All the Places and the Spaces

scrappybadger January 26th, 2008

I come from a long line of people happy to stick close to the things and places that they know. Not only is most of my extended family in the same state, but also, with the exception of just a few, all live in the same general area within that state. I suspect they have different reasons for their lack of mobility, but when it comes right down to it I think that most of my family likes the comfort of being in a place with which they are intimately familiar.

It can also be claustrophobic and isolating. I want to see places, and the little bit of seeing that I’ve done this past year has just made me want more. Thus, I’ve decided to keep a wishlist, in no particular order, of places and spaces I’d like to visit.

I’ll start my list with Charis Books in Atlanta.

Oh, Queen Latifah, Not You Too

scrappybadger January 26th, 2008

Don’t do it; don’t buy into the idea that your body is still imperfect. Please, don’t hide the difficulty of being fat and the obvious pressure you feel to conform in euphemisms about “getting healthy.” Don’t pretend you are our friend, looking out for our “health,” when really you are peddling a diet program.

It was bad enough that they started covering your real beauty with make-up. It’s been hard to watch your demons manifest themselves in fluctuating weight as you try to make your body do and be something that it constantly feels the need to buck against. Now we have to watch you work for Jenny Craig.

Resist. Your fat is beautiful, and you know it. Don’t let them tell you otherwise.

Don’t let them tell me otherwise.

Quote of the Day

scrappybadger January 8th, 2008

I have two favorite quotes today.

Piig upon hearing yet another erectile dysfunction commercial:

“I am so tired of hearing about their limpy-ass dicks!”

Earlier in the day when I asked if she had a tissue:

“A clean one?”

“The Closest Shave You’ll Ever Know”

scrappybadger January 7th, 2008

Piig and I finally got around to seeing Sweeney Todd this weekend after several postponements. I had extremely high expectations, which I generally find leads to a little bit of disappointment, but the movie was actually quite good. It was good enough, in fact, that the almost 2 hour story line felt a little rushed.

Sweeney Todd was a must-see for me — a real triple hitter. There’s Johnny Depp, who I really like as an actor, a nineteenth-century setting right up my research alley, and the fact that its a musical. I love musicals — campy, weird, musicals. I don’t think most people would be able to guess that, but what can I say, I’m a big ball of contradictions.

I also really like Tim Burton’s cartoonish realism and realistic cartoons; he melds the two into something completely new. His dark humor appeals to my love of unhappy endings, and I have a soft spot for those pale characters, both real and cartoon, with the big, dark eyes. I don’t know why, but I just love them. As usual, he delivered on all fronts.

Lots of people have mentioned the violence in the film, but even that was classically Burtonesque. The blood, for example, wasn’t really the right color. It was heavy on the orange which made it more like the primary and secondary color swatches in an elementary art room than the gushing of a severed carotid artery. That makes sense, though, given that much of the slicing and dicing happens while Depp’s Sweeney Todd sings morbid show tunes.

There were even a few feminist messages in the movie. Without giving away too much I think I can say that the movie didn’t make light of women trapped, literally or figuratively, by men. It examined, ever so briefly, sexual depravity by way of Judge Turpin’s character and hinted at women’s sexual subordination and denigration. It also commented on a blinding (and ultimately deadly) obsession with beauty, and the only female character with even a small hope of a positive outcome complicates any fairytale reading that you could have of her future life. The movie comments, too, on classism, but it does so in a much more direct way, making it unlikely that the average viewer would generalize those ideas to everyday life.

Ultimately the movie comes back to something Sweeney Todd says within the first five minutes of the film. He tells a young sailor friend that life is difficult and sometimes it sucks; the man is young enough (and financially secure enough) that he simply hasn’t experienced that part of life yet. It’s something I’ve been feeling a lot lately as my young shine has started to wear off a bit. As I start to show the first few signs of tarnish, I have to acknowledge that nothing is as easy as it used to seem. It isn’t a realization I wanted to come to, just as Sweeney Todd didn’t want to be grizzled by years of hard work, false imprisonment, and thoughts of revenge, but there it sits nonetheless.

Sometimes 1 Isn’t the Loneliest Number

scrappybadger December 29th, 2007

I like living by myself. I did it for a while in college and then after college when I got my first real job. Piig and I were both pretty happy living alone when we met. Of course, once we started dating and going through the initial I-can’t-stand-to-be-away-from-you phase she spent lots of time at my apartment. So much time that she moved her cat into my apartment because poor little Julie was getting lonely. It was a change for me, and it took some getting used to having someone in my space all the time, but being all gaga over this cute new dyke helped.

