Assorted hotties

It's time for the first Hottie Roundup. With no further ado, I give you:

Current Celebrity Crushes!

Zachary Quinto:

Nikki Blonsky:

Lee Pace:

David Blue:

James Corden:

Crystal Renn:

Amy Lee:

Amy Adams:

Miracle Laurie

There's no such thing as a conservation of pretty

I was at breakfast this morning (okay, afternoon, because I was up until past 5 a.m. watching "Huge", which I'll talk about later; don't judge me). Now, I love breakfast with a ridiculous, fiery passion, enough that I will eat alone, in public, on a regular basis in order to indulge. Also, this place in town makes the best breakfast burritos. Just so you know.

The point is, I was out at breakfast with my delicious burrito, reading the Shapely Prose archive on my phone and enjoying the Very Cute Waiter whenever he came by. A lovely time, all in all. After a while, though, when I was about to get up to refill my coffee I glanced over at the VCW again to see him chatting with a very pretty girl sitting a few tables over. Immediately, despite having left the house feeling quite satisfied with how I looked, my self-confidence took a nosedive. The thought process is a familiar one, and goes something like this:

She is thin and pretty --> I do not look like her --> therefore I am not pretty.

It's a problem I frequently encounter when I'm out, just one of the self-esteem pit traps to be navigated. I could feel my shoulders hunching in, my head lowering, the thought going 'round and 'round my head, Keep quiet, keep your head down, don't let anyone notice you. Just getting up from the table, crossing the room to get another cup of coffee felt like a horrifying, daunting prospect. But instead of letting those feelings inform my actions, I squared my shoulders and stood up and crossed the damn room. Because really, the thought process should go something more like this:

She is thin and pretty --> I do not look like her --> so the fuck what?

Here's the thing to understand, and what has taken me far too long to be able to articulate: there is not a finite amount of attractiveness out there.

There is plenty of pretty to go around. If there is a pretty girl in the room, that does not make me less so. One person being pretty does not take away from the rest of us. Insane as it may sound, I only realized today that if I'm pretty, and another pretty girl walks in (even if she's prettier than I am), my level of attractiveness have not changed. Pretty has not suddenly been subtracted from me, or from anyone else to accommodate her presence.

If I don't look like her, what does that matter? If I saw a girl who looked exactly like me, except she had blonde hair, would I think that I couldn't possibly be as pretty because my hair was dark?* So why the hell am I letting myself get hung up on the fact that I don't look like someone else as though it makes me any less pretty?

Because it doesn't.

There are so many different kinds of pretty out there. (And I will compile some of them here, because I like to look at pictures of people I think are pretty.) Sure, maybe not everyone is going to find me attractive. But that's true of anyone; there is absolutely no such thing as an absolutely universal standard of beauty. How much happier would I be if I stopped defining my self-image based on other people?

I think quite a bit.

Health Advisory System: Red Alert

Confession: I am unhealthy.

I have stopped, after a ridiculous amount of time, thinking about my health as a symptom of my weight issues. I've thought that way for edging perilously close to thirty years now, and do you know where it has gotten me? Nowhere. I still have the problems that I've always had. Clearly, focusing on the need to lose weight has been ineffective, so say the least. So I started to wonder, what if I just reversed my thinking? What if my fat is a symptom of my being unhealthy?

Now, on the surface these sound like pretty much the same thing. Let me tell you why they're not.

Focusing primarily on weight loss can lead--and has, at least for me--to resorting to unhealthy measures to shed those unwanted pounds. No, I've never been bulimic or anorexic (though much of my thinking about food and weight has been disordered, something that I'll probably address eventually). But I've been guilty of falling into the diet trap time and time again, engaging in eating habits that don't deliver proper nutrition and probably did more damage to my body in the long-run, especially when you consider the way my weight yo-yo'd whenever I'd go on or off of them. Rapid weight gain or loss puts stress on your body that is just plain ol' bad for you. So here's my plan:

Fuck thinking about weight loss.

This is not to say that I think it's good and okay and healthy for me to be my current size. Frankly, I don't. But I also don't think that my lack of health is caused by my size. I've heard a lot of buzz recently (old buzz, but give me a break, I'm new to this) about a book called Rethinking Thin, which as I understand posits the theory that all bodies have a size that is more or less a natural baseline. Proper nutrition and regular exercise will keep you within a reasonable range around that size, and it takes intense and constant effort to maintain a weight very far above or below it. (Makes sense to me so far, but I want to pick up the book to see if I'm understanding it correctly. Hope I don't have to go to a regular bookstore to do so; I might be allergic to paying full price for books these days.) If this is true, then I can be healthy and still be fat. So . . . okay.

That doesn't sound so bad.

