on the occasion of a recent encounter

 

To a Well Intentioned Person:

It’s been a very long time since we last saw each other. I think we talked about places we had traveled to. I remember wishing I was as well traveled as you, and I still think about I will make that happen.

I have no doubt that you had only the best of intentions when you said I had lost weight since the last time you saw me. I thanked you, and I meant it, but you should know that I’m still thinking about it, in a way you likely did not intend.

First, ecstatic. Losing weight is excellent!  I am more impressive and interesting and attractive than the last time you saw me!

Then: Wait, what did I look like the last time you saw me? Was it so bad? Were you thinking, while we talked, about my weight? Did that mean more to you than the words coming out of my mouth?

And then: If I have actually lost weight, it might be because the last year has been really emotionally taxing, and my eating has been inconsistent at best. I’ve been walking what might be considered by some extraordinary distances because it eases my anxiety and helps me write. Under these circumstances, my alleged weight loss seems not so awesome.

And then: The time someone in college told me I needed to lose “twenty or thirty pounds.” The time my mother told me I looked “like a horse.” Every person who has ever made a cruel or disparaging remark to me about weight or food, and every time I have forgotten those remarks and then remembered them.

And then, and then, and then.

I know, Well Intentioned Person, that you did not mean to set off these fireworks in my head, that you were most likely making a simple observation, that it was a compliment.  The reality is that talking about weight is a trigger for me, as it is for many people, and that trigger can turn an innocent comment into a spiral of doubt and anxiety. I want to be someone for whom practicing generosity comes naturally, but that is a work in progress, along with the rest of me. I am trying to be patient with myself. In the meantime, please be thoughtful.

Sincerely,

Chanel

of late (all photos by me)

 pink basket. envy.

  her tattoo is rad.

 statuesque and glittery.

Why “Humanism isn’t better than “Feminism”

Reblogged from tumblinfeminist:

Humanism as a whole does not recognize the uneven power binary that contributes to systematic oppression; acting as though the problems facing different classes of people on the oppressor/oppressed axes are somehow both equal in scope is dismissive and derailing.

I’m sure there are “humanists” out there who understand the way oppressive binaries work; however, the majority of people I see arguing for “humanism” seem to believe that there is no such thing as institutional oppression so we should focus on all classes, not just the privileged. “Why not humanism?” folks are almost always tantamount to “But what about the men?” folks – they want to erase the reality of female subjugation because it makes them uncomfortable.  Simply put, they don’t want women to have their own discursive space or narrative framework to think about their specific oppression.

Words matter. Erasing the names for the subjugation that happens to specific groups is minimizing and another microaggression – we’re not even allowed to speak framely or name the problem facing women, even that is somehow an assault on the status quo.

in a shocking turn of events, people continue to procreate.

Someone I knew in middle school is having a baby. Here’s what I remember about her: She lived in a house with an elevator. She got a rose on Valentine’s Day in eighth grade from the boy I liked. And once, she came to my house and played some songs from  ‘Phantom of the Opera’ on our out of tune and underappreciated piano, which my grandmother talked about for years afterwards.

The fact that she’s now having baby  is not in itself surprising, or particularly interesting, save for the fact that it’s representative of the trend of people who seem to date for years, get married, and then, a few months later, announce the pregnancy, as though the wedding were the equivalent of a pistol being shot off to indicate the race to procreation.

I looked at her ultrasound photo, noticed that at the top of it was her first name and her husband’s last name, and had the usual feelings about that. Then I read the comments. Standard fare-congratulations, you’ll make great parents, so excited, etc. Towards the bottom, someone wrote: “Congratulations!!! There’s no better job than being a mom.”

Okay, so maybe triggered is too severe a term for how I felt reading this, but it bothered me, and continues to bother me, and it’s bigger and more complicated than the fact that I myself choose not to have children. What’s problematic about the comment is its essentializing nature-once you’re a mother, you are nothing else, you have no other interests or desires or identities.

What if she loves being a mom, but also loves her non parenting job? What if she  hates motherhood? What if it’s just not for her?Do you know these things in advance and have kids anyway? (I’m sure it’s been done before.)  Are you even allowed to say it out loud? You might complain to your friends, but can you express regret or unhappiness? (See Ayelet Waldman’s self reflective essays on maternal ambivalence.) What if she waits and waits to feel like it’s the best job in the world and never feels that way? How will she feel about herself and her child?  What if we just didn’t, in aggressive or passive aggressive or even nice ways tell women how they should/will feel about motherhood?

