Bree by the Numbers, Redux

Okay, this is where it's at:

Thesis - done!
Psychopharm assignment: done!
Family Therapy paper: 5 pages to go
Psych Testing - 8 more reflection comments

One of each class to go. Classes are done on Thursday; graduation on Saturday.

Trying to hold a sense of accomplishment and freedom before freaking out about what's next. Deep breath. This is hard.

Hooray for Me!

I turned in the final draft on Friday, and what a feeling of relief and joy it was to read my professor's email today:

"Thesis complete! I’m attaching a copy of the certification page. Excellent work! It’s something to be proud of!"

Exhale.

Overheard at the gym

Two thin women were talking at the gym about how they need to lose weight, and one of them was lamenting that she can't buy ice cream anymore, because she'll eat the whole carton if it's there. I was doing stretches nearby and trying to focus on my routine; I couldn't help but listen and muse about their conversation a bit.

It made me tap into the pain of being a fat woman at the gym, the incarnation of the "unsightly" fat body these women are avoiding like the Plague. And while I'm sure they're working out because they want to be "healthy," on another level, they're working out because they don't want to look like me. Hell, I'm working out 'cause I don't wanna look like me, if we're in the business of being honest here. My goal is not to be skinny - that's just not my body type. But I do want to lose some weight, and it's for health reasons, sure, and it's so I can continue to be more effective and physically active, yes, but it's also so that I can squeeze my tummy into cute shirts I wanna wear, so that it doesn't droop downward so very much, so that I may be able to possess one chin instead of the multitude I've lived with for years. I, too, am a product of a fatphobic culture. And even though I love my body at times, and have lovers who love my body, and wouldn't change who I am internally, I do want to weigh less.

It is so fucked up that almost every day, I hear people casually bemoaning their weight, making derisive comments about fat people, and equating fatness with poor health and ugliness. My asshole psychopharmacology professor once said in class that extra weight around the stomach was both unhealthy and "unattractive." The assumption that fat people aren't healthy, and aren't sexy, and conversely, that a thin person is naturally in better health and obviously better looking, is just plain unfounded and subjective. Thin people get heart disease and diabetes too. Thin people can be ugly motherfuckers. I've got normal blood pressure, I've never smoked cigarettes, and I exercise regularly. How many fucking thin people do you know who've got three strikes on those counts?

Fuck you and your fucking carton of ice cream. You don't know what it's like to have entire You Tube channels devoted to making fun of you for being fat.

Crazy Spam

This one made me laugh out loud: Angelina Jolie set to destroy own vagina!

In other spam-related news, I keep getting these horrible ones that say, That's an ugly face you have there, Bree! Do advertizers really think I'm gonna click on a message that's insulting me?

A-l-l-l-most Done

Why does writing this thesis feel like straining to take the most humongous, painful shit I've ever taken?

Banning Fast Food in LA?

In L.A., a town where you're just as likely to catch someone eating a small salad with a lemon wedge as you are a Big Mac and Super Sized fries, city council members are looking to put a moratorium on fast food chain construction. This issue cuts to the juicy center of the controversy that conflates personal responsibility and choice with governmental paternalism and corporate domination over our lives. Where does responsibility lie in the obesitization (my word!) of these United States of Consumption? There is some wisdom in this sort of legislative ban. In urban areas across the country, healthy food options are limited, and there is a widely-acknowledged "grocery gap" in many cities where shopping for raw, healthy, and less processed foods has become a hardship. In South L.A., where the ban is being considered, 30% of adults are obese compared to 21% in the rest of the city, and in addition to being an area already dense with fast food chains, it's also a grocery store impoverished area.

It's really easy for privileged folks to decry that the government should stay out of the way of free enterprise, and that we have no business regulating what corporations do. After all, there is clearly a huge demand for fast food, so much so that South L.A. is already sustaining the highest concentration of fast food outlets in all of L.A. county. But really, don't we need to start somewhere in order to create demand for healthy food? Maybe the government should start subsidizing organic and natural food outlets so that the prices at stores like Whole Foods can come into the range where poor and working class people can actually afford to buy it. That's an intervention I'd like to see.

