Surprise! People With Low Expectations Tend to Be More Content With Their Lot In Life

Well, yea.

That's why you don't teach women to read. Or slaves. Or anybody else you want to control. They might realize there's something else out there. They might start thinking things could be really different.

Weight Hysteria

The regional VP stopped me in the conference room today and said, "Are we losing you? You've lost a lot of weight. Are you OK? You don't want to do anything dangerous."

It still bothers me when people do this.

"I'm just lifting weights in the morning," I said. "I don't really feel like I'm doing much."

"It's so strange how people losing weight just changes the, you know." He made a motion around his face, "You know, the whole way people look in their face and.." he gestured to my body, "Their body. It's just so strange."

"Uh, yea," I said, and I thought, Is this as close as he feels he can get to saying I look a lot hotter? Better be, cause if he goes there, I'm gonna snarl.

I'm startled a lot at the reactions to my weight loss, mainly because I don't really feel like I'm trying. I spent all day Sunday on the couch in my pajamas eating cookies and chips with that cheese salsa dip, reading and watching the snow. Five days a week, I do a 15-20 min morning weight routine. I walk a lot. But I haven't been to the gym in at least six weeks because of weather and personal issues. And I just went to Old Navy this weekend and bought size 12 pants because the 14s are falling off.

What a lot of people at work don't get, I guess, is that when I got to Chicago I was at an abnormally high weight for me. A 12/14 is where my body naturally sits. If I cascade below a 12, I'll get pretty scared, but for now, I'm really comfortable with where I'm at.

The problem with that comfort, however, is that I'm less likely to go to the gym because I'm not constantly thinking about weight. This is bad because being "thinner" doesn't neccessarily equal "being fitter." Weights or no, I'd like to go back to getting in a little jogging or bike riding everyday. If nothing else, it'll make our three flights of stairs easier. And you know, I still want to be really fucking buff, and no matter my pants size, that ain't going to happen if I spend all my time eating cookies on the couch. Though a day a week of that is probably good for me...

Anyway, I'm going to go and eat something. Every time somebody comments on how much weight I've lost, I get hungry.

I do feel that I have this psychological thing about weight: I feel more vulnerable without that extra layer of fat. I feel like more people are looking at me. There's this weird conflation with gaining weight and avoiding male attention, to my mind. Which is why I think that the only way for me to permanently stay at my natural size is if I feel strong enough to defend myself. When the VP eyed me over, I totally tensed up. I hate feeling like I'm on display.

I gotta get back into boxing. The urge to do so gets stronger with every size I drop.

Land of the Free!

MaBell

Didn't we break up MaBell because it was a monopoly?

So, wouldn't putting it all back together be rebuilding a monopoly? And, um, be illegal?

You know, like banning abortion?

Wait, sorry, for a moment there I thought I was living in another country! Like, say, America!

I'm moving to Canada. Brendan, how are grad schools in Toronto?

Here We Go!

Gov. Mike Rounds signed legislation Monday banning nearly all abortions in South Dakota, setting up a court fight aimed at challenging the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion.

The bill would make it a crime for doctors to perform an abortion unless the procedure was necessary to save the woman's life. It would make no exception for cases of rape or incest.

Makes me pretty pissed at all those people who kept reassuring me, "You're being hysterical. They're never going to overturn Roe v. Wade. You feminists, getting all worked up about nothing." And then they all went and voted Republican, patting themselves on the back for being so smart.

Yea, right.

This is how it's done. I bet it's going to ZOOOOOOM into the Supreme Court. I can see them all licking their lips already.

Animals Remixed With Everyday Items

As someone who writes about a lot of bug-tech ideas, I thought these were neat.

Quote of the Day

"Everywhere’s a small town if you do something that bothers enough people."

(via Jennifer)

The Wiscon Shuffle

Nailed down the hotel reservations for me and my posse (me, my boyfriend Brendan, Jenn the Great, and my awesome Clarion buddy Patrick of Bioware employ). We're three blocks from the con hotel, so all together, we may be able to hold each other up while we drunkenly stumble back to the hotel after the parties.

Madison is a great town for a con. It's already full of drunk liberal college kids. The drunk SF geeks fit right in.