The problem is that, right now, I have a lot of bad habits. I mean, a lot. Habits that I'm going to have to change in order to be the kind of healthy I want to be. But the thought of changing them all at once sort of feels like saying, "I've decided to take up mountain climbing. I shall therefore go out and climb Mt. Everest RIGHT NOW." Meep. That's a surefire recipe for failure, right there, which will just lead to backsliding into unhealthy habits all over again. Instead, I'm going to take a marathon-training approach to healthy habits. When I've mastered one stage and it's ingrained as a new, healthier habit, then I'll move on to the next. In the meantime I'll still try to make healthier choices when they're presented. (e.g. I still got a mocha after breakfast today, but ordered it with skim milk and no whipped cream. Baby steps, right?) I will mark these steps off on a Homeland Security Advisory-esque rainbow scale, because I'm a bit of a smartass and because I like rainbows. The idea is to get from red all the way down to green. My first step:

Drink more water.

I have always gotten very easily dehydrated. For those of you who don't have this problem, let me tell you: it SUCKS. In addition to plain old thirst, when I let myself start getting dehydrated I get headaches, feel sluggish and sick, and tend to be in an incredibly pissy mood. None of these are good things! The Mayo Clinic assures me that everyone needs different amounts of water, so I guess I'll start out with the 8x8 rule (8 8oz glasses of water a day) and adjust from there if necessary.

Hooray for hydration! Let's all drink up together. (Just don't try to toast each other with water, okay?)

Children can be cruel (though they're not the only ones)

As I mentioned earlier, part of this blog's purpose is to help me come to terms with some of my own issues. Sort of like a public therapy session, only without a licensed therapist and really just me talking and okay, so it's really not like a therapy session at all. Erm. Still, I have Things To Say and memories to rehash and work through and this is where I'm gonna do it. This is me checking some of my emotional baggage, so that I can deal with it and move on.

It's not going to be easy, but I'm going to do my best to be open and honest. I encourage you to do the same: if you have a story you want to share, leave a comment. (Or, if I can ever overcome my technology fail and figure out how to add a link to the sidebar, you can email me.)

Today I'm going to talk about elementary school.

I hated it. I mean, absolutely loathed it. Why? You know how most everyone remembers middle school as this two-(or three-)year stretch of unending torture and humiliation? That was elementary school for me. (By contrast, I actually rather enjoyed middle school. What, puberty, you think you can damage my self-esteem any further? You got NOTHIN'. BRING IT.) I theorize that this isn't because people become less cruel as they grow older, but because at that age most children have yet to develop their internal censors that keep them from actually saying what they're thinking out loud.

As a fat child ("Fat"? "Heavy"? Whatever the technically accurate term may have been, I was bigger than my peers and that was what mattered.) I'd always been teased. I hated my school uniform because . . . well, okay, mostly because it was hideous, but partially because the default uniform for girls involved some sort of skirt, and I was ashamed of exposing my legs. To put this in perspective for you: I attended that school through third grade. At younger than nine years old, I was ashamed of letting people see my fat legs.

One more time: I was ashamed of my body before I was nine years old. What the everloving fuck?

And the thing is, because I was ashamed of myself, I moved as little as possible. If you get called Thunder Thighs and hear earthquake and elephant and hippo jokes and people tell you the sight of you makes them sick; if you hear this every time you run, guess what? You stop running. You try to keep yourself still so you don't jiggle, don't draw attention to yourself. I was like some poor defenseless woodland creature, trying to become invisible* in the hopes that those predatory eyes would skate right over me. Of course, in the process, I'd stopped moving. And the longer that went on, the less easily I could move, which made me more inclined to hide, and the cycle continued. When I was little, I would move for the sheer pleasure of it, for the amazement of Look what my body can do! Isn't that cool? It's so cool! Then came shame, and then habit, until now I don't really move any more than absolutely necessary. (Though I do want to go roller skating. How does a college town not have a roller rink? I call shenanigans!)

In any case, things already pretty much sucked but weren't horrible until fourth grade, when we moved. I don't know why; maybe it was the shift from living mid-city to living in a much higher-income suburb. Maybe it was the combination of being fat and the new girl all at once. But for whatever reason, for that entire first year every day felt like running a gauntlet of insults and cruelty and sneering contempt. I had friends, yes, but they were the other childhood outcasts: girls who were smarter than average, or socially awkward, or not as well-off financially. Against the pretty and popular and rich we had no defense. And I was, if you'll pardon the pun, the biggest target of all. After all, I was all of those things and new, and fat. It was like shooting fish in a barrel.

The entirety of elementary school was more or less like that, but things started to improve a bit in fifth and sixth grade. Not because my fat became more acceptable--there were still insults, and jokes, and pranks. Mostly, I think, the novelty simply wore off. But one thing that did happen was a shift in my own behavior and attitude. I remember discovering, at some point in the fifth grade, that acting as though I was less made me more socially accepted. I was smart, but if I downplayed that by keeping my hand down more often than not and occasionally playing up not understanding things, my intelligence wasn't threatening. If I made it clear that I didn't expect anyone to find me attractive, my appearance was more likely to get a pass. If I sat down and shut up and did all the work in group projects with a smile and protested that I didn't understand, I didn't expect, I didn't want, then people would allow me to simply exist. And the worst thing about that wasn't that it worked. No, the really, truly horrible thing? I felt like I was getting a good deal. I was grateful.

