September 11 - how many dead?

It's the seventh anniversary of the terrorist attacks that leveled the World Trade Center and hit the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Bush, Rumsfeld and crew held a "somber" ceremony at Ground Zero this morning, lamenting the 3,000 American deaths from the attacks. And these deaths surely should be remembered, but no national tragedy can justify the violence we have returned in kind.

Why aren't our elected officials, and the presidential candidates, and the mainstream media mentioning the more than 20,000 Afghan deaths and the more than 1.2 million Iraqi deaths in the wake of the comparatively minor suffering we've endured on U.S. soil?

Where Fat Meets Butch

I've always hated shopping for clothes. Even now that I really enjoy dressing up and looking all hot and shit, finding clothes that fit me, particularly button-down shirts, the staple for all my biz casual and dressy wardrobe needs, is elusive and irksome. The experience of finding a great shirt at a vintage store, a western style collar shirt, in worn cotton with mother-of-pearl buttons, say, is more often than not completely demoralizing, as I slide into the sleeves, noticing that the fit of the shoulders and collar and tits are perfect, but the lower two buttons, the ones situated over my distended belly, will not, no matter how I strain, fasten or stay closed. This happens over and over and over again.

My hatred of shopping is perhaps more deeply rooted in my gender nonconformity than it is in my fatness. When my mom and I went to the department store together, I loathed every moment of getting into the changing room with her to try on blouses and dresses and cute little girly shorts with matching flowery tank tops. "Butch" is a shorthand, and not a label I strongly identify with, but it gives you an idea. I've always been a tomboy, ever since before I can remember. I rode bikes on the creek path, played with Star Wars action figures, dug in the dirt, eschewed Barbie and make up and all things pink and purple. My favorite article of clothing when I was a kid was my precious Zoom shirt. A handsomely androgynous striped rugby, I wore it practically every day of my fourth and fifth years. At right, I am receiving the Zoom shirt on my fourth birthday. The eyes in the photo say it all: "I can't wait to get outta this cutsie sundress and into that shirt!"

My mom had a theory about why I didn't like to wear pretty clothes, which she didn't hesitate to share with me during my adolescence. She said she thought I would like wearing dresses if I lost weight. I told her to shove it, but politely. The theory doesn't wash, considering I was a tomboy before I became fat, but it fits nicely into my mom's ideas about my sexuality, and into her self-hating narrative about her own fatness. So much precious life could be lived if fat women could love their bodies instead of being eaten alive by self-hatred.

But being fat certainly contributes to my dread about shopping, my anger that "plus-sized" clothing for women is usually feminine, and often so fucking ugly besides. And the problem with shopping in the men's department is that the cuts are not tailored for womanly curves, not to mention the big ol' belly. There is a fucking gold mine awaiting the clothing designer who will create an inexpensive butch clothing line, with ample size options, and there are rumblings about this online, but scarce proof of anything out there yet. The cutest plus-sized clothes I've seen online are from Torrid, but the products are still overwhelmingly girlie. I have no problem shopping in the men's department, and feel pretty safe and unharassed about it since I live in the Bay Area. But the belly conspires to keep me wearing stretchy polyester for the long haul.

Vintage Bree: Who Killed Roy Orbison?

It is early December, 1988. I am in my high school chemistry class, junior year, chatting with my lab partners as we mix some concoction of stuff in order to make a polymer or some shit that I didn't understand then and certainly don't understand now. We are chatting about this new supergroup called the Traveling Wilburys, and all of us agree we really dig their single Handle With Care, which has been ubiquitous on the radio lately.



Then I chime in that although I really like the song, I can't stand Roy Orbison's vocals and wished he wasn't in the band. Most of us are in agreement about this as well.

The next day we all come running into class, shocked at the news of Orbison's death. All eyes are on me as the group collectively charges "You killed Roy Orbison!" And while the news was unfortunate, indeed, given the '60s crooner's renewed fame with the Wilburys, this becomes a running joke for the rest of my high school days.

Jump to the year 2000, my ten-year high school reunion. I'm having pre-reunion cocktails at my good friend Gabe's apartment in San Jose with a few other high school pals that Gabe has kept in touch with. Of these friends is one of my former chem lab partners, Tom, who somewhere between high school and adulthood has grown to a towering 6'4 from his 1988 height of about 5'6. Tom was one of the truly sweet guys in high school in a field of obnoxious rich jocks and stoner wasteoids that made up the major portion of the dudes I went to high school with. So as we get to reminiscing, Tom and I both start telling the story about that fateful conversation in chemistry class. We take turns telling pieces of the narrative, and then Tom claims that he is the one who had wished Roy Orbison's departure from the band: by his own account, Tom was the one who killed Roy Orbison!

I sit there blinking as everyone laughs at the story. Over the course of the last dozen years, Tom and I, and our selective memories, have taken credit for the uncanny wish that coincided with Roy Orbison's fatal heart attack on December 6, 1988. I decide not to correct Tom's version of events, and take another sip of gin and tonic. Wouldn't want to be Petty about it.

The Grind

The job search has been kinda depressing. Usually, I'm able to get a bookkeeping gig within a week or two of looking, but it's pretty competative out there right now. Got a very humane rejection email from a nonprofit that got over 200 applications! And this is just for a tiny 10 hour/week gig. So I might have to adjust my rates to get more responses on my résumés.

It looks like I did land a short-term job with a small home-based company starting tomorrow. It's not what I ultimately want, but I'm grateful to have some money potentially coming in during the next couple weeks. I'm actually at the point of not being able to come up with rent if I don't start earning something, so this is a life saver. As much as she'd like, Astrid just can't be my sugar mamma for long. Sigh.

Seattle bound!

Despite the blahs, which have abated somewhat for the moment, and being too broke for travel, Astrid and I are off to the great Northwest today. We'll be visiting friends in Seattle and attending the wedding of my dear erstwhile lover, Callie, who lives with her six year old daughter and partner in a tiny town on the Olympic Peninsula. Some of you read about my last visit with Callie way back when in the old blog days. I'm excited to meet her love, whose thoughtfully powerful musings can be found here. Funny that jacket uses "Callie's" real name, so there goes the mystery of my fool-proof pseudononymous system! Anyway, yay!

Blahs

Feeling inexplicably morose right now. The first couple weeks after graduation were relaxing and wonderful, and now I'm settling into a bit of a malaise, probably owing mostly to being unemployed and having only shitty bookkeeping work to look forward to as I continue on at the clinic two days a week. I will get a lot out of working at the clinic for another year, but this decision to stay on was a really stupid thing to do in terms of finances. It leaves me with bookkeeping as the only way to make enough money part-time to live on. If I had found a full-time mental health internship, I could have been accumulating clinical hours while getting paid, but I just didn't have my shit together enough, amid the massive chaos of my school tanking, to procure myself a full-time gig. Now I'm kind of stuck having made this committment to be at the clinic for a whole second year. The good thing about it is that I love working with my clients there, and I get excellent supervision, so ultimately it's not all bad. I just wish I could be doing full-time work in my field this year instead of waiting to really start cranking in the hours and getting paid.

