legal under county and state oversight. Prostitution is illegal in Clark County surrounding Las Vegas, and Washoe County around Reno.

If she really wantes to make money, she'll have male and female prostitutes, and she'll stick to that "women clients only" rule with an iron resolve.

Sucks that she's working for a man, though. Which is why I think the whole thing will come to naught. She's just another Charlie's Angel.

What's So Bad About Being Called A Lesbian?

The girls' soccer team at Immaculate High School celebrated a goal that helped them win the championship game. A copy editor for the local newspaper placed a caption beneath a picture that stated they were actually celebrating one of their teammates coming out as a lesbian. The caption was considered offensive and unprofessional.

While the copyeditor was lying, and so violated journalistic principles, what he (?) was lying about shouldn't have been an issue. Yes, it's stereotyping female atheletes, but you know, some women athletes are lesbians. So are some fashion models. If "lesbian" wasn't a "bad word" would people have reacted so strongly?

The day when calling somebody a "lesbian" is considered a statement of fact and not an insult will be a good fucking day. Why's "lesbian" have to be a curse word?

I enjoy being mistaken for a lesbian. Doesn't bother me a bit. Why should it?

Only 37?

"Strong drink."

- Daniel Handler, author of the Limony Snicket books, when asked how he kept his confidence in his first book through 37 rejections

If Only I Could Type a Little Faster

A bit of a hunger night. Should have gone to the gym. Was bloody fucking cold, and I wasn't dressed for the walk home, dammit.

I'm going to seek out some yogurt and type a little faster.

I've got to finish this book.

This Just May Be The Weirdest Article I've Ever Read

Huh?

That is all.

But How Will I Type?

Fell on the stairs coming up from the train platform yesterday. I smashed the hell out of my right middle finger. I didn't think much of it at the time, but when I woke up this morning, it was pretty stiff and and sore. It's not puffy, though, and I can bend it easily.

But getting up last night, realizing it hurt, and not being able to see what was going on with it, I had this suddnen, terrible fear:

"But how will I type?"

The answer, of course, is two-fingered typing.

But it's funny how worried I was about that. My entire livlihood, from dayjob to writing work, hinges on my abillity to get words down on a keyborad quickly.

I have nightmares about people cutting off my fingers.

God's War: Excerpt

Chapter 14

“I always thought you’d be taller,” Nyx said.

Queen Nasyaan smiled and stood. Nyx had seen images of her before, of course, but most of those were doctored.

The Queen was a short, plump woman with a halo of graying hair. Her face was too young for the hair – she wasn’t even forty. The desert tended to suck the youth from everyone else. Nyx supposed the Queen was attractive in the way of an older sister or blood cousin; cute, and immediately likable, but not someone you’d first tag as a bed partner.

Nyx caught Rhys looking at her, and had the peculiar feeling he was reading her mind. One never knew, with magicians.

“Sit, please,” the Queen said, gesturing to the two seats on the other side of the polished white table.

Nyx watched the woman’s hands – soft hands, hands that hadn’t seen much of the desert. The filters kept out the worst of the sun. This was a queen who would never have to be scraped for cancers.

“I guess I should say I’m sorry about your mother,” Nyx said. “Her dying.”

When Queen Abyyad died, Nyx had gotten drunk and told Rhys to thank God for her dying. Rhys told her God didn’t work that way. It hadn’t put a damper on her spirits.

“I never liked the old bitch anyway,” the Queen said.

“Not many people did,” Nyx said.

“Nyx?” Rhys said quietly.

She waved him away.

“So it is Nyxnissa so Dasheem?” the Queen asked.

“Nyx, yea.”

“Nyx, a pleasure.”

“Thanks.”

“Thank you for answering my summons. I’m interested in expanding my pool of hunters. I heard you served time at the front.”

“A long time ago.” Nyx looked around for something to drink, found nothing. Did they have something against liquor in the palace?

“Volunteered?”

“Yea.”

“Two years of service, honorably discharged at nineteen, so I’ve read.”

Nyx stiffened. This wasn’t going to be cut and dry.

“You came back with burns over eighty percent of your body,” the Queen said. “Your military file says you were put into the care of the magicians for reconstitution.”
The Queen eyed her over, as if looking for evidence that Nyx had once been a charred, blackened husk of a woman. “Is that right?”

“Yea.”

The Queen didn’t look convinced.

“I got a good magician. The best in the business,” Nyx said. And then he fucked me over and sent me to prison, Nyx thought. But she didn't say that out loud.

“You’re a war hero, then. A true patriot. I went against the advice of my best counselors in asking you here.”

“I don’t get on well with most people. They don’t like me much,” Nyx said. “I’ve been a bounty hunter and a bēl damê a lot longer than I was at the front.”

“I read that you served some time in prison for black work.”

“I did.”

“You have some sympathy for breeders?”

“Not really. It paid well.”

“More than being a bēl damê? As I recall, collecting blood debt is quite rewarding, monetarily.”

“Only if you’re good at it,” Nyx said. “I wasn’t.”

“You brought in all of your notes. What was it? Twenty-eight for twenty-eight?”

“I did that in three years. Most bēl damês do two or three times that. They’re better at throwing away bad notes than I was.”

“You pursue your notes to the end.”

“I do,” Nyx said. “I’m stubborn. Maybe just stupid.”

“Neither of us have gotten where we are by being stupid,” the Queen said.