AIDS Walk

Instead of working on my paper today (which was due on Thursday and still isn't done, though it's nearly done) I'm joining 25,000 other folks for a little walk in Golden Gate Park. It's actually the first time I'm doing the AIDS Walk. Makes me think back to the very first time I did a charity event where I got sponsored for something - I was five or six years old, and ice skated at Vallco Mall for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Those were the days.

Progress - or not.

Hi. Not much forward momentum on the thesis, though I've been sitting with it, and have managed to write a few more sentences. This is one of the most nerve-wracking things I've ever done, and though I'm pleased with my thinking on the subject, I feel like all the angst and carrying on and trouble has been pretty pointless. It's really just a paper. It has a lot of symbolic meaning tied to it, and the content has a lot of emotional meaning, but at the end of the day, it's just words on paper. I know I can do this, and yet I've given myself pretty much no time to produce the bulk of it I need to by Thursday. I've been sitting with it all day so far, and I'll have to get going to meet my carpool for class in about an hour. Then there's small blocks of time tonight, tomorrow morning, and Thursday morning til early afternoon before it needs to be done, as in done. ((Big breath!))

There are so many other things I want to write about, and I'm so relieved that it's almost over. I've been jotting down ideas for both blogs, and I've been stealing time to fill in pieces of my 2008 Wrap, which will be in full production before ya know it (the year's half-over already, people!) And then there's the semblance of summer before I've got to gear up for the dreaded job search (more on why I'm dreading it another time.)

Sigh.

Bree by the Numbers

8 to 10 more pages of my thesis
5 more psych testing assignments
4 more family therapy classes
4 more psych testing classes
3 more psychopharm classes
2 more psychopharm assignments
2 more fam therapy assignments
a bunch of paperwork
some graduation organizing

And the best number of the lot:
24 days til I have my master's degree!

Playing with (the idea of) Death

I'm so moved to continue redesigning the blog - not near satisfied with the template I chose, and I'm realizing now it's way too similar to the template I picked for my other blog. But I clearly don't have time to fiddle with it. Here I am, holed up at a café in the neighborhood, working on my final thesis draft. Or trying to work on it, and continuing to get pulled into tinkering with the blog design. What's nice is that I am finally getting into some free styling philosophical discourse in the paper, away from the ideas of the psychoanalytic canon and into my own obsessions about the dynamics of death inside intimacy. It's freeing to be here and begin to explore and articulate my ideas in tangible written words. In some way, I'm sure I hoped to master my own death anxiety by writing this paper, and I know I won't accomplish that (I think it's pretty impossible.) But the more I force myself to confront it, and in fact to become playful with the ideas, even, the less it's triggering my intense anxiety. I'm inspired by something Irvin Yalom (one of my current heroes) said about dealing with death anxiety. He said that while actual, physical death ultimately destroys us, confronting the concept of death is our salvation. And on that note, it's back to the drawing board with me.

Update

Maybe I haven't been blogging because I haven't been making any "progress," and by progress, I mean I haven't been eating more healthfully overall and haven't lost any weight. Generally, I've been less down on myself about these things, so that is a mark of progress I can be reasonably happy about. I've also been going to the gym: not as much as I ultimately want to, but I have gotten there several times. I'm up to ten minutes on the elliptical and another 30 minutes on the recumbent bike, so that's a decent aerobic workout, compared to my first couple times.