Vintage Bree: The Cult Meeting

This is not a timely post, but the anecdote came up a while ago, and I realized I really needed to blog it. This prompts me to think about other classic Bree Lore that may be included in the blog over time. So let's call this the first installment of Vintage Bree.

So in the summer of 1994, AstroB, Lola, and I were trying to amuse ourselves in downtown Santa Cruz. We were walking around on a beautiful sunny day, some of us stoned, when we passed by the local library branch. A flyer posted on the bulletin board outside the library caught our attention. It said:
It was advertising a community meeting in which we would find out the fate of the human race! How could we not go?

We entered the meeting room at the library. It was packed with students and townies, maybe fifty or so, and at the front of the room was a panel of men and women, all around middle age, all white, all with shorn hair, most wearing fleece sweatshirts. They said they were the "Away Team" sent by their leaders, Ti and Do (pronounced "Doe," like "Doe, a deer") to educate us about how we could leave our "Earthly shells" and move on to the "Next Evolutionary Level Above Human."

I've given something away in that last link, but for those of you still scratching your heads, yes, we had stumbled upon a Heaven's Gate cult meeting three years before they would make headlines as the largest group suicide on U.S. soil. The shit they were talking about was weird, but it didn't occur to us, or apparently to anyone else in the meeting, that this was a suicide cult. There were definitely people there for the same reasons we were: to gawk, to be amused. And there were people who were dead serious and listened to the Away Team like they were speaking the direct word of God.

There was unfortunately at least one woman at that meeting who would go on to join Heaven's Gate and kill herself along with her fellow cult members at Rancho Santa Fe on March 26, 1997. Her name was Gail Maeder, a woman in her late twenties from Sag Harbor, New York. One of my friends in Santa Cruz had grown up with her.

One of the men we saw at the recruitment meeting in Santa Cruz who later took his own life in the group suicide.

So, back at the meeting at the Santa Cruz library, you can imagine the kinds of rumblings that were going on in the audience. The Away Team likened their leader, Marshall Applewhite to Moses and Jesus (though not to Mohammed). Not only that, they insisted that these religious prophets were direct representatives from the Next Level, sent to Earth to recruit humans in their time, just like Do was. I scrawled a note to B. – "Did 'the next level' send any representatives to Earth before the Judeo-Christian era? Or to Africa, the Far East, S. America, etc.?" We snickered. Apparently most of the world's population, the poorest people, incidentally, were not ready to evolve.

They kept going on about how when the comet Hale-Bopp arrived, we would know it's the time to depart our earthly existence aboard a great spaceship. They talked about what we would encounter when we got to the Level Above Human: there would be no war and no suffering. It was a realm beyond temporal and spatial reality as we knew it. It was beyond the realm of the sexual, and when we joined the Next Level, we would no longer need our bodies (a.k.a. our "earthly shells") or feel sexual desire (and, no, they didn't happen to mention that many of the male cult members had elected to castrate themselves, possibly an elaborate and ugly manifestation of Marshall Applewhite's shame about his own homosexuality.)

At this point in the talk, a woman stood up from the audience. She was someone I had encountered in town many times before, a local eccentric-with-a-capital-E named Elana Smith who went by the moniker "Clitora Cummings." Anyone who's lived in Santa Cruz in the last thirty years probably has a story about Clitora (you can meet her for yourself in this video interview). She stood up at the repetition of the mantra about the Next Level being a "non-sexual realm" and shouted to all who could hear, "Fuck this shit! I'm gonna go get LAID!" and, most appropriately, she stormed out of the room.

Maybe she saved some lives that day.

Graduation Day

Fuck yeah!

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.

::Big Sigh of Relief::

Draft Number Two is in my professor's hands. Thank fucking god. It's not as complete as I'd hoped it would be, but I feel like, just in the last couple days, I finally broke through the crushing weight of anxiety and got my writing groove back. After days and days of sitting at my computer, not producing anything at all, just editing and moving paragraphs around and feeling overwhelmed, I finally pushed through, finished my lit review, and began working on the actual thesis concepts. I have a fair amount more work to do to get to the final draft (due in about 4 weeks) but I'm not nearly as freaked out now. I've tasted what it's like to put forward my own ideas, and it's not as scary as I thought it was gonna be.

A very heartfelt thank you to a few people who lent support and inspiration in the final hours of the draft. First and foremost thanks to Ms. Astrid, who has loved me unwaveringly even though I've been a fucking wreck for weeks. Thank you to astro-b, DJ, and my family for letting me vent. And a very special nod to Mag, Dax, Ms. Crankypants, and The Undertoad for the last minute words of advice on the thesis writing process. Totally invaluable inspiration: thank you.

Mawwage, Part Two

Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin became the first legally married lesbian couple in San Francisco just about an hour ago. Huzzah! Not only have they been some of the most important activists for LGBT rights in history, these broads have been together for 56 years! Can you imagine being a lesbian in the '50s, with that most complete cultural denial and repression aiming to destroy you and deny your existence, and at the same time, sustaining a relationship for over fifty years? Unbelievable.

Mazel tov to Del and Phyllis!

This is also good: the first gay couple to legally marry in Santa Clara County was
David and Rich Speakman of San Jose.

"The couple is using President Bush's economic stimulus check to pay for their wedding."

"'It paid for everything,' David Speakman said, 'so we should probably send him a thank you note.'"

(quoted from the Merc.)

LMAO!

Thesis Anxiety Rant #19

I've been nursing functional anxiety about this paper for months, but I've been fucking freaking out the last two weeks. The complete draft is due in six days. This weekend is the last clear chunk of time I have to produce pages.

I'm a good writer; I know I can do this. That's not the thing. The thing is, I chose to write about my most core emotionally triggering issue: death anxiety as it manifests in intimate relationships. And so whenever I sit down to write, on some deeply unconscious but visceral level, I think of loved ones dying. When Astrid leaves the apartment to go to work, my eyes well up with tears thinking she might get into a car accident. When a sentence finally emerges from my fingertips, I imagine my sister calling me with the news that my mother is dead. That's what the anxiety is about. It's the core of the procrastination, the stop-starts, the binge eating, the grasping at every possible distraction: if I write this paper, I will kill everyone I've ever truly loved.

