Is it the Weekend Yet?

No? No?

Someone called the house this morning at 5am - THREE TIMES. Finally, on the third call, someone with a slight Irish accent actually replied to my angry "HELLO!!!" and said they'd been trying to fax something three times ("I KNOW!!!" I said), and wasn't this New York?

"No, this is a RESIDENCE in CHICAGO at 5 O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING."

Like many Brits, he was deeply apologetic, but my alarm was going off in twenty minutes, and fuckity fuck fuck fuck.

I'm so ready for the weekend. Where are you, Friday?

Thoughts on Roe

If they have the balls to do it, it might go something like this:

1) The legality of abortion will get kicked back to the states, so blue states will have the procedure, some of the bigger red and mostly southern states won't, and I'll be smuggling in terrified pregnant teenagers from Indiana into Illinois and fending off further homegrown terrorists bombing health clinics. We'll have our own underground railroad. How charming.

2) Abortion is totally illegal, and we get 1.9 million more unwanted children every year. This will likely go the way of Prohibition, so we'll have ten years of women dying on tables and in back alleys and trying to self-perform abortions. Ten or twenty thousand dead women a year should do it; get a million real, live women who are now dead and talk about *their* deaths in front of a higher court, and we'll go back to allowing legal abortion. Of course, a lot of women, maybe you, your sister, your wife, your girlfriend, will have to die to get that to happen, but hey, that's politics.

It's not like politics are personal or anything. I mean, after all, this has nothing to do with me, or you, or anybody else.

Just politics.

In the meantime, there's a war on, the country's a bazillion dollars in debt, and most people don't have health care. I'm so glad we've picked something like this to spend all of our time and money on, instead of letting a quite good law continue to provide a quite good service that results in less death and complication than actual pregnancy.

When are we going to go after the real villains? Why am I the terrorist?

Thoughts on Food Addiction

Though I’ve never been a classically small person (which I’m generally OK with), I put on about 70 lbs between the ages of 16 and 18, due mostly, looking back on it, to getting on and then off the pill. Add in some depression (also partly caused by the pill) and a bad relationship, and I ballooned. It was an issue of never-ceasing hunger, the feeling that no matter how much I ate, I was still unsatisfied, still looking for something more and better.

I’d been an overeater before that, but all those triggers at once turned me into a raving lunatic, and that’s the period when my binge eating really took off. At 16, I had a car, and made my own money, so I could run into a convienence store and feed my cravings at all hours. The binges were definitely triggered by high stress, and the overeating was largely pill-based.

What I did to slough off all that excess pill and depression weight quickly so I could move around in my own skin again was to get on the Atkins diet. I lost 40lbs in four months (and kept that off because I’d merely gotten back to my set point anyway) and got up the self-confidence to go ahead and go bike riding several days a week and up my exercise routine in a “fun” way – not thinking of them as workouts, but just days where I’d go out to have fun.

By the time I hit college, I was down a total of 60lbs, and after the first couple months of college, I lost another 10lb and was at my fighting weight of about 175lbs or so. That meant going to the gym 3-6 days a week for 30-60 minutes. By that time, I’d modified my diet so I was eating wheat bread, lots of fruits and veggies, meats of all sorts, and as summer rolled around and I started bike riding a lot, I had no trouble going out for ice cream and pizza once a week.

What I remember most about my time in Alaska is how happy I was, and I know a lot of that had to do with my diet, and all that bike riding. Add that to the fact that I had a boat load of money and not a care in the world, and yea… I was damn happy.

The trouble is that I’ve been raised with bad habits, and during times of high stress, I still haven’t found another way to deal with that stress besides eating. I’ve gotten better in that I don’t binge eat so much anymore (my project for the year), but I’ll still turn to shit food when the going is tough, as I did in South Africa. As I’ve done the last couple of months (though every time I do it, it’s to a lesser and lesser degree. This is a positive sign!).

But I’ve gotten stressed and lazy, and I can’t afford new clothes, so I’ve gotta cut back for a bit to get things under control. When my world is out of control, my eating goes there too, and I have to cut it quick before it becomes an issue again.

I’m cutting my drinking down to a couple beers or some whiskey one night a week, which always helps, and I’m back to reasonable low-carb (brown rice and sweet potatoes are OK), no sugar. I’m on day two of this, and today was the office “bagel break” which turned out to be a heaping tray of danishes.

I hate this place.

The cravings are always the worst the first few days after I’m trying to break my white bread and sugar addiction. I wanted to dive into the whole platter of danishes and spend the rest of the day eating.

The problem with me and sugary sweets available on demand is that I can never eat just one, or half of one. I’d love to be one of those people who could just cut down portions instead of eliminating nearly an entire food group and all sugar, but I’m just not. I have to go cold turkey. There are certain foods I’ll binge on, and I have to avoid those at all costs, or I’m going to be dropping money I don’t have on new, bigger, clothes I can’t afford.