We started dating in October and officially moved in together the following August. I got laid off from my software engineering job in March, and my asshole landlord wouldn’t renew my lease when he found out. It was pretty much impossible to find another apartment by myself that was affordable and would take me on without a job. It was in the months after September 11; the tech sector was dead around here, so I was out of work for a while. Piig and I started looking for places together and eventually found a small 1.5 bedroom house in her neighborhood. When that went up for sale we moved to our current house.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t regret moving in with Piig. I wish that the circumstances had been different and that we’d been able to make the decision without my unemployment and housing situation hanging over our heads. I think we would have waited much longer than we did.

Plus, out of everyone else I know in the world Piig is the only one I’d want to live with. My idiosyncrasies are a pain,  but she takes it in stride. For the most part she understands where it all comes from, so though she complains about it, she is understanding in a way that most people would never bother to be. And we have fun. We’ve always been big morning snugglers. We can spend a few hours in the bed in the morning talking, playing with Luna and/or several of the cats, and just generally having a good time. It is nice to have someone to talk to whenever you want, someone to cook with or for, and someone to cheer you up after a sucky day.

Nevertheless, there are days when I desperately want to live alone again, and I know Piig has them too. Sometimes the quiet of solitude is nice. Sometimes you just don’t feel like compromising; you want the heat at 68 and you don’t want to bargain it up to 70. The truth is, living together can be really good, but it can also put a tremendous strain on a relationship. Especially so if both parties are feminists trying hard to split responsibilities evenly and fairly all of the time.

It is a struggle, and though Piig and I have something of a system, it is still hard. We both fantasize about living alone again. We imagine ourselves with houses next door to one another or adjacent apartments. I hang on to that idea because there are times when I can’t imagine never having my own space again. I know that talking about a Room of One’s Own has almost become a cliche, but it is just so true that women need it. I need space that is all mine, a place where I can get away from everyone to do the things I want and need to do. I need that time to think. I need a place that is mine. And Piig needs a place that is hers.

Money, like always, gets in the way. We’re lucky to have found the place we’re currently in, so separate apartments or houses or a bigger house together are pretty much out of the question. We’ll just continue to work with what we have. I’ve been enjoying the past few days while Piig is off visiting her grandmother in another state. Poor Piig won’t even get her two nights alone anymore since I’m not teaching night classes this semester.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep daydreaming about my own place or an attic room in some future house with Piig.

Feminist Dreams and Secrets

scrappybadger December 3rd, 2007

Antigone Magazine, which I admittedly know little about, is posting feminist postcards from readers.

Antigone Mag

A Day Late and Several Dollars Short

scrappybadger November 1st, 2007

But what the heck? How about a Halloween picture?

This is Luna being devoured by a spider.

Luna eaten by spider

And this is Luna pleading with me to stop the insanity.

Luna - stop the insanity

For more pictures of my dog’s shame visit the entire album.

I love you Luna! Even when it doesn’t seem like it.

A Scholarly Success

scrappybadger September 18th, 2007

I presented my very first professional paper at a conference in Richmond, Virginia this weekend. It was nerve wracking, and Piig spent much of Thursday and Friday morning riding a roller coaster of Badger emotions. They ranged from slightly to very panicked, and Badger ain’t no fun when she’s nervous! It took me several days to narrow my paper down to the 20 minutes allotted for presentations, and I hurriedly threw together a visual presentation to go with it. I was discussing 19th century advertisements, so it made sense to have pictures. I managed to get it all finished the night before, but we didn’t arrive in Richmond until well after midnight.

After I presented I got lots of questions which is always a very good thing. Most of them wanted to know more about some aspect of my research or to ask what I thought about a related topic. One, however, was the kind of thing I was dreading. I got a snarly comment from a woman well known at this particular conference. I defended my position while allowing for the fact that she made a good point (because she did). I think I handled it well. In fact, I was extremely proud of myself. It was the kind of academic shot in the arm I’ve been needing. I tend to put a lot of pressure on myself. I expect perfection and berate myself for not being able to do the impossible. Because of that I often doubt my ability to “hang” in academia. And it doesn’t matter how many times people tell me that I’m good enough, it usually doesn’t sink in. Experiencing it for myself makes it more real, though. It feels good.

I’ll post more about Richmond soon.

Reading About Dogs Makes It All Better

scrappybadger September 5th, 2007

I just finished Ken Foster’s The Dogs Who Found Me. Read my review if you’d like.

I don’t remember if I mentioned it in a previous post, but his interview with Terri Gross made me run out and buy the book the very same day which is pretty much unheard of for me.