Okay, that's off my chest. Now I guess I need to write.

Getting Strong Now

Alright, so after a bit of research and much inner-struggle, I decided on the mega-corporate gym down the street, 'cause it was the cheapest membership fee I found (after haggling), and it's the closest gym to my house, which ostensibly provides less of a barrier to my getting there. On taking the tour of the place, I saw a good mix of men and women, a few other fat people, and numerous people of various ages and body shapes that would not be commonly viewed as "gym-bunny"-types. So I felt as comfortable as I possibly could being in such an environment. I've gone twice this week so far, and have actually enjoyed it. And after exercising each day, my body has felt much more relaxed and serene than it usually does when I'm just sitting around.

So far, I really like the recumbent bike. It's a good way to get the heart rate up and work up a good sweat while staying pretty comfortable. No stress on the back, and very little stress on the knees. I also like clocking the miles that I'm biking. It's less intense and less calorie-burning than the elliptical, but I'm finding it's a good starter machine for me. I tried the elliptical for the first time today, and I'm a bit baffled by it right now. I know the swooping leg motions and corresponding arm swinging will make more sense after I get more familiar with it, but it was a bit overwhelming on first try. I also started feeling a great deal of stress in my left calf muscle after only about five minutes on it, so I quit at that point and went back to the recumbent. Then I did some crunches and a bit of weight lifting. I also made sure to do some stretching both before and after the exercise.

My lovely friend G. showed me around the gym today, and introduced me to various workout equipment. That was pretty cool of him to do. It is so intimidating being a fat girl at the gym, and then on top of that, not having any idea how all these machines work. So tip of the hat to G. - thank you for being so supportive!

Just by way of logging what I'm doing at the gym, right now, it's just about 20 minutes of cardio and then as many crunches as I can do (maybe 10) and then 10 reps of very light weight lifting to tone each different arm muscle group. I expect I'll increase all these numbers as I progress, but I'm starting off very easy.

So I'm no longer a gym virgin. Woo-ha!

Journey To The Bank

This is really old news by blogospheric standards, but does anyone know about Journey's new lead singer, Arnel Pineda?* Founding member and songwriter/guitarist Neal Schon found Pineda singing Journey songs on YouTube with his band in the Philippines, and then after meeting with him and playing a gig with him in Chile, announced the Steve Perry sound-alike as their new frontman. Check out Journey's performance on Ellen from last week:



And that, my friends, is how once-great pop bands of the 70's and 80's strike 21st Century gold.

Now, at my most lenient, I can understand why Journey would be ecstatic about getting a great singer again, a great singer who happens to sound exactly like Steve Perry. They can relive their glory days, play huge venues filled with excited paying guests, and generally feel like big boys again. Yes, and the money. If they'd hired a singer with his own distinctive voice they'd a crashed and burned - who gives a shit about Journey without SP?

Beyond all that, I have to wonder what it's like for Arnel Pineda, who would ne'er have achieved international fame without sounding exactly like SP. I'm famous 'cause I sound like Steve Perry will be running in his internal monologue for the rest of his life. But again, cha-ching. For his part, he seems to be taking it all with a grain of salt, judging by his press statements. I would love to see what Perry has to say about it, but haven't found anything. Though if anybody's interested, there's a great, long interview with Perry and a follow up interview with Neal Schon on GQ which is pretty in depth, as far as popculture reporting goes. Sadly no dish on Pineda by Perry, though. And while I won't buy their new album of 11 "classic" Journey tunes and 11 new tunes recorded with Pineda (really, who gives a shit?) I can't say that hearing the new formation of the band hasn't given me chills. Why would I blog about it otherwise?

____________

*Thanks to ch for the tip.

The Week in Food: The good, the not so good, the awful

After re-committing to the Regimen, I had an excellent week. I ate steel-cut oats and flaxmeal most mornings, ate lots of fresh fruit and veggies, big healthy salads, didn't overeat at all clear through Friday. I walked a lot during the week, too, and felt my gait pick up pace.

Then the family dinner for my birthday in San Jose happened. And I'm a sucker for corned beef, as we all know. But even though I piled on too much of the fatty, ridiculously tender meat on Friday night, I didn't eat myself to the point of belly-aching overkill. I ate til I was satisfied, and then had one more piece of corned beef beyond that. Dear readers: a year or two ago, I'd have eaten three or four pieces beyond that, so we're making progress here, okay?

But unfortunately, Friday night's dinner turned into the gateway drug for a major backslide on the Regimen. When Saturday rolled around, I intended to eat sensibly again, but I had class all day in Alameda starting at 9:00am, and couldn't pry myself out of bed early enough to prepare for the day before meeting my carpool at 8:30. So instead of the oatmeal I would've normally made for breakfast, I ended up eating a chocolate croissant supplied by a well-meaning classmate. Then for lunch, I did okay, ordering a grilled chicken and rice salad bowl from a nearby burrito/wraps kinda strip mall food outlet.

But then happy hour arrived. When the carpool got back into the City, I got the mischievous yen for bloody marys, dragging E-dog and EDG to have cocktails with me at the Orbit Room (scroll way down to the March, 2008, reviews, and see my very own), and getting Astrid to meet up with us. The evening devolved from there into a gluttonous adventure of too many drinks of too many varieties of alcohol, and ordering in Chinese food, which is always pretty much the death knell on reasonable portions for me.

Which led me right into Sunday, a day supposed to be devoted to my thesis, which started on the doubly-wrong foot of leftover chou mein and pancakes made by the lovely Astrid (they were multi-grain, at least), followed by leftover hot and sour soup, then a thesis-related stress craving for a chocolate milkshake, fulfilled down the street at Burgermeister (mmmm...Mitchell's ice cream!), then DJ came over for Bad Movie Night and we ordered in from a pizza place that, god bless/damn them, also makes chicken strips. Sigh.

This morning: oats and flax. Yum.

Pygar is Dead! Long Live Pygar!

70 year-old actor John Phillip Law has died. Many of my beloved friends might remember him as the blind angel from Barbarella, otherwise known as "Pygar, Last of the Ornithanthropes."


The instant I heard the news, I knew it was my sacred duty to memorialize him. Rest in peace, Mr. Law. I will explore more of your film oeuvre as soon as that damned thesis is put to rest.

John Phillip Law's official website

John Phillip Law on imdb.

Regimen Revisited

On almost a daily basis, Astrid and I declare, sometimes while we're eating a grossly unhealthy meal (like last night's chicken strips at Bagdad Café), that "tomorrow, we start the Regimen!" The Regimen, in our couple mind's eye, has something to do with exercising more (or at all!), keeping up on grocery shopping so we have healthy stuff to cook at home, and eating reasonably. It's not a big deal, and yet why is it so hard to stick to? So last night, we declared the Regimen to be on again, and so far today I feel renewed committment to it.