“Oh, I’ve done some pretty stupid things,” Nyx said.

“How long would you pursue a note for me?”

Nyx shrugged. “It’s all the same. I’d go until I got it, or until someone else did. Rumor has it you’ve called in a lot of hunters.”

“A handful. All but half a dozen of the bēl damês have already given up the hunt. I need someone –“

“Desperate?” Nyx suggested.

“I suppose you’d like to know about the money, then.”

“I want to know what I’m hunting first.”

“You’ve shown an incredible dedication to your country.”

“Uh-huh,” Nyx said. Government types had sweet-talked her with words like honor, dedication, service, obligation. She had burned for it, and much more.

“Tell me, why did you volunteer for the front?”

“My older brothers died at the front. My little brother got called up. I joined so I could watch his back.”

“That’s –“

“He died of dysentery during basic training,” Nyx said.

“Sacrificing for the cause is truly –“

“Let’s go ahead talk money,” Nyx said. The last thing she wanted was to listen to the Queen of Nasheen tell her she was some kind of living saint for burning at the front. Nyx knew better.

“Money isn’t an issue,” the Queen said. “Bring me the woman alive and I’ll give you however much you want. I’ll set you up in an estate by the sea with a hundred servants if you wish it. Women, of course.” She flicked a look at Rhys. “Unless you’d prefer half-breeds. We have no end of male half-breeds.”

“Until we start sending half-breeds to the front.”

“Bring me this woman, and we never will.”

“What do you mean?”

“Let’s say this woman has the power to end the war. The war that took your brothers, your life. I offer you a way to end the war, and get paid well besides.”


Nyx eased back into her seat. “Now I know why you called me up.”

“Your file makes for interesting reading.”

“No doubt.”

“So.” The Queen, too, leaned back in her chair. “What do you think of my offer?”

“I have a good team,” Nyx said. “We could put something off. When did you last see this woman?”

“She’s a foreigner, an off-worlder called Nikodem Jordan.” The Queen pulled a slate off the table and called up a photo. She handed the slate to Nyx. “This gives her likeness and her vitals. You’ll need to change the password. I require the utmost discretion.”

Nyx took the slate and looked at a display of photos. They had date and time stamps. Some were dated eight years before. She’d figured that. Nikodem was a small woman, Chenjan in coloring, with a broad nose and wide cheekbones, gray eyes. It was an arresting face, not so much alien as exotic in the way she’d heard off-worlders were. She was too little for real beauty, but the face, ah, the face! Nyx saw strength in it, and some cunning. It was a face that kept others out, kept secrets.

“You will bring her back to me?” the Queen asked.

“I’ll need to know everything about her,” Nyx said. She looked up from the slate, reluctantly. “How long has she been gone? Does she have friends, other travelers? Who did she meet with while she was here?” She paused, wondered if she should show her card. “This wasn’t her first visit. Who did she meet with the last time she was here?”

The Queen answered a few of the questions, talked a little about the off-worlders. Nikodem had been missing for a month. The Queen said that when the off-worlders had come into Faleen fore the first time sixteen years before, they came in speaking Arabic. That’s how out of touch off-worlders were with what was going on in Nasheen. It took some time to explain to them that Arabic had been dead in Nasheen for two thousand years.

“What did they come here looking for?” Nyx asked.

“Some of that is confidential,” the Queen said. “What I can say is that they were very interested in finding other followers of the Book. They found our particular brand of Islam rather contemptible.” She glanced over at Rhys. “And they didn’t think Chenja’s was much better, but they have an offer for us, and we’ve been in negotiations these last eight years. That’s the transit time from our world to theirs.”

“New Canaan?” Nyx asked.

“Yes. You know it?”

“I didn’t take geography or astronomy much past the ones, but I listen to a lot of stories. I hear they’re pretty conservative, and mostly looking to some dead white guy,” Nyx said. She thought of Kine, who hadn’t had sex or alcohol in nearly fifteen years. That couldn’t be good for anyone.

“They call themselves the Mujahadin. The Quran is their primary book, yes, but they’ve incorporated both the teachings of the prophet Jesus and the old testament of the Judeans. They believe that because they have a faith composed of this trinity, they are the only true believers of the one God, the only people who know and understand Him.”

“God is unknowable,” Rhys said. “That is his nature. For them to claim to know God is arrogance at best.”

“It’s true that only the Chenjans have a call to prayer anymore, and some of Mohammed’s proscriptions I find terribly contradictory and backward within our current society, but it is no business of mine to tell my women how to worship. There are God’s laws and women’s laws. Whenever possible, they intersect. When they do not, I tend to ere on the side of individual freedom.”

Nyx coughed. Individual freedom, sure. She remembered her brothers. Remembered how honor-bound she’d been to “volunteer.”

“It would be a fantastic opportunity to spread that sort of freedom to other worlds,” the Queen said.

Rhys said, “But wouldn’t that be Nasheen imposing on others the sort of trinity the Canaanites are coming here to spread among the Nasheenians?”

Nyx sucked her teeth and glared at him. The Queen laughed.

“We have different views of God, you and I,” the Queen said.

“So when can I see these Canaanites?” Nyx asked. The less Rhys talked about God to the Queen of Nasheen, the better.

“Come, I will take you to them,” the Queen said, and rose.

Carnivale of the Feminists is Up

Good stuff.