Oh, These Haiku-Like Passages!

Good money, tho.

Distillery to revive 184-proof whisky

Fucking sweet!!

"A Scottish distillery said Monday it was reviving a centuries-old recipe for whisky so strong that one 17th-century writer feared more than two spoonfuls could be lethal."

Today's Message From Corporate:

Dear Peon,

I know you were expecting your 1K bonus this year - which would have been far more than last year because business has doubled! - but we've decided to get rid of bonuses for our Scheming Corporate Reasons. We need to cut our budget because we have a major acquisition coming up, and screwing over the peons was the best way to do that.

And yes, you heard that right! We're only screwing the peons, of course. We really don't care that you're part of a 4-person team who's produced over 50 million dollars of work for this company over the last two years and is currently working in the Most Important Market for our telecommunications branch and the client we're working for.

The upper-execs and CEOs are laughing all the way to the bank. You didn't expect us to cut bonues for the Big Boys, did you? Even though "saving money for the company" would have been far easier if we cut just a handful of exec bonuses instead of culling all the measly under-5K bonuses we send out to all the peons?

What do you think this is, Fantasyland?

Go back to writing books.

All the best,

Corporate America

Busy Busy

Yea. That about sums up my life right now.

CULT CLASSIC FINALLY OUT FROM MAJOR US PUBLISHER

Dude, that's such a great headline.

VanderMeer's City of Saints & Madmen is finally out for wide public consumption.

Go forth and consume. It's good stuff.

My God

Octavia Butler died on Saturday.

I'm stunned into silence at the moment.

Dorky Things Are Funny

ha ha

(thanks, b)

What I Owe

I've spent the last couple of nights getting my finances in order.

Counting credit card debt and student loan debt, I'm about $28,000 in the hole. I'll be 1K less when I cash my writing contract work check on Saturday.

About 3K of that is computer debt. No, more: about $3500 if you count all of the expense related to getting crap off both of my old hard drives. Maybe $500 in healthcare. The other $3000 I owe in credit cards is just fuck-off money. I had too much fun over the holidays, had to buy new clothes that actually fit as I dropped two sizes, and bought a *lot* of books and about $100 in CDs. Also, too many lunches.

I got it all organized using Quicken, and I'm trying to figure out how to have it all subtracted automatically when I pay my bills. I turned in my student loan consolidation paperwork today as well, so that should fix all the loans at a lower interest rate and bundle them into one payment, which I'd appreciate. I'm paying about $300 a month in student loans right now and $200 toward credit cards.

Seeing it all layed out calmed me down a little.

I've been having nightmares about work and bill collectors - the Citibank student loan people keep calling me because, though my parents graciously agreed to pay that loan for a couple of years, the payments were always late, and now that I've rolled all the bills over to my address (because I got sick of having the bill collectors call me), I'm trying to catch up on those payments so they're reasonable able (I owe $250 this month, which should then allow me to pay "only" $115 a month from then on, until the loans are consolidated).

I hated putting all that together, but I think that in the long run I'll have less nightmares and hopefully a better balanced checkbook. I knew things were dire when I bounced a rent check last month.

Oh yea. Time to put my house in order.

More Thoughts On Writing

The older I get, the more I write, the more I want to bash in the heads of those people who are like, "Yea, I'm going to write a novel soon, I just don't have the time." Or, "I think I'll take up writing."

I think I'll take up brain surgery.

Fall Down Seven Times. Get Up Eight: Or, Why I'm A Feminist

When I was eighteen years old, I spent a couple of nights a week standing in the bathroom at 3am thinking up ways to kill myself.

I had a few options. A bottle of sleeping pills in the medicine cabinet. The loaded gun my boyfriend kept under the front seat of his car. The apartment I shared with my boyfriend was on the third floor of the complex, and even though I knew that jumping off the balcony would probably result in nothing more than a broken leg, I still fantasized about that freefall, that excellent feeling of letting go, of making everything just stop.

Depression is one of those things that just sort of creeps up on you. You spend so much of your energy just trying to get through the basic tasks that keep you living that you don’t have time to reflect on why you feel like you’re looking at the world through a gray gauze. You stop noticing that nothing feels real.