I weighed myself this morning, and I'm now 221. Given my bike situation, it's not shocking that I've plateaued and gained another pound, but the main culprit right now is the decadent eating. In light of not having a bike, and also wanting to get into a more disciplined exercise routine in general, I've been contemplating joining a gym for the first time in my life.

As a fat girl, I've always feared gyms: why would I want to invite public ridicule upon my bouncing flabby body sweating on the elliptical machine? It brings back the terror of adolescence, when kids would make fun of me in P.E. class, and invokes the present-day fatphobia I still receive from strangers in public, like whenever I get called "fat-ass" while riding my bike too slowly for some shithead driving behind me. So the terror is historic, and current, and all too real in my experience. I'm 100% positive that other fat people stay out of gyms for exactly this reason. It's part of why the gym franchise Curves was invented, but I can't support them, what with the founder being a right-winger and giving significant contributions to anti-choice organizations. The other thing is that, well, I'm pretty fucking poor at this point in my life, and paying $30 to $60/month on a gym membership that I may or may not utilize seems like a very risky idea.

I'm going to check out the membership options at a few gyms in the neighborhood, and I'll report on my findings. I'm curious not only about fees and the amenities I get with my money, but I'm also very interested to get a sense for how their staff treat fat people, and what other fat folks have experienced at these places. Any tips on SF upper-Market, Lower Haight, and Mission area gyms would be welcome feedback for me.

Onward Ho - the Regimen begins (again!)

Stagnant

News flash: my bike broke. Yeah, kind of a bummer. I was in the habit of hiking my seat way up to compensate for a frame that didn't properly fit me, and I've managed to crack the seat tube, which in layman's terms means my frame is cracked and it's unsafe to ride. I'm feeling very resistant to spending money on a new bike, but I know I need to bite the bullet. I've been walking more, but I move my body much less without it. Not to mention I get a lot of my joy from my bike commute on a daily basis, so it's pretty essential that I get going on finding a new one. I bought my first cheap-ass used bike about five, five and a half years ago. It was promptly stolen. A few months later, some amazing friends of mine, who turned out to be the then-marital unit of Raquel and Chauncy, financed a new bike for me anonymously under the auspices of the philanthropic syndicate "The Hidden Hanukkah Helpers." Thus began my all too short relationship with my Raleigh C40. I've quite loved this bicycle, and it deserves a proper eulogy here. I rode that bike about 15 or 20 miles a week on commutes to work and school for about five years, took it on a trip through the Santa Inez wine country, learned these steep and trafficky San Francisco streets on its wheels. Sure, it was a little too heavy and hard to maneuver up and down the BART stairs, but it was mine, a simple machine to get me around and help me exercise whilst not polluting the environs. Good bye, bikey. You've been good to me.

Thesis Procrastination Log

1:00pm – Sat down at the computer. Opened up my thesis documents, including the work I've done so far and my rough outline. Organized my ipod and downloaded music.
1:18 – Printed a relevant article for the thesis. Chatted with two friends online.
1:40 – Prepared to read the article, then decided to stay with the writing. Instead of writing, I ate some cherries. Then I read a bit of the thesis draft so far. Got up to eat more cherries, looked in the fridge, and prepared to wash the cutting board. Realized I wasn't hungry and was clearly wasting time.
1:50 – Started this journal entry to document my procrastination. Anxiety level: yellow-orange.
1:57 – Attempted to write again. Continued re-reading what I've already written. Thought about some themes of death and chaos in Chagall's paintings and in Bunuel's films. Looked up shit online.
2:15ish – watched/skimmed through Un Chien Andalou on YouTube. Watched someone's short version of the film overdubbed with the Pixies' "Debaser."
2:30 – Began to write! Became extremely anxious; a knot formed in my chest. Wrote about three sentences. Anxiety level: red! Got up to walk around. Grabbed some relevant books and notebooks. Talked to Astrid about non-related logistical matters. Thought about eating lunch. I was actually hungry this time.
2:40 – Paused to ground myself by touching my "transitional objects" – a book my therapist lent me for my writing process and my silver baby cup. Looked up at the lovely birthday flowers Astrid gave me. Read a recent relevant journal entry to Astrid. Anxiety level: back down to yellow.
2:45 – Made myself some lunch. Ate it on the couch, then took a "break" during which time I chatted with Astrid, downloaded music, organized my school supplies, and ate vanilla ice cream out of the carton. Before I knew it it was...
6:00pm. Impressive, no?

"Mawwage is what bwings us together today...."

Same-gender marriage is legal in California! (for the moment.)

I don't have a specific desire to get hitched; nevertheless, the news made me well up with tears this morning. Read the SF Chronicle article for more details. Essentially, the state Supreme Court overturned Prop 22, a limitation on marriage passed by voters in 2000. The majority opinion today ruled that denying same-gender partners the right to marry and form a family with the same rights and responsibilities as male-female partners is unconstitutional. It's about fucking time.

The bad news, however, is that there will be an initiative on the California ballot in November attempting to change the state constitution to ban same-gender marriage for good. Take a look at the CitizenLink page, a right-wing political organization's take on the signature drive to qualify for the ballot and "represent God's will" on marriage.

People need to turn out to vote this bullshit down. Hopefully, since the stakes are so high in the Presidential election, progressives and friends and family of LGBT folks will turn out in large numbers to put down this hateful initiative. But there will be more battles to come, no doubt.

The Final Countdown

The last term has commenced, and it's the worst one yet, in terms of the content of the classes:

Advanced Family Therapy (not so bad)
Psychological Testing (blech!)
Psychopharmacology (double-blech!)

No, unfortunately I can't write you a prescription for good psychotropic drugs. I just need to know this shit for the licensing test, and to understand the meds my clients may be on (or may need to be on.) The psychopharm professor is a character, to say the least. He's a psychiatrist, and being that he's an MD and into the proprietary order of things, he's insisting we address him with the "Doctor" in front of his name. When he writes on the white board, each word is like two feet tall by four feet wide. I don't know if he does this for emphasis, or because he assumes we can't read normal sized penmanship. He talks through the entire class, and the only discussion permitted is if we have a question, which he will directly answer, and then move right back to his lecture notes.

The complete draft of the thesis is due the week of June 19. After that, I'll get feedback for revisions, and have to turn in the final draft by July something or other. If I had a page written for every time I complained about this thing out loud, I'd have a fucking PhD dissertation by now. I just have to say, once again, that I wish I'd decided to write about the psychology of Buffy rather than the death anxiety in intimate relationships. If there were a topic ripe for putting off, this would be it.