I think I’m beginning to move into the watching-my-weight-for-economic-reasons place. Which, actually, is pretty damn cool. I’m not hating myself. I don’t feel I’m unlovable just as I am, I just realize that if I don’t get a handle on myself again, I’m going to have to buy new clothes.

And this morning on the bus, I noticed that the world was looking a little clearer than usual, a little brighter. I recognized the feeling, because it was what I had in Alaska when I was really taking care of myself. Ah, sweet happiness, a clear head.

I always feel better when I cut out processed food. It really sucks, goddammit, because damn, it’s so good to eat that food. So, so, good. But then there’s this feeling, this great high I get when my body’s running a little cleaner, and damn, I don’t want to eat those danishes if they take this away…

The sad thing is that knowing, intellectually, that the crap food won’t make me feel any better, in fact, will make me feel worse, doesn’t help with the actual physical craving for a thing. It’s like I have a gaping black hole inside of me waiting to be filled.

And it’s going to take a week before those cravings subside. And it’s a bitch of a week.

Perhaps the biggest lesson I've learned as I've gotten older is that everything is changeable. Getting back into a rut doesn't mean you're doomed to stay there. Many states are temporary. You get back up and start going again, you get to the place you want to be.

Falling isn't dying. It's not over until you're dead.

Kids Aren't For Everyone

Continuing with the subject of having kids...

Unless you're absolutely wild about the idea, you probably shouldn't. I must say I admire those who do, but you better be clear about what you're getting into.

Stuck In NY

All five flights out of La Guardia Sunday night were cancelled due to weather. They didn't finally give into this, of course, until about midnght, when we'd all been suffering through unannounced gate changes and assurances that flights would get out at some point, which is why we sat through 7 or 8 hours of waiting time in the airport instead of taking the 10 hour bus ride to Chicago. People were so pissed of that the desk agents had to call security.

Got rescheduled for 3pm on Monday (missing work I can't afford to miss), got delayed again at the gate, got out onto the tarmac and waited, then heard air traffic control had put a stop on all planes going into Chicago. We spent nearly an hour sitting on the tarmac. Me and the girl next to me had been at the airport the night before, and we were pretty much resolved to spending yet another night in NY. I love B and everything, but I seriously couldn't afford to spend any more time in NY. We got to sit around on Monday and snuggle and eat pizza, but missing another day of work for Tuesday...

Yea.

Anyway, miraculously, we got clearance to go ahead and go over the big storm that was blocking Chicago from the northeast, and the pilot navigated through no problem.

Long weekend. Wish it could have been longer, actually. I need a new job. Got a call from a woman at Washington Mutual who saw my resume on Monster.com (this really does work - I've gotten three or four calls from people through just posting a resume there) who wanted me to work out in Vernon Hills.

Ummm

No. It's the loop or nothing, at this point. I want a shorter fucking commute.

And more money.

Off to NY

Off to NY for the weekend...

It's Like Genderfucking, Only With Sex

Alleyrat rant:

Many people have come to accept the notion of homosexuality but have a much harder time with bisexuality because it suggests a type of sexual flexibility or fluidity they find threatening. It is also much harder to pin people down into sex/gender categories if they tell us they are bisexual. We have our "gay man" category neatly figured; we've got our "lesbian" category; now we've got some new gender-related categories like the metrosexual, so we can sort out the dapper straights from the dapper gays; we've got "lipstick lesbians" for the femme dykes. But with bisexuals, it gets confusing. If John has a boyfriend one year, we see him as a gay man. But then, who is he when he shows up the next year with a girlfriend?

Bisexuality threatens the comforting straight/gay and man/woman binaries. (And the identity politics built around them). But it is also only the very beginning of sexual diversity. The simple fact is that sexuality is infinitely more complicated than which dirty pictures get you hard/wet, and the fact is that any one person's sexuality can shift over time or circumstance. And that it's sometimes impossible to tease out where gender and sexuality diverge.

For example: One of my high school boyfriends confessed to me, a few years after we broke up, that he had been getting blow jobs from an apparently "straight" friend of ours. The friend would come over, the two would smoke some weed, and then the friend would get to work on my ex. The Ex said that "if you close your eyes, it's just the same as getting it from a girl". But it wasn't, not really. Because (my hunch is) that this was an act that grew out of their particular friendship, their particular intimacy, their particular chemistry with each other. And it probably felt excitingly dangerous and taboo. And for my ex, more invested than our friend in thinking of himself as "straight", receiving felt like an okay, straight-ish thing to do. But giving would not have.

How do things like that fit into our rigid little categories of "straight" or "gay" or even "bisexual"? I don't think they do. I think the categories are almost worthless. (Except as community building and organizing/political strategies. Identity politics, again).....