I developed a number of crutches to get through my six months in Bellingham, Washington. I took up smoking and ate a lot. I hit somewhere close to 270 pounds and only had one pair of jeans that actually fit me. I could barely get up a flight of stairs or around the block without getting winded. My boyfriend was getting increasingly irate about my weight, but demands for sex didn’t lessen. I think a secret part of me was hoping that if I gained enough weight and dressed badly enough that he would break up with me for not being attractive, and I’d be free. When I did later get up the gumption to make the break, I realized my fears of doing the breaking were pretty well-founded – he kept calling me, waited around for me after classes, and threatened several of my friends that he would kill me and then drink bleach, or get plastic surgery so I wouldn’t know it was him. He started trying to date all of our mutual friends. He finally backed off when I threatened to get a restraining order.

But that was much later.

As for the sex, I started thinking about it as a chore – like doing the laundry, the dishes, cooking dinner. Close your eyes and think of England. A sorry state of affairs for somebody like me who does, in fact, really enjoy sex and has a pretty high sex drive (when it’s not pounded out into a passionless schedule. Some people confuse sex and masturbation). Sex was something I had to do because if I didn’t there was going to be a conflict, another angry night followed by a screaming fight, and when you’re really depressed, you don’t have the energy for much at all, let alone a screaming fight.

I got used to feeling stupid and unattractive. After all, I spent all of my time with somebody who patted me on the head and told me so. Spend all your time with an asshole who tells you you’re stupid and worthless, and you’ll start to believe it. Spend all your time in a house of screaming fights and broken dishes, and you’ll start to think it’s normal.

After a while, you’ll start to look for an easy way out. The only way out. When you paint yourself into a corner, suicide looks pretty rosy. I had no money. Kept a crappy job as a restaurant hostess that paid minimum wage (no health insurance, no benefits, etc. of course). Took a couple community college classes to try and finish up my AA degree.

I thought I should be happy. I’d gotten out of my parents’ house at eighteen. I was out there living with my boyfriend. I had an outside balcony where I grew plants.

I hadn’t written a word of fiction in nearly six months.

I’m now twenty-six years old. I’m sharing an apartment in Chicago with a buddy of mine from Clarion. I live in a houseful of books and plants. I work at a telecommunications company for about 42K a year (OK health insurance, 401(K), bonus, etc). I just got another couple of contract writing assignments that I’m using to pay off my credit cards. I just consolidated my student loans. I’m strong and back to a body size I’m comfortable in. I’m moving to NYC in July, a city I never in my weirdest dreams ever thought I’d live in. I’ve sold some stories. I’m rewriting a book for an agent. Finishing another book this summer. I have amazing friends. My parents love me. I’m working toward a number of personal goals. I read a lot of books. I have a Master’s Degree. I lived in South Africa and Alaska. I’ve traveled a lot overseas and intend to travel more (gotta live in London sometime!).

I have a good life.

When things get ugly around me, when I feel like I’m not moving forward as well or as quickly as I’d like, I remember this story. I remember looking in the mirror and thinking, “This isn’t the woman I want to be. “

I picked someone else, and decided to be her instead.

I’ve read about the stories of some feminists on other blogs who wrote about why they decided to be feminists. I didn’t become a feminist until I was 19. Until then, I was pretty much the biggest misogynist I knew. I didn’t think of myself as a woman, really. I was too smart to be a woman. Things that women did, the messes they “got themselves into” weren’t things I had to worry about: rape, abusive relationships, unplanned pregnancies, job discrimination - these things weren’t real threats to me. I was smarter than that.

But being smarter than that didn’t make me a man, and it didn’t take away those threats.

I learned that the hard way.

I’m a feminist because I woke up one day and realized that despite the fact that I was smart and strong and capable and believed men and women had equal rights and opportunities and were treated the same in the world, I was wrong. And I don’t want to live in a world where women not only get treated like dirt for being women, but take that abuse because they believe they’re dirt, too.

I have made a great, big, successful life for myself, and I did it with the help of some very supportive friends and family and through sheer, angry stubbornness.

I had a life I wanted to live and a woman I wanted to be - and that’s what gets me up every morning.