I shouldn't have been grateful. I should have been furious. It was like I thought I had to compensate for my big body by making the rest of me as small as possible. How much of that was due to things that actually happened, and how much was due to what I thought would happen, what I thought people would think . . . honestly, I have no idea. But I look back now and I'm incensed for the little girl that I was, the one who was never so happy as when she was completely invisible because nothing good could possibly come of being noticed. How much more could I have accomplished if my weight had simply passed without comment? How much more would I have moved? How much healthier would I have been?

I don't know. I'll never know. And maybe it's useless to rehash and wonder about things that you can't change, even if you had a TARDIS because we all saw how that went, right? There's one thing I do know, though: what I went through isn't unique. And sometimes it helps just to know you're not alone. If you want to, tell me your story.







*Looking back on it, I'm surprised at how deep this fantasy went. When I'd daydream about the cute boy in class asking me out (We all did, right? Unless you were into girls, but I imagine there was a correlating fantasy there.) I'd slipped away from a party to be by myself and he'd found me out there. I distinctly remember having one of these daydreams leading up to our sixth grade graduation party. Would I have been allowed to slip off by myself? Hell no. But in my mind I could do it, because no one would notice I was gone. This was an integral part of the fantasy, allowing my crush to see me while remaining invisible and unnoticed by everyone else.

Everything that happens is future history. Weird, huh?

First post of my brand new blog! Exciting, and . . . yeah, not a little scary. I suppose I ought to start things off by explaining who I am, and what this is, and why it's here.

Due to long conditioning on behalf of my mother and Law and Order: SVU (OMG did you know that on the internet you can be anyone you want to be? You could all be axe murderers!) I'm going to refrain from giving too much personal identifying information. Old habits are hard to break. But basically, I am a white(ish) female in her late twenties, who lives in that great expanse of space in the middle of the U.S. I am overweight; actually, according to my BMI, I am morbidly obese. Ah, hell, let's just say it.

I'm fat.

There, I think we all feel a little better now, don't we?

I'm going to use that word, because a big part of what this blog's purpose is to help me come to terms with myself. All of me--and yes, there is a lot--including the parts I don't like so much. So I'm going to call myself fat, because I am, and I'm not going to apologize for it. It's taken me many, many years to realize that it's really nobody's business but my own. That if someone doesn't want to look at me, they can turn away. That I deserve respect, and consideration, and yes, love. Fat is not a moral failing. It's just fat.

Be aware, I'm also probably going to be talking a bit about diet and exercise. However, if I start talking about weight loss specifically you have my permission to give me a good solid Internet Slap. Not because I'm anti-weight loss, but because I've spent far too much of my life focusing on that as the reason and motivation behind anything healthy that I tried, as well as some stuff that probably wasn't healthy. What I need to focus on now is getting healthy, not on dropping pounds. If the one leads to the other, great. If it doesn't, well, I'm getting to be okay with that.

I've had issues with my weight, and with ridiculously low self-esteem, for more or less my entire life. I was a fat baby, and a heavy child, and kids can be vicious. (So can adults; kids just haven't learned to couch things in socially-acceptable terms yet. More on this later, probably.) I grew up being ashamed of what I looked like, and believing deep down that every insult, every slight that I experienced was no more or less than what I deserved. After a while, I didn't even need those; they were so deeply ingrained that I was my own worst, cruelest critic.

This isn't to say that I've been walking around in a deep, dark depression all my life. Most of the time I'm okay. Self-conscious and introverted, but okay. Every so often, though, I have particularly dark periods. This past week I hit one of those low points, and for the first time ever I thought to turn to the internet to see if just maybe there was someone out there who understood, someone who was talking about it, someone who might have had some advice on how to cope.

I found BFD. If you've never been there, go now. It's a wonderful, warm, supportive place run by ladies far smarter and better-informed than I am. And it made me realize that maybe I'm okay just the shape I am. Could I be healthier? Yes, and I should. I should get up, get out, move around because hey, the human body is amazing and can do amazing things. And because when you're healthy, you feel better. But if I'm healthy and fit, if I'm eating right and exercising and I'm still fat?

Well . . . so the fuck what?

This isn't just about me, though. There are other people out there who are feeling or have felt the same things I have. There are things to talk about, stories and opinions to share. We all have our stories of how we got here; how we feel about ourselves; hurts we've had along the way; good things that have happened. And there's a whole world out there full of things to talk about. Body image in the media and society in general, how to deal with and combat prejudice, how to keep from being prejudiced ourselves, how to lace a corset (I have to look this up every time, damn it), etc. I imagine The Patriarchy will probably be discussed. Basically, if you're reading this and you have something you want to talk about, let me know. I'm opinionated, but surely I'll run out of things to talk about eventually.

I hope this helps. You, and me, and all of us.