So my point is: sexuality is not reducible to visual arousal, or even arousal. It's not reducible even to sex, or whom we have sex with. And sexuality is infinitely more complicated than these narrow little categories we have, as a culture, created for ourselves. Labels can pin people down, make them feel trapped, defined. "Bisexual", as a label, is the most open category. Though people tend to assume that a "true" bisexual would have equal desire for men and women (and if not, well, that means they're actually straight, or gay!) at least the bisexual label gives people room to move around in. Maybe I should start identifying as bisexual, as a political move. Maybe we all should.

Amen to that.

Read the rest.

Musing

You know, this empty iced tea glass looks a lot like an empty beer glass, with bits of foam and everything.

I can dream.

Raising Children, or Lack Thereof

I've been thinking a lot about raising children. Not because I'm all that hot on having any, but because of this post over at Bitch Ph.D. and because of a comment one of my first readers made about a draft of the fantasy saga.

I've got a female-dominated matriarchy as one of my major countries, where men only make up about a third of the population at best. When my buddy asked, "So, where are all the children in Dhorin?" I prepared to explain that that's why they had so many slaves. The slaves stayed home to take care of the kids, and women got raises and advancements depending on how many kids they had, and the social system was set up so they had this prime birthing window so they could take time off to nurse kids, and then...

And then...

The trouble with being stuck with the whole "women want to be equal" instead of "let's revolutionize this society so it's better for everybody," is that you get stuck, again, with "male" being the norm. So instead of revolutionizing the workplace so we've got onsite childcare, or better, can have kids hanging out acting as interns at the workplace and functioning as members of society instead of subordinates, we just figure, hey, the parents will work and just hire somebody to take care of the kid, like a wife.

One of the big jokes between me and Jenn is that we're both so busy that we need a wife to do things like change lightbulbs and pick up mayonnaise.

And I was reading about kids in Rome, how they were dressed like "little adults" and had to function as adults by the age of 10, and I was reminded of my great grandfather, who was orphaned at 10 and who supported himself shoe-shining by the time he was 13. Infantilizing kids in the Victorian age, I guess, just made it more acceptable for a woman to spend 20 years raising kids instead of five or ten, you know, until they could go out and function in society.

In Durban, the department secretary sometimes brought her child to work with her on those days she and her husband weren't able to juggle childcare. The kid was maybe 2 or 3, and played quietly on a blanket, surrounded by toys, in the department office. Profs and grad students would come in to say hi, and the secretary could do her work at her desk and watch her kid. It didn't hurt anybody at the department, and I'm sure it was good for the kid to get out and be around other people.

We had a paper presentation once where the presenter brought her baby with her. Unfortunatley, the baby was pretty whiny and upset at being up there; it sure would have been nice if the conference room had a cradle or something she could rock the baby in with her foot while she lectured.

Yea. I'm being serious.

What's wrong with it? Shouldn't children be fully integrated into society? Isn't treating them second-class keeping them acting like "kids" far longer than they would otherwise? I know that the more people treated me like an idiot, the more I knew I was going to be able to get away with. In high school, if teachers treat you like you're four, you'll do just the amount of work they expect, and you'll produce it like a four year old. Why should I work harder? It wasn't like I was being treated like an adult.

And I realized I was doing that fantasy matriarchy all wrong. Why should they hide their kids at home? By the time the kid's five or so, they can function in society. Kids were being sent off to knight training and Roman schools at that age. Why can't we ask the same of modern children? Why can't we tailor institutions so that we can integrate our desire to raise families with our desire/neccessity to work?

Kids in Dhorin would be shipped straight off to schools and jobs at 5 years old. The lucky ones would likely apprentice to their mothers or mothers' friends and be ushered through the halls of the capital, running notes and errands and acting like "little adults" - and being treated that way.

If you want to change basic ideas about how society works, try altering assumptions about the place of children, and the separation of private and public life.

You might come up with something really different. Well, different to 21st century America, anyway.

I Am Not An Overly Friendly Person

There's this guy at work who keeps trying to be overly friendly with me, and talk to me while my headphones are on, and be generally polite and say hello every morning. This is usually fine if it's just a regular "good morning," but I'm not somebody you want to try and have a conversation with at work if I hardly know you and don't interact with you often.

It took me nearly a year before I felt comfortable idly chit-chatting with Cyllia the secretary and the regulars here. I take a loooonnng time to warm up to people. That's just who I am, and I tend to keep things as business-like as possible for as long as possible. I'm not at work to make friends. I'm at work to work, and write, and blog, and play Insaniquarium.

I am not here to make idle chit-chat when I'm half-awake and grumpy.

Also, I am drinking ice tea this morning instead of coffee.

That's enough to make anybody anti-social.