B says that I’m too hard on myself. This may be true, but it’s the only way I know how to go forward. I have to push, because I’m naturally lazy. I have to work harder than other people. I have to sleep at least 8-10 hours a night, hours that insomniacs are likely using to figure out their finances. I have to eat a certain amount to maintain all this muscle mass I’ve gained. I have to portion out workout times and writing times and work times and work overtime times and figure-out-my-finances times.

It’s called life, sure.

But there was a time where I went to work, ate, watched TV, and slept. And then I woke up and did it all over again, with no desire to do anything else at all because everything seemed so hard.

I don’t think any of it is any easier now, but I have something to push against. I have somebody I was, somebody I don’t want to be again.

And after two years of weight lifting and sporadic martial arts and boxing classes and jogging days and bike riding and figuring out how to eat outside the binge-and-purge cycle, I want to learn how to never go back. I want to learn how to maintain this.

I want to be better. I want to be smarter and stronger. I want to be a better writer. I want to stay in the same clothing size for more than two years at a time. I want to live forever. I want to fly.

There are women who’ve been through shit that’s a fuck of a lot worse than mine. There are women going through worse. There are women who’ve had it easier. What I hope about all those women, though, is that they know that if they want it, they can be better, too. They can close their eyes and decide who they want to be, and they can step away from all the bullshit. They know that they can be smart and strong and still make dumb decisions. And they know that making one dumb decision doesn’t mean they have to end it all. And it doesn’t mean their lives are screwed because of it.

When you do something dumb, you pick yourself up, you brush yourself off, and you start over.

You be who you want to be.

Fall down seven times. Get up eight.

Quote of the Day

"The fundamental intellectual level of humanity has and will always be low. New technological possibilities mean more experimental things can be forgotten in new ways. There are amazing filmmakers, like the Soviet Dziga Vertov. Who knows who this guy is and who cares? Who knows or cares who Joyce was? That means people who want to write at that level, and I include myself, are only doing so because we love it. In the end, what else is there? There is no prize, including the Nobel Prize, which can compensate you for the work you put in. If it's not a joy, you shouldn't do it. If you don't get published, that's unfortunate insofar as whatever else you must do to stay alive consumes and prevents you from doing what you really must do. When I wrote Rising Up and Rising Down, it took me 23 years, and my publishers all said if you want it to see the light of day, you have to cut it. And I said no. I fully expected that it would never appear. I was fortunate that McSweeney's agreed to publish it. Now it's out of print."

- William T. Vollmann

(thanks Jenn)

You Can Make It Up, Or You Could Just Read About the Real Thing

Wilfred Thesiger lived with and observed the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq. Here's a quote:

One afternoon, a few days after leaving Dibin, we arrived at a village on the mainland. The sheikh was away looking at his cultivations, but we were shown to his mudhif [guest house made of reeds] by a boy wearing a head-rope and cloak, with a dagger at his waist. He looked about fifteen and his beautiful face was made even more striking by two long braids of hair on either side. In the past all the Madan [Marsh Arabs] wore their hair like that, as the Bedu [Bedouin] still did. After the boy had made us coffee and withdrawn, Amara [one of Thesiger's boat boys] asked, 'Did you realize that was a mustarjil?' I had vaguely heard of them, but had not met one before.'A mustarjil is born a woman,' Amara explained. 'She cannot help that; but she has the heart of a man, so she lives like a man.'

'Do men accept her?'

'Certainly. We eat with her and she may sit in the mudhif. When she dies, we fire off our rifles to honour her. We never do that for a woman. In Majid's village there is one who fought bravely in the war against Haji Sulaiman.'

'Do they always wear their hair plaited?'

'Usually they shave it off like men.'

'Do mustarjils ever marry?'

'No, they sleep with women as we do.'

There's also mention of a biological man asking for his penis to be cut of so he can be a "real" woman, since in "every other way" he was "a woman."

I've read about the same gender issues in colonial New England and among the Pueblo Indians.

But, as everyone knows, marriage has always been between one man and one woman, women don't go to war, and the existence of male transvestites and transexuals are a uniquely 20th century invention.

(via David Moles)