Look, I’m totally aware that this comment was written to be affirming and supportive and expressing of joy. We say things like this all the time to each other, most likely with benevolence behind them, but perhaps not with an awareness of how saturated comments like this are, and how easy and practically inevitable it is to internalize them, as well as how clearly a reflection they are of how uncomplicated we think  motherhood should be.

in which the cat and i sleep through a small grease fire. *

(*Truth. I didn’t know anything had happened until I woke up and the front door and all the windows in the house were open. Also, it was smokey. Like the bear.)

Fluffernutter,a stray cat who lives in the woods around J’s apartment, has taken ill. We’re not sure what it is, but S, the care taker of the cat street gang (there are something like 13 cats who hang around the neighborhood), has made him a bed, where he’s currently sleeping, surrounded by tuna fish cans. F looks sad. Yesterday, he ran across the parking lot to kill a frog and eat it, but today, it doesn’t look so good. It makes me less angry that J’s cat has gone to sleep on the print out of the document I’m supposed to be editing.

In the meantime, I’ve been moderately ill since Friday, when my throat starting feel hot and itchy. It seems to be lifting now, but I still can’t breathe out of my nose. After waking up at two pm on Saturday, I spent the rest of the day trying to convince myself that it was okay to lay around and not do anything so that I could get better. IT WAS A GIFT I WOULD GIVE TO MYSELF. (Therapy seems
to be working.)

Last night, I started writing some new fiction, and it was like rain was falling and I had to make a bucket to catch it, which is a much better feeling that the one where I have to patch up holes so the rain doesn’t seep in. I was afraid I’d wake up today and it would be gone, or worse, terrible, but it turns out I still like it.

About to start reading Naked in the Promised Land, Lillian Faderman’s memoir. Faderman wrote Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (among other things), which I read in my junior year of college and is one of those books I still get the urge to buy even though I already own it.

(songs today: june hymn, the decemberists; drawn, the garden verge; bixby canyon bridge, death cab for cutie; raja vocative, the mountain goats; landfill, daughter; free man in paris, joni mitchell; this electric, badly drawn boy; man of the hour, norah jones; so says I, the shins.)

weather(ed)

 

 

Songs: Going to Maryland, The Mountain Goats; Dance with Me, the Modern Lovers; The Way It Goes, Gillian Welch; The Golden Thread, Dar Williams; There Will Be No Divorce, The Mountain Goats.

The rain cannot make up its mind. Right now, it is bright and safe for wandering, but in a moment, clouds will rush in and squeeze themselves out.

I am worn out after my unsuccessful weekend, spent petting the cat and sleeping too much and feeling the weight of all I didn’t do. Writing sometimes is like getting over a fear of water-I cling to the edge for a while, until at some point, I summon the courage to push off and swim. I managed to overdose on NPR news, which I didn’t think was even possible, but when it’s all about how the economy is crashing and none of us will make it out of this alive, I reach the point of saturation. 

In front of the café, there is a sullen looking little boy riding a scooter. Tonight is Tisha B’av and this morning, I ate bacon.

probably, i still make this face (1982).

me and my mother, 1980

my mother at the Skyline Motel, 1970

“Oh tortured creative souls, freelancers and office workers alike, we must remember this mantra: It’s August. Nothing happens in August.” (jami attenberg)

J lives in a weird small town. There are two Chinese restaurants, a library, a strip mall, a VFW, and a gun club. There are Victorian houses and a park and in the town over, a Jewish camp where many people I know are counselors. They are primarily familiar with the ice cream stand and the Walmart.

****

Yesterday I saw some people running, they were serious runners, in spandex, with pedometers, the kind of runners who go very far away from where they live, because they know they can trust their feet to bring them back.

****

The cat threw up. Twice, which is a departure from his usual regime of three times. Cleaning it up makes me feel functional, as I have done nothing else today. I drank some coffee, looked at my list, and thought about how twice since arriving here I have been reminded of Oberlin-the first time when the coffee shop smelled like the co-op right before Shabbat, the second while listening to Science Friday, something we would often do in the co-op on Friday afternoons while making giant pans of chicken and kugel.

****

Once I had a fight with my friend from middle school about opera. She was angry, I remember, that I’d gone to a high school outside of our city, a public school whose standards rivaled those of a private school. They got you, she said, when I told her I was going to run track (read: badly) the next season. Our opera fight stemmed from my obsession with Les Miserables, which at one point in my life I thought was terribly original. (I even wrote a terrible college essay about it.) She insisted that it was opera, and I insisted that it wasn’t, and the internet did not exist then to prove either of us wrong. I couldn’t tell her why it wasn’t opera. I’m not sure I could tell her now why it wasn’t, but that’s not the point. I really wanted to be right, because she had made up her mind to hate opera and track and people who liked them and did them, and before high school was over, we were no longer talking.