Breathing While Fat

scrappybadger August 31st, 2007

Don’t do it. Seriously. If at this moment you are both fat and breathing then just stop it. If not for yourself then for the rest of us. You are fucking everything up, and we don’t have enough oxygen to power that body of yours.

Every day. That’s how often my right to exist is questioned. Some days, most days, I fight it; I recognize the fear that is behind that message. I know that fat is hated and that everyone is afraid of being associated with that hatred, so most of the time I meet it with the same kind of disdain I have for misogyny, racism, or homophobia. Meanwhile, I’m working overtime not to internalize it. It’s like radioactive slime in a comic book. You see it coming and you know if it gets on you that’s it, so you run and you fight back at it trying not to trip, hoping that it doesn’t have the ability to sling itself in your direction. All it takes is one drop and you are done for, so you struggle and you run. Every day feels like that to me, like I’m constantly running, trying not to let the fear and hatred spewing in my direction get on me and work its way into my head.

I have to fight it because I’ve given in before, and it wasn’t pretty. It didn’t make me thin to hate myself for being fat. It didn’t make me feel good about myself, didn’t get me lots of dates, didn’t change my life for the better, and it sure didn’t make me healthier. No, the realization that I was a horrible person for being fat didn’t do anything good for me. And no matter how many times I went to the gym, berating myself for needing to go in the first place, life never got better. No matter how many times I threw up — in the bathroom when my roommate was out or locked in my bedroom, head hung inside of a trash bag, when someone was home — I didn’t feel better about myself. One year in college I would take my Walkman, loaded with angry music, and walk to the post office 4 miles away to mail my bills. I was exercising, and I screamed self-hatred inside of my head to the music in my ears. Despite the mad walking, I don’t think I ever really lost any weight, or if I did it wasn’t enough to make me remember.

So I know I can’t give in. Been there, done that, and it sucked. What sucks just as much is knowing that this is what I have to look forward to — a constant struggle to assert my right to sit here/eat/be comfortable/be liked/find clothes/fill-in-the-neverending-blank. The latest reminder comes in the form of airline tickets. I’ve been dreading it ever since I got the notice that my paper proposal was accepted to a conference too many miles away to drive. To keep the anxiety at bay I have told myself that I can back out. I can make up an excuse, I can lie, I can just say I’m not coming. The thing is, I really want to go.

I’ve only really travelled once. I was 16 and was able to go on a school sponsored trip to France and Spain. It was only 9 days long, and I don’t remember much about it, but I did it. I went somewhere. Other than that I’ve been exactly one state away in each direction except to the north. I’ve been two states to the north. Two very small states. I live, right now, 45 minutes away from where I grew up; 20 minutes from the hospital where I was born; 30 minutes from my elementary and high schools. My parents live in the same county they’ve always lived. All of my grandparents except one grandmother live in the same area they’ve always lived. My family doesn’t move, and they don’t go anywhere. Ever. That’s fine really, but it isn’t what I want for myself. I want to experience new places. It is fun and exciting to go someplace new.

Most of the time it’s a money issue for Piig and me. We can’t afford to go anywhere. In fact, we can’t really afford this particular trip, but we decided to do it anyway. We’ve given ourselves permission to spend money in order to build the beginnings of my academic career, and we’re secretly giddy about the idea that we will also get to go somewhere.

We are taking a big financial leap. That and the idea of flying – in a plane, where I can’t touch the ground, where I can’t even see the ground, where I’m trapped inside with no way out – is scary enough. The added pressure of extra seats, seat belt extenders, and fat hating passengers and flight attendants is making me really nervous. Our decision as of right now is to go ahead and book two seats for me. I’m afraid that if we don’t one or more of the airlines we’re flying will require that I buy an extra seat the day of the flight, and not knowing the cost of day-of tickets is just out of the question. I can’t run the risk of some outrageously priced last minute seat. To make matters worse, the blatant hostility exhibited by most airlines when dealing with fat passengers is unbelievable. Piig sent me a copy of Continental’s extra seat policy. I especially like the way they require that you be able to buckle your seat belt with one extension but are unable to tell you the exact length of the extenders available on the plane you are booking. Additionally, “the carry-on allowance is not doubled” despite the fact that I will be paying for two tickets. This presents a big problem for me. Where oh where will I keep all of my snack cakes, chips, soda, and that large cheese pizza that I’d planned to bring if I can only have one bag? After all, no fat traveller can be on a plane for more than 30 minutes without a supersized snack, right?

I’m frustrated and worried about travelling. Maybe I’d feel better if I boarded the plane wearing this t-shirt.

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