I'm doing crunches on this really fun thing where you climb up on a tall doohickey, rest against a back rest while holding onto these handles, legs swinging free off the ground, and then do leg lifts to work out the lower abdominal muscles. I can do about ten of these at present. I like the idea of getting stronger in my core - I want to be able to move more gracefully, have better stamina, be able to get up from sitting on the floor without grunting and straining, for god's sake. My out-of-shapeness makes me feel older than I am, and that's just silly. I've got lots of life to explore through movement, and I want to make it easier for myself not to automatically resist things like biking or hiking long distances, dancing with Ms. Astrid, and having long sessions of fantastic fucking. Core muscles help immensely with all that.

Tech Difficulties

All: bear with me as I tweak with the design of the blog. Thanks!

Lisa Lisa, Redux

My dear friend, astro-b, left a comment on the previous blog entry regarding the song Head to Toe, by Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam. I thought the comment deserved some particular attention, so I find myself now writing not one but two entries on the subject. He writes:

I'm impressed you know who Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam are. Perhaps the last time you heard them all those years ago was in my car...?

B. actually caught me in an illusion of "finished product," as I didn't immediately remember that the song was Lisa Lisa's, and so fetched the info online in writing the blog entry. I vividly remembered the song and, for brevity's sake, left out the part of the story which involved my reverie about who it was performed by.

As I listened to the boom box, I thought that the voice was Madonna-esque, but knew it wasn't Madge, and wondered whether it was someone like Samantha Fox or, shit, I dunno, Paula Abdul. B's surprise that I could've pulled Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam out of my ass was right on the mark, as he's known me since the '80s (in fact, since June of 1987, which makes our 21st anniversary as friends coincide with the chart-topping anniversary of Head to Toe!) and is quite familiar with this particular blind spot in my popcultural knowledge: I often can't distinguish one '80s pop songstress or girl group from another, with some exceptions, based on areas of personal interest. As an example, I still can't differentiate Bananarama from the Bangles, even though I know they sound totally different.

I never remember which one did Hazy Shade of Winter, which one did Walk Like an Egyptian, and which one did Cruel Summer (Bangles, Bangles, and Bananarama, I'm told by the magical internets. And now that I'm hearing the difference, I will admit I much prefer the Bangles.)
I'm also utterly lost trying to pick out Debbie Gibson from Kylie Minogue from Taylor Dane and so on. To B., this has always been blasphemous, because he has been obsessed with the pop divas since well before he started sucking cock. I think there must be some sort of gender component here between the fag-to-be and dyke-to-be sets, 'cause while B. was car-dancing to the chick singers of the '80s, I was scandalized by how girly they were, and opted to listen mainly to classic rock dude bands at that time in my life.

But let's get back to Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam. During the '80s, while I couldn't have told you what songs were theirs, I was certainly aware of LL & CJ. But in an amalgam of my ignorance of both pop divas and hip hop, I always thought that LL & CJ had something to do with LL Cool J, given their initials lined up so nicely. I also remember thinking at the time that Lisa Lisa was the same Lisa of Wendy and Lisa, Prince's sexpot sidekicks, which, again owing to the wonder of the world wide web, I now know to be patently false.

So, yes, all this was swimming in my head yesterday at 4:30am, while I was trying to determine who sang Head to Toe and why it should serve as my personal alarm clock. I guess it was just another manic Wednesday.

Why I Love Living in the City

This morning at about four-thirty I awoke to the tuning of a very loud radio outside my window. As my waking consciousness became clearer, I could perceive the switching of stations intermixed with screeching static, and the noise was getting louder as the radio, which I suspected emanated from a moving car, approached the apartment. Finally, the operator of the radio settled on a song, and though the volume waned slightly, it still played loud and true. I laughed in bed listening to the song for a moment, then I got up and peered out the window to see what the hell was going on.

It was a guy with an enormous boom box walking down the street, who apparently thought the end of our block was the spot he would settle. He just stood there, in the middle of the street, blasting Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam's 1987 hit Head to Toe. I probably hadn't thought about that song in at least fifteen years. I understand from the internets that the song hit number 1 on the Hot 100 21 years ago last month.

Sleep: I get that every night, more or less.
Lisa Lisa on a boom box outside my window: priceless.