Apropos comic by Kelly at the Onion.

Progress Report #1

The numbers:
So it's been two months since I launched this site, and I still weigh exactly what I did when I started, 220 pounds.

The physical feeling behind the numbers:
I feel somewhat sluggish physically, haven't been riding my bike enough, and haven't been drinking enough water. This less than ideal physical state is counterbalanced somewhat by feeling emotionally uplifted by the end of the school term and other reasons you can read about at toothpicklabeling. So, all in all, my body and stress levels are feeling pretty decent.

The emotions behind the numbers:
On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being least concerned or stressed about my weight and 10 being red alert-level anxiety and self-flagellation, I'd say I'm holding steady at about 4. I'd still like to lose some weight for overall bodily functioning, health, and to increase my physical fitness/stamina/mobility. But I'm not too upset with myself right now. It's been a really stressful several months with the school situation, and my crazy schedule has contributed to a lot of difficulty, beyond my regular resistance and bad habits, to preparing healthy meals and getting on my bike. I think now that I'm acclimated to the new schedule, and Spring/Summer is upon us, it bodes well for being more active and planning meals better.

More updates like this one whenever the muse strikes.

xo
Bree

Relief

Just turned in the last of my work for the Spring term. I'm on break this week, then I've got twelve more weeks til I have my masters degree, provided I actually turn in my thesis. Which is due in 6 or so weeks. Sigh.

It feels good, though. I'm in high spirits. My class is doing a little ritual together on Ocean Beach tomorrow, to mark the transition to the new university, to mourn the loss of our old school, and, well, just to celebrate each other.

I've also got Spring fever bad. I'm horny and high, like Don McLean sang in the 70s. Except that I'm not currently drinking whiskey nor rye. It's just a palpable oozing of libidinal energy, is all. Beware if you're around me: I might come on to you.

My Belly, Part One

The first time I became aware that I was "fat" was on the playground in first grade. Some kid came up to me and said something like, "I know why you and Kenny play together all the time: 'cause you're both fat!" Kenny was a kid who lived in my neighborhood. We rode bikes together and killed snails and ate snacks at his house after school. His mother would make us cinnamon toast and Tang (the beverage of the astronauts!) The revelation that I was fat had never consciously occurred to me before, but it doesn't strike me as surprising that my fatness was first named by another person. It does seem from that moment onward, my body image was sculpted by many an "other," whether it was a kid on the playground, a TV show, a movie, various doctors, fatphobia in the cultural ether, or, not insignificantly, my mom. I'll share more about my mom and fatness in another post.

For now, let's turn our attention to my belly. The belly that, in first grade, wasn't all that big, but over the years, and particularly by my senior year of high school, began to protrude and spill over my middle section thanks to weight gain and gravity. I'd had chicken pox over the summer of 1989, and a scar remained on my stomach to the left of my belly button. Later that year, the scar began to blur and dimple: the origin point of my first stretch mark, and with it, a deeper hatred of my body(self.)

It is a curious thing, growing up fat. No one notices you and yet everyone notices you. Particularly in the heteronormative realm of the sexual or romantic: the boys I'd had crushes on in junior high and high school were nice boys; they just thought of me as "one of the guys." It may have had something to do with my gender presentation, having been a tomboy, but I think the real reason was 'cause of the belly: this large, lumbering body that seemed, for all its obviousness, to be invisible.

The Daily Grind

Hi friends. I haven't been able to blog so much since school started back up. I'd love to regale you with stories of my wacky adventures, but things have been decidedly unwacky lately. This is pretty much the routine:

Mondays - I leave at 8:45am for the clinic, where I've got a 10:00am process group (kinda like group therapy with the other interns), a clinic staff meeting at noon, and see clients in the afternoon. Then I come home and do school work.

Tuesdays - School work until I leave for class at about 2:30pm; the bike-and-BART commute to Alameda takes about 1.25 hours; then I'm in class til 10:00pm; then I arrive home at about 11:15-11:30pm.

Wednesdays - Clinic - 10:00am didactic training; 1:00pm group supervision; individual clients until 6:00pm; facilitate the grief therapy group til 8:00pm; home by about 9:30pm.

Thursdays - School work; personal therapy at noon; more school work; commute; class 4-10pm; commute; home 'round 11:30pm.

Fridays - Leave for 9:00am individual supervision by 7:45am; clients at the clinic from 11:00 to 4:00pm; do paperwork; home by about 5:30pm.

This morning when Astrid woke up for work, she kissed me and said something like, "See you in several days." The thing that's most sucky about my schedule, apart from the hella annoying commute to my new school, is that Mondays and Fridays are the only weekdays I'm actually home for dinner. Astrid and I pretty much just see each other at bedtime Tuesdays through Thursdays. Thankfully, now that we're back to class, the end is actually in sight. Come August, I might have a life again.

Kisses,
Bree

Now I *am* talkin' 'bout movin' in (or out, as the case may be)

Jeezus. Astrid and I have to move out of our place in the next couple months. The landlords are putting in a new foundation and politely, more or less, asking us to leave. We've been looking at Craigslist for the last few days, and basically everything in our price range is either like a tenth of the size of our current apartment or in exactly not the neighborhoods we want to live. Here are the listings - all four of 'em (at time of writing) - in San Francisco that are comparable in size and rent to our current digs. Note that the location "Inner Sunset" in these listings actually means "Outer Sunset" (bastards!) So anyway, if we wanna stay in San Francisco, we've gotta go with a one-bedroom or even (gak!) a studio. There are 300 square foot studios in this town going for $1300! We are considering hopping the pond, as it were, and looking in Oakland/Berkeley. Getting a decently sized place there for as much or less than what we're paying now is at least a possibility; however, apartments in our price range are often in dodgy neighborhoods, as we found out from doing a couple reconnaissance trips to Oakland this weekend.

Once more with feeling: I hate money.

"I'm not talkin' 'bout movin' in..."

I was at a taqueria in the Mission the other day, and as the lady behind the counter was making my burrito, the song "I'd Really Love to See You Tonight" was floating through the sound system. The mellowly upbeat tune by '70s pop duo England Dan and John Ford Coley, unlike the very mediocre carne asada, truly hit the spot for me. I whistled the tune to myself as I walked back down 16th Street, and made a mental note to look the song up online when I got a moment. As with most of my "mental notes" this one faded into the mélange of momentary stimulations, distractions, and preoccupations, and when I tried to recall the song later (hmm...it wasn't Jackson Browne...was it Seals and Crofts?...) it had completely vanished from consciousness.