Random Alaska Picture

Perhaps I just need a vacation

Ohhhhh Sweeeeeeeeet

Unless you fit yourself up with an IUD, I don't know that you'll really know just how sweeeeeeeet this is to contemplate.

I'm not looking forward to next week.

(via feministing)

P.S.

And also, I've decided that for Christmas I'm going to get a tattoo.

Or another loop ear peircing.

But leaning toward tattoo.

Celebrate the push to 30.

Another Wednesday Night

I'm sitting here in bed listening to Tom Waits and sending off my resume rather randomly to admin and project assistant jobs posted on Monster.com.

Damn, I remember when making $32K a year sounded like a lot of money.

Then, of course, I picked up a bunch of student loans.

Funny how that works.

I'm out of beer, which is a good thing. The last two weeks, my roommate and I have been coming home and imbibing every night of the week. It's time to lay off the sauce on weekdays.

Seriously.

I also just finished eating my last chocolate bar for some time, and my last bagels for some time, as well.

I have become soft and doughy, and though the morning weights are keeping up the muscle strength and definition in my arms, my endurance is for shit. And I feel guilty and shitty about it, because this isn't who I want to be, physically. I want to be stronger and leaner, and instead I've been stress-eating for the last, what, four months?

Yea. I can feel it.

The IUD is settling down; I can go jogging without getting some irritated pinching at the end of it. Yea, I admit, a lot of this backsliding physically has had to do with physical stuff. It makes sense that making a big change in your life (in my case, beginning a relationship after six years off) is going to have a big upheaval of an adjustment period. As we get more comfortable as a couple, I get more comfortable too (as does he - we've both let a lot slide while working on this relationship, and we're just getting to the point where it looks like we can breathe comfortably without worrying that the other person will jump ship. Lots of strong feelings on both sides).

And it's time to stop with the stress eating and drinking.

I'm on a long road, I have been for some time. The curse of knowing exactly who you want to be, exactly what you're gunning for, is that when you're not that person, you get pretty pissed off at yourself.

I don't need to eat three bagels. I do need to get back to running my three miles, and I miss my boxing classes more than I can say. Money issues are getting smoothed out at month's end as well. I have a terrible, terrible, way with money, and I've been using a credit card I'm technically not supposed to be using in order to go out for comfort-food lunches.

I need to concentrate on my other comforts.

Like, say, writing.

I'm down to 0 stories in the mail, and though the fantasy saga is currently sitting with an agent, I've gotta fucking get these other novels done so I can get a bunch of shit moving at once.

And I need to be stronger. I need to be smarter.

I realize it's a long road, but I've gotta get off my ass every goddamn day in order to be the person I want to be.

It's a fucking killer, because it hasn't been a couple days, or a couple weeks, it's been more or less four months, and in order to jolt myself out of the bullshit routine, I need to dramatically alter a bunch of shit at once....

You know, like giving up coffee.

That would certainly be something.

It would certainly be a start.

Do you know some Exec.Assistants make 65K a year?

Why the fuck didn't I get *that* job?

Need to work on that shit.

Good Morning, Chiklits

Downside to heading to the beach for a day and bringing a Kelly Link book?

I misjudged my flipping-over rate (it was just so much more comfortable to read while lying on my stomach).

Hence, one of those nasty sunburns on the backs of the knees, the small of the back, the backs of the shoulders...

wheeeeewwwwwwww

Sitting all day at work will be FUN!

Something more substantial later...

Book Launch: Bodies in Motion

My local writing colleague, Mary Anne Mohanraj, has a bunch of book-related events going on here in Chicago, including a reading at Women & Children First Bookstore, which, as I learned today, has been having a shitty sales summer now that the local Borders has opened up.

Swing by and show some support for Mary Anne's excellent story collection and the coolness that is Women & Children First.

Sweet cover, eh?

Fuck It, I'm Going to the Beach

Blew off work completely.

I'm going to the beach with a blanket, a copy of Kelly Link's Magic For Beginners, Singularity Sky by Charlie Stross, a notepad, and fucking enjoying myself.

But before that, I'm going to go buy some pancakes at the local pancake house, deposit my tax refund, and buy something decadent from the Women & Children First Bookstore.

This whole worklife 8-5 bullshit just doesn't do anything for me. It's not what I want. I don't know how much longer I can work a shitty job.

The Madness That is My House

It has been a hellish weekend here at hacienda Chicago. My roommate awoke this morning to realize she'd overslept and missed her plane flight, and I overslept so I could miss a couple hours of work because it fucking blows and we both did a bunch of rollcoaster stuff with our respective partners this weekend.

We look and feel like about eight kinds of shit, and are terribly, terribly late, overrtired, and overstressed. You know: life.

So, what's new?

The Rhysling

My buddy Greg Beatty won the Rhysling award for best SF short poetry.

Woooot!

Britain's Response:

Carry on: