Scrappy Badger

scrappybadger June 11th, 2007

I’m feeling a little down lately. I guess, to be both honest and more accurate, I’m feeling more down than usual. I haven’t had an overabundance of joyful days for a while, but lately I’m feeling particularly beaten down by the world. Something happened. The wires got crossed, the connection was fuzzy, or I didn’t have good reception. I don’t know which one it was, but somehow my Pull Yourself Up By the Bootstraps memo ended up giving me one hellish wedgie. I guess, like usual, I misinterpreted. I’ve been pulling at the wrong strings, and all they get me is a butt rash and aching forearms.

Part of my trouble is that I’m tired. Teaching two accelerated composition classes doesn’t leave much free time, and what little there is always seems to be filled with dirty dishes and bills and laundry. Even the days when I shirk all of my responsibilities, when I take the day off from housework or grading or even answering the phone, are filled with worrying about what I’m not doing and guilt for not doing it.

The worry and the anxiety never go away. I’ve been trying not to think about a trip I’m supposed to be taking in October. My first grown up conference proposal was accepted and by the big Victorian conference — the really big one. I’ve been to the conference once, but only as a spectator when it was held at a school a few hours away. I really didn’t even expect my proposal to be accepted, but it was, and what’s more, I was faced with the possibility, be it ever so dim, of going somewhere. I haven’t been more than 5 hours away from where I grew up since I was an undergrad and even then it was to attend college. The last vacation (and the only one I think) that Piig and I went on was one funded largely by my parents who rented a beach cottage in North Carolina and invited my sisters and I.

We never go anywhere, so the idea of traveling to the West Coast, to Canada even, is really exciting. I’m beginning to think it won’t happen though. Everything is prohibitively expensive, and we’d need money for food, a hotel room, and airfare. That last one isn’t helping me feel optimistic either. Piig has been looking at flights, and I don’t know, but I’m really thinking I’m going to be forced to buy two seats. Just the thought of the dirty looks from passengers and the exasperation of flight attendants that I’ve read about in other fat people’s accounts of flying is enough to make me want to give up right now. Then there is the fact that I have to keep the trip a secret from my family until right before I leave or my parents, who live within two minutes of where my dad grew up and ten minutes from my mom’s childhood home, will start in with the horror stories of people killed in fiery plane crashes or kidnapped when they crossed the Canadian border.

Sometimes it feels like things that are really easy for other people are crushingly difficult for me. It’s as if I lack some kind of enzyme that would allow me to cope with the world like a normal human being. Meanwhile, I usually just end up feeling inadequate and incapable of really doing anything. I go back to the dirty dishes and the bad student essays, and I wonder if this is what it will always be like.

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scrappybadger June 6th, 2007

I’ve been busy teaching a couple of freshman comp. classes this summer, so I haven’t been able to watch The View in over a month. During the spring semester my schedule usually allowed me to catch it a couple of times a week. I’ve loved the show ever since Rosie was added to the cast. I’d been thinking for years that they needed a lesbian on the show, and I love that she is both a dyke and political. Frankly, I don’t get apolitical lesbians, and, what’s more, I don’t find them particularly interesting.

I don’t necessarily agree with everything Rosie says, and oftentimes my politics are much more radical than hers, but I love her and that wonderfully big mouth of hers nonetheless. I like seeing dykes on tv, real ones, not those pseudo-lesbians from The L Word or the occasional psycho gay woman on Law and Order. I like the actual lesbians, the ones that look like me, that sound like me, and whose lives might be at least a little like my own.

I’ve been happy watching her shock people and sometimes piss them off. I saw a Youtube clip of the very long (for tv at least) fight between Rosie and cohost Elisabeth, but I hadn’t heard much about it otherwise, so last night I went trolling through Youtube again only to find that she left The View early, earlier even than the few weeks she had left on the contract she wasn’t renewing. I guess I’ve been under a rock — or, more accurately, stacks of student essays. How can this be? How can she be leaving early?

I’m so bummed. I liked watching her. I like that she is fat. I like that she doesn’t hide the fact that she likes food and doesn’t incessantly apologize for liking it. I like that she is a lesbian. I like that she talks about issues the way regular people and that she does it in front of millions of people even though that isn’t an easy task. I just plain like her, and I hate to see her go.

I don’t think I’ll be watching The View anymore. I didn’t watch it much before, and I can’t stand the constant promotion of dieting and body hatred that has come to define the show. The hot topics were what I tuned in for and to hear what Rosie would say each day. It just sucks that we’re back to Our Regularly Scheduled Heterosexual Programming. It’s tiresome.

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scrappybadger June 5th, 2007

A few weeks ago Reps. Jo Ann Emerson, Jim McGovern, Tim Ryan, and Jan Schakowsky finished the Food Stamp Challenge.  Each lived for one week on $21 for food, the average allowance for foodstamp recipients. I think it was a pretty good idea. I mean, sure, it had its problems. They knew, for example, that no matter how hungry they got that eventually they would be able to fill their bellies on their nice, high priced food again. Still, it is an interesting way to bring attention to an important issue — one that is all too often derailed by comments about giving away money and food to people who aren’t willing to work.

The fact is, there are lots of people in the U.S. and beyond who work every single day but still don’t have enough to eat nutritional meals on a regular basis. In this country too many people are spending their time wringing their hands and exclaiming that we’re all going to die of so-called morbid obesity to realize that lots of people, even the ones who don’t look like it, don’t have enough money for food. The link seems obvious to me. A small bag of cheetos, all food morality hemming and hawing aside, tastes good, fills you up with its combination of fat and carbs, and costs about $0.99 in most places. Try finding an orange that cheap.

I know how difficult it can be to find food that is both affordable and good for you. Before coming back to graduate school I was out of work for just over two years. It was shortly after September 11th, the company I worked for suffered major ad revenue losses forcing a 30% cut in work staff, and no one else was hiring. It wasn’t a good time. I was lucky enough to get unemployment, but it wasn’t much, and it sure didn’t go far with bills. Piig and I moved in together, we cut out unnecessary expenses like cable and nearly all entertainment, and we started pinching pennies extra hard. About a year into my unemployment Piig switched jobs and started working in the Art Department on campus, so we supplemented our grocery purchases with free wine and cheese at all of the local art shows while at home we ate mostly beans and the occasional veggie burger. It wasn’t rock bottom, but it wasn’t the best of times either.

The thing is, this kind of thing can happen without people even knowing — none of our friends really knew how close to the edge we were. While they half jokingly talked about being poor, we were busy trying to figure out how to pay our electric bill from two months before. We managed to scrape by, but you never really know whether the person living next to you doesn’t have enough to eat that day or the next day or the next week because you can’t always just look and tell. Many people have it far worse than Piig and I did. At the worst point we were actually able to borrow small amounts of money from family to help us make it. Without that help, the kind of help that doesn’t exist for lots of people, we would have been in far more trouble.

I would like to see people paying real attention to this issue. Take, for instance, an “expert” recently featured on a local public radio talk show about <insert scary music and circa WWII announcer voice> the Obesity Epidemic! When a caller mentioned how difficult it is to eat well on a small budget, the <announcer guy voice> Obesity Expert claimed that you can get, for the same price as a large order of fries from a fast food joint, an entire bag of potatoes. This, people, is fairytale land. I don’t know where she lives and what size bags they sell their potatoes in, but around here you could probably get 2 baking potatoes or 3 regular potatoes for that price. It’s hardly an entire bag.

We are so invested in this image of the overindulgent, fat, lazy American that we often can’t stop long enough to see that the fatest people around are also some of the poorest. We aren’t living in 1935 anymore. Skinny no longer automatically means poor, and fat rarely means wealthy. There has been a good deal of research in cultural studies to suggest that the roles have been reversed. Today’s thin, the kind that so many people aspire to, often requires money. There’s a gym membership, personal trainers, leisure time for working out, and sometimes surgery. And then there’s food. Fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and lean meats are expensive. Thin often comes with a price tag. Processed foods, fast food, food with little nutritional value and lots of salt, fat, and sugar — the bulk of what gives it any flavor — is cheap to make and easy for people on a budget to buy.

The lack of affordable food choices is the true epidemic.

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scrappybadger May 13th, 2007

The same goes for my Barbies. They all had lesbian sex with impunity.

Mine weren’t so into the butch/femme thing as these dolls are, though. My dolls eschewed gender typing.

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scrappybadger May 11th, 2007

Though it was actually created a couple of years ago, there is a video enjoying a bit of popularity at YouTube right now. Doll Face features a robot who ventures from “her” box to investigate a tv screen and begins emulating the images of female faces it displays.

I don’t think it is any accident that the robot has female features or that her first smile appears after she has correctly applied lipstick, rouge, and eyebrow penciling. She obviously smiles of her own accord, happy with her likeness to the woman on the television screen, since the melancholy look of the onscreen woman never changes.

The smile disappears as quickly as it came, however, when the tv channel changes to a new face, one with even more makeup. The robot again tries to make her image match the one she sees, pulling more and more makeup out of her box. It takes twice as many of her robotic arms to apply the makeup this time while another pops in the appropriate pair of eyes and her skin is shaded to an acceptable shade of whiteness. This time, though, she doesn’t smile; rather, she looks expectantly at the television – hoping, it seems, to see a reflection of her new self.

The channel switches again, and as happened each time before, the tv moves farther away from her and she adjusts herself to get a better view. This time, though, she has run out of robotic extensions and can no longer reach the television. Distressed and obsessed by her desire to follow the tv, she extends her body until it breaks, leaving her in pieces on the floor with one half of her face still perfectly painted.

The images, coupled with the music, hauntingly recount what happens to so many women as we sidle up the mirror, inspecting differences that are too often interpreted as flaws. The ritual to correct the flaws, to hide the difference, and to conform to an acceptable image of beauty is carried out over and over, and not a few end up broken, mentally or physically, in the process.

Interesting, too, that she comes equipped with an arsenal of cosmetics. She reaches into the patriarchal knapsack to retrieve her tools, and they are all there. Safe and sound.

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scrappybadger May 9th, 2007

Today was my birthday, and I got goodies! Piig got me a bottle of plum wine (which I’m lately in the habit of ordering whenever I get the chance), a subscription to Bark, and Pigeon – a book all about a very underappreciated bird. Perfect gifts!

Bye, bye, birthday. I’m off to bed.

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scrappybadger May 2nd, 2007

One of my guilty pleasures is watching The View since Rosie has been a co-host (you will, no doubt, hear more about her later), and today they featured a doctor who claims that women with eating disorders begin to form their identity around the disorder. It’s funny because earlier this morning as I was grading student essays, I read a quote in one paper that said eating disorders are often accompanied by obsessive compulsive behavior, anxiety, and perfectionism. Jeez, ain’t it the truth.

I used to, and still often do, call my bulimia my “eating issue.” I told very few people about it, but when I did mention it I always heard a voice in the back of my head telling me that I was too fat for anyone to believe I had an eating disorder. The truly sick women, the ones who really deserved help or even compassion were the thin ones. Who was going to believe that someone my size had a problem with food beyond putting too much of it in my mouth? I figured that calling it an “eating issue” would get around all of that. And, of course, there was a lot of shame in admitting that I actually had a real problem.

I haven’t purged in a long time, but the thoughts are still there. I guess like any other habitual behavior it never really goes away; you just learn to manage it. As weird as it sounds, though, I miss the bulimia. It never made sense to me before, but as I was watching this show today I remembered some things I had read about bulimia several years ago. That information and the quote from my student’s essay helped it all fall into place for me. I used the binging and purging, as so many other women do, to control my body in the hopes that I could control other parts of my life, but I also used it to manage my anxiety and to punish myself for imperfections.

Without cycles of binging and purging that outlet no longer exists. That’s probably part of the reason why my anxiety and OCD tendencies have gotten worse over the years. It’s tiring for everything to feel so big all of the time. I want to be able to eat because I enjoy it, because the food tastes so damn good. Sometimes I can do that, but more often than not, I eat out of depression, anxiety, or guilt. It temporarily distracts me from worrying, but the flip side of that is that it has become so important to me, so necessary, that I rarely put anything in my mouth without worrying about the consequences. It doesn’t help that every single time I turn around someone is screaming about the so-called obesity epidemic or trying to convince the world that you are going to die if you are more than 10 pounds heavier than some arbitrarily contrived “health” chart. So there I was last night about to eat lightly salted sauteed spinach worrying about my blood pressure. A few weeks ago I couldn’t even see a piece of cheese without envisioning my clogged arteries, the high cholesterol literally choking me to death. A few weeks before that I was asking Piig to check my blood sugar, every day convinced that I was in some sugar-induced high.  I’m afraid of everything that gets near my mouth no matter how high or low the fat/salt/sugar/fill-in-the-blank content.

I want to eat. I want to like it, and I don’t want to worry every time I raise my fork. I want food to be something I enjoy in life. I don’t want it to be my life.

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