Then, by some amazing stroke of luck or fate or perhaps just the consistent marketing trends on lite rock stations throughout the Bay Area, I just heard the song again in a cafe in Berkeley! Oh happy day! I present to you "I'd Really Love to See You Tonight" by England Dan and John Ford Coley, complete with a psychedelic butterfly-chick fade-in!

Sometimes I do; sometimes I don't

We did a check-in during class tonight, in which we were supposed to share something about self-care: where it's at for us right now, what we want to be mindful of for ourselves as we engage in our clinical work and return to classes after the ordeal we've been through (see the other blog if you don't know the ordeal to which I refer.) I talked about how I'm taking multi-vitamins and fish oil supplements now, which I'm truly happy about. But it was a veneer to mask the real thing I'm not doing to care for myself: I'm nowhere near where I want to be in terms of eating healthfully. That couple-week stretch of eating well has given way to the usual pattern of eating satisfying but non-nutritive crap and eating too much of it. Sigh. Then my amazing new teacher told us she recently joined Weight Watchers. I didn't have a negative reaction to this because, A., my teacher is fierce and serene in the best combination of those qualities, and even said she could facilitate WW meetings better than their group leaders, fat and all! and B., WW is actually the one diet plan in the whole universe of the $40 billion diet industry that doesn't turn my stomach, so to speak, because it's actually a way for people to learn how to eat balanced, healthy meals and change their eating habits. So anyway, this isn't an ad for WW, but it's just to say that, damn, I didn't use that opportunity to be "out" about my contemplation of losing weight and my struggle to eat healthier.

On the flip side, I was the only one in class who commuted by bike, and that's something I can be pretty proud of, even if I ate a can of Chicken and Stars soup upon arriving home. ;)

Narcolepsy in the 'Burbs

Finishing up Shabbat with my family down in San Jose. Long into the food coma, a gorgeous meal of early-season matzo ball soup and roasted chicken with lemon and rosemary (the mouth waters again) I'm feeling very sleepy on the couch, while my sisters and Astrid play "Speed Scrabble" at a folding table. Schmend just asked for the official Scrabble Dictionary to justify her play on the word "cig" as in "cigarette," and that shit is in there! The Scrabble Dictionary is totally bogus, dude. Get the OED, I say!

I've been loopy like that all day. It's on account of having stayed up super late last night (nay, this morning) drinking beers for the birthday of the illustrious Dax. It seems that the Triple Rock Brewery in Berkeley serves up some gluten-free beers, and Dax was free to get as schnokered as she pleased. 'Twas pretty fun.

Ah, Speed Scrabble is over - back to the Big City with us.

xo
Bree

Bad Week with Food

The stress has let up somewhat, though I've got a lot of clinic work right now, and school starting up. So there's that. And the fact that I just ate a whole mini cheesecake, even though I wasn't hungry in the slightest. It looks like one serving, but it's really two, or maybe even three. Sigh. It was really fucking tasty, though. Like some of the best cheesecake ever, all velvety and lemony, with a bottom graham crust that tasted more like carmelized butter and sugar than a box of stale crackers.

I had some time to kill tonight before Dax's birthday celebration, so I ducked into a wifi café in Berkeley before heading to the pub, and there's a problem with me and cafés, see: I love 'em, but I don't drink coffee. So here I am with this gorgeous display of pastries and confections in a curved glass case in front of me, and these beautiful tiny cheesecakes staring up at me, needing a tummy to fill. Okay, you know it's bad when I start anthropomorphizing food. So, yeah, I bought it, I ate it, and now I feel really yucky. And now I'm on my way to drink beer on top of it.

Back to School!

Finally, I will be attending orientation at my new university today. Unfortunately this will be happening only after a half-day of mind-dulling number crunching at the bookkeeping gig. I'll be working for a few more hours over the next week or two, and then I'll be done with my commitment there. It's been a lifesaver to make a little bit of money while waiting for my student loans, but going back to bookkeeping makes me realize how desperately I do not want to go back to bookkeeping. After getting all oriented and shit, we'll be resuming classes on Tuesday. I feel a really weird mix of excitement, relief, and dread.

Comfort Food

Some folks eat mac'n'cheese, others prefer pork chops and apple sauce, and then there's me. When I'm stressed out, I crave Chinese food. The subject deserves several entries, but suffice it for right now, I'm an American Jew, just one generation removed from the Lower East Side, where the Jewish neighborhood rubbed up against Chinatown and Jews began eating Chinese food as early as the late 1800s. It's essentially in the makeup of my cultural genetics. If you're interested in the subject, check out the article Safe Treyf by Gaye Tuchman and Harry G. Levine.

It's a fascinating account of the socio-cultural phenomenon of intergenerational Jewish appreciation of Chinese food, and it addresses the history of the phenomenon, as well as the complexities of the race/ethnicity, economic, and religious dynamics at play.

Duck sauce and gefilte fish, like ebony and ivory, they live together on the shelf at Safeway.

So Friday night, Astrid and I ate at Red Jade on Church Street, the only Chinese restaurant in the neighborhood. It's decent, inexpensive, and more "American-Chinese" fare than authentic, like many of the restaurants I've frequented in the City. It's not on my list of all-time favorites, but in a pinch, it's fine. The food is fresh, it's not too oily, and the dishes have some flavor. But the key factor this weekend was the stress and the relief of said stress through food. I've gone my two weeks of eating sensibly, and this weekend was the bounce-back binge, starting with Friday night's excursion to the Red Jade. We really enjoyed the spinach tofu soup with button mushrooms, a clear broth soup with a delicate flavor. Their prawns with Jade greens, which ended up being an uninspired glut of conventional broccoli, were just okay. I was hoping for bok choy or gai-lan (Chinese broccoli), which would have made the dish more distinctive and tasty. We also ordered their mango ostrich, which had a really nice, savory brown sauce that contrasted well with the sweet, firm mango slices. The ostrich meat itself was kind of beef-like and a little on the chewy side. Overall, I'd give the meal almost 3 stars, but despite the moderately enjoyable mediocrity, I continued to eat and eat until I was completely gorged.

The other major indulgence of the weekend was a Saturday night wee-hours trip to Mel's Diner for my ultimate indulgence: chicken strips. Many out there may know that chicken strips (embarrassingly enough, the Denny's version of the diner classic) were the first meat I ate after three years of vegetarianism in college. They have become a huge part of what Astrid lovingly calls "the lore of Bree."

So now you know that Chinese food and chicken strips are my total fat-girl kryptonite. What's nice about beginning the week after the weekend's indulgences is this: I'm not tripping out about it.

Back to the regimen!

Nervous Energy

I'm not generally an insomniac, so it's kinda odd for me to be wide awake at 4:00am. It's a good kind of nervous in ways: we just got word, like yesterday, that the whole grad psych program is being transferred out to another university, and we have to fax in the registration papers by today at noon. Orientation is Thursday, and classes are supposed to start the following Tuesday. Big, big sigh of relief, yes, and at the same time, I'm so jumpy. Since starting the bookkeeping job just a couple weeks ago, my anxiety level has been through the roof.

There are a number of factors at play right now. Not only has the school situation moved abruptly from a lazy depressed stasis to a frenzy of registration deadlines, I'm also in the process of starting the grief group at the clinic, and saying good bye to my very first therapy client, whose last session is today. There are more kinds of grief than seeing someone die; there's also the kind of mourning when someone goes away.

My heightened energy also accounts for or has been stoked by a new project of mine. If you haven't stumbled upon it yet, feel free to swing over to my new blog and read all about my obsessions with food, my body, my health, and my reluctant desire to lose weight. All served up, if you will, with my own special sauce of chronic skepticism, critique, and celebration. Don't worry, though, Toothpicklabeling is still very much alive. Where else would you find all the grad school angst, popculture fetishes, and minutia of my daily life in one tidy online package?

I love my readers! Thanks for being there.

xo
Bree

Half a Corned Beef Sandwich

I could count the times I've eaten just half a sandwich on one hand. As a rule, I'm not good at leaving food on the plate. If there ever were a Jack Sprat's wife, she'd be me. Except for the being someone's wife thing. And the having no name except my husband's thing. And the being in a nursery rhyme thing.

You know what I mean; I can eat no lean.

So tonight, I ate at an old favorite in Berkeley, Saul's, a Jewish-style deli on Shattuck Avenue. It's a place N. and I used to go frequently, and I don't even remember whether I've been there since we broke up over three years ago. I went there after work at the clinic with my co-worker Devra. I ordered a cup of matzo ball soup and a "6-ounce" corned beef sandwich on rye. The sandwich came with a choice of cole slaw (yuck!), potato salad (meh), french fries (danger! danger!) or salad. I went with the salad. So the soup, salad, and half a sandwich were exactly enough food for me. I knew I didn't need to eat the second half, so I didn't.

I will make a minor complaint about the corned beef at Saul's: while I love that they use Niman Ranch sustainably raised, hormone-free beef, lending a very Berkeley feel to the New York style food, the truth is, and this is the kicker, it's too lean. Even Jack Sprat knows that corned beef should be juicy and fatty and lip-smackingly rich.

(*okay, so I am someone's wife. Sheesh, don't be such a stickler!)

I love my shrink

I've never blogged about my therapist before. I've mentioned being in therapy, but never anything specific about Mark, my dude. He is so light-hearted and takes my issues seriously but helps me create a relaxed, nonjudgmental space to contemplate them and start letting stuff go. Last week I went into therapy totally down on myself for how I've been eating lately. With everything going on with school, and the new bookkeeping job, I've been so fucking stressed out and eating everything in sight. I cried on the couch, feeling huge and awful and shitty. Mark basically told me to chill out and give myself some credit for coping with the stress. Since eating is one of my self-soothing strategies, it's not surprising that that's where I go when I'm freaked out. We talked about what I might do in the next week to stay grounded, and it totally calmed me down. I've been eating really healthfully all week, and feel bunches better. Just being reminded not to beat up on myself was really the key. Once I felt freer to cope by eating, and became more mindful of it and accepting of it, I wanted to do it less.

Life as I know it

Just so's everyone knows: I got a bookkeeping job to tide me over until school starts back up. No, classes still fucking haven't started yet. So a big thank you goes out to my friend Mag who landed me a temporary gig at a wonderful local community arts organization in the Mission. I'm working there Tuesdays and Thursdays, and continuing with my clinical internship Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I don't know if it's gonna be enough to live on, but I'm hoping the teach-out plans move forward soon. It looks like I'll have more news about that within the month. Crossed fingers are appreciated.

I hate bookkeeping. Hate. But it's a living.


xo
Bree

What It's About

(The first Ambivalent Fat Girl entry.)

By way of introduction, I am a fat dyke in my mid-30s, living a beautiful life in San Francisco. I'm shacked up with a really swell lady and I'm currently a grad student in clinical psychology. My academic and professional interests swim around such issues as death, sitting with the unknown, existential anxiety, body image issues, fatness, fat positivity, health and well-being, sexuality, queer/GLB identity, gender variance, genderqueer and transgender identity issues, spirituality, finding meaning in life, and yadda yadda. For fun, I like listening to music (mostly of the post-punk, folkie, political, artsy, nerdy-emo indie variety) riding my bike, lazing about, blogging, being social, drinking gorgeous cocktails, and more often than not, eating lots of yummy food.



I've been fat my whole life. I'm 5'4" and I currently weigh around 220 pounds. I've weighed as much as 235, but in the last few years, I've stayed pretty consistently between 210 and 220, most often lingering at exactly 215. I weighed 210 at the end of high school, so my weight's been fairly steady over the last 18 years.

My feelings about my weight yo-yo a bit more than that, to be true, thus with the "ambivalence." After growing up with a lot of anxiety and unhappiness about my weight, in an unforgiving fatphobic culture, with a mom (whom I adore, by the way) who constantly dieted and modeled body self-hatred for me, coming into my own sensibility about my weight involved everything from internalizing the self-hatred to rejecting the paradigm and refusing to get on a scale for more than ten years. Back in high school, I ate like absolute shit. Taco Bell, Denny's, everything fried, crispy and golden brown. I still love me some chicken strips. Moving my body as little as possible was a matter of true slacker pride. In college I went vegetarian for three years and lost a bit of weight that way, but I can't say I was eating much healthier, really. It wasn't until about five years ago that I started exercising, and now I totally dig getting myself around by bike. I actually enjoy working up a sweat, even. So since biking entered my life, and a new consciousness around healthy eating has crept slowly into my routine, things have shifted for me a bit. I'm still a chronic overeater, and tend to indulge my cravings too often, so despite an overall healthier lifestyle, I really haven't experienced a significant net weight loss. Sometimes I feel okay about that, and sometimes I don't.

I experience some health problems which I feel to be related to my weight and to overeating. My knees are stressed and weak, and I had a bad case of patello-femoral syndrome for a couple years, which still affects me, but has lessened some since doing physical therapy and getting more exercise. I can't squat or spend too much time kneeling, or else the knees crack and pop in a very unpleasant way. I've had a low-grade but chronic struggle with acid reflux, which I'm quite sure is caused mainly by overeating, and has diminished some since quitting coffee about four years ago or so. My overall and long-term health would be much improved if I were to dramatically cut back on saturated fats (main culprits: red meat and all things fried) and if I were to make a habit out of eating til satisfied and not until utterly stuffed. Though I'm a fan of salty snacks which carry their own kinds of risks (raising blood pressure and water retention) I will say I'm not much of a sweet tooth. A small square of chocolate is a totally doable limit for me, but get me near a bowl of briny green olives, and the lot of 'em will be gone before you can say "bowl of briny green olives."

It's also noteworthy that since getting into biking, I realize that if I weighed less, I would actually have more endurance and be able to bike faster and farther. Climbing the San Francisco hills is a painful and slow undertaking for me, and if I weighed even twenty pounds less, I think my biking efficiency would be vastly improved, not to mention my stamina and energy for lots of other fun stuff like sex and walking and um, sex.

So I'm inaugurating this here blog with an admission that I'm making quite public. I'm interested in losing some weight. Even as a fat-positive feminist anti-establishment dyke, I have come to understand that for my own body, for my own lifestyle, and for my own long-term health goals, this makes sense for me. I don't know if I'll be successful. I don't know if I'll be any "happier" if I weigh less. I don't know whether, even if I lose a significant amount of weight, I will keep it off or not. I just dunno. But I want to blog the progress, the literal ups & downs, and mostly the fleeting thoughts, feelings, fears, and myopic obsessions that run through this noggin when anything related to these topics floats on through. Welcome to the contradictory journey.

Please feel free to leave comments, but if you flame me for being a "fat hater" I will have to lash you roundly. Also, if you leave inane fatphobic comments like, "Oh my god, you'll look so much better when you're skinny!" I'll also have to lash you. My feelings about this subject are ambivalent for very complex personal, political, cultural and healh-related reasons. In this blog, I am attempting to be as honest as I can about my mixed feelings on weight loss, what is at stake for me emotionally, how I've been conditioned to hate myself and other fat people, and how wanting to lose weight is mired in all kinds of problematic socio-cultural ideologies, prejudices, and power relationships. In other words, I know. Don't judge me for being human, please.

Peace, y'all.

Bree

Election '08 Rant #1

In last week's Presidential primary election, I got to vote for one of my all-time favorite elected officials. Suffice it to say, it wasn't Barack Obama, and it wasn't Hillary Clinton. It was, in fact, Cynthia McKinney, former U.S. Representative from Atlanta, Georgia, now a candidate for the Green Party's Presidential nomination. If you've been tuned into my blog since the old days, you may remember reading my long-winded entry about Cynthia McKinney's fight to win back her seat in Congress in 2004. After serving another term, she got defeated once more, and has since defected to the Greens.

On Super Tuesday, McKinney got 26% of the Green vote in California with 7,000 votes, but was eclipsed by continual candidate Ralph Nader, who took close to 17,000 votes for 61%. And although McKinney fared better in a couple other states, she may not emerge the Green's candidate in the November election.

Not that the Greens matter at that point anyway. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Nader got 2.8 million votes in the 2000 election, and after the devastation of Bush's coup of the "hanging chads," he only brought in 500,000 votes in 2004. Needless to say, this year, with the tide turned against Bush and his War on Everything, the Greens will get even fewer votes, on account of progressives' and liberals' sheer terror of tipping the cart to the Republicans. Since I live in a state that more than likely will go to the Democrat, I can probably get away with a Green vote in November. Of course, if I lived in Florida or Ohio or somewhere, it'd be a different matter altogether.

Point being, I like being excited about someone I voted for for a change. Holding my nose and voting for Kerry in 2004 made me almost hate myself. But why blame the victims of the system (people like you and me who'd like to vote for decent candidates) for what are essentially structural problems, like the Electoral College, the two-party system, campaign finance policies, mega-corporate lobby power, etc?

I'm babbling now, 'night.

xo

Neverending Winter Break

Wouldn't it be nice if Winter break from school were an endless juggle of skiing, trips to the tropics, relaxing by the fire with expensive whiskey in my coffee mug, communing with friends and family in celebration of various festivals of light?

Well, I did have the celebrations of the season-appropriate holidays. But what if I were to tell you that, come Valentine's Day, I will likely still be out of classes? And as for the skiing and romps to Hawaii, it's a bit hard to vacation when you've been waiting for your financial aid check for months.

I'm sorry to be so cheeky, but that's just the mood I'm in. Truly I can't complain about the extra time off I've had, but on a budget, it's looked more like: sleeping in, playing Tetris, watching the remainder of Angel, Season Five, and cleaning the apartment. Woot, I say, woot!

Don't even ask me if I've worked on my thesis. Don't. I'll sock ya.

So, those of you who have been following the story already know that my crappy-ass college is in the midst of what one of my classmates has called a "hot mess." The latest news is that our faculty are threatening to resign as a group in order to force the administration to permit a "teach-out" to another institution, so that we can get on with our studies. The best case would be that our instructors could follow us to another school and we could continue our curriculum and finish sometime this summer. The worst case is pretty grim: the school shuts down and/or we can't secure a teach-out, and we have to drop out, get jobs, and re-apply to other programs, losing our clinical internships as well as most of the credit for classes we've already taken. And god knows what a pain in the ass it'll be to try to extract our loan money from the black hole that is our financial aid office.

So, yeah, thankful for the free time, but I can't say it's been terribly restful. I will report that my spirits are generally up. I feel really happy about my life other than the hot messiness of the school/money situation. Astrid and I celebrated our 1-year Shack-Up-iversary this weekend, by walking to the Mission to eat yummy tapas, then continuing our stroll for drinks at The Uptown, one of my fave dive bars, and then swing dancing at the Metronome in Potrero Hill. All the while, the evening was filled with oh-my-god-I'm-so-in-love-with-you-cooing and chatting and, yes, I am apeshit in love with that girl.

Today has been a truly relaxing day, even though I've been doing errands and such. It started with a much needed catch up breakfast date with my old pal Chauncy, for whom I made yummy sherry-poached eggs in a nest of wilted chard, onions and garlic, as well as fresh strong coffee and a bowl of fresh fruit - kiwis, bananas, and tangellos. Shoulda taken a photo of breakfast for you, sorry. Then I went to drop off dry cleaning (you don't wanna know how long it's been since my wool sweaters were laundered) and then I got my vote on. More on the presidential race later, perhaps. Are you curious who I voted for? Need I remind you that I'm registered Green...so I'm out of the Obama-Clinton tug o' war for the moment. Then I did a wee-bit of grocery shopping (I'm trying these high-fiber multi-grain tortillas that my mom has been raving about) and now I'm actually putting words to blog template. It's a good day, and there's so much more of it, ta boot. It really helps that it's sunny out.

On to the next thing.

xo