Latest Posts
Favorite Old Chestnuts
Contact Me
Sites I Like
Archives
17 October 2008 : On Friday.
One of these days, I swear, the thing itself will be reason enough. I'll run headfirst like so much falling laundry into whatever it is that needs no justification. It happens, I know it does, unlike Hollywood romance and painless change.
Until it does, I'm going to make every effort to stop it, already, with the pretense.
posted by lindsay at 23:38 :: 0 comments
16 October 2008 : One Side of the Conversation.
What he said: I think you should stop worrying about school and just go over there. You'll run into someone, somewhere, who's doing something and needs your help, and it won't be hard at all.
What he meant: Stop pussying around and put your ass on a plane to Africa already, because I am so tired of hearing about it. You know you can do it if you want it, so who the fuck cares about all the bullshit that worries you?
(I like him because he keeps me honest.)
posted by lindsay at 11:25 :: 0 comments
11 October 2008 : After the Revolution (Glib, people, GLIB)
Without going into details, I'll go ahead and tell you two things that are important in my life.
One, my friends and I are slowly preparing ourselves for survival after the downfall of civilization (the phrase "every animal has enough brains to tan it's own hide," has almost lost meaning due to repetition here at the Dorchester).
Two, most of my friends and I are obsessed with post-apocalyptic fiction in both book and movie form. Especially if the apocalypse came in the form of zombies or viruses (re: 28 Days Later - ARE YOU KIDDING? A VIRUS THAT CAUSES THE APOCALYPSE BY TURNING PEOPLE INTO ZOMBIES? This is the greatest movie ever made).
This is all just background information so that I could tell you all that my friend Snakes had a dream the other night in which the apocalypse came in zombie form.
And what did he and I (and I think Jenny) do?
We perched in the window drinking beer, poking our heads out on occasion, watching the ruckus and shooting the zombies. Protecting our land as it were. Snakes taught me proper rifle technique, and the best way to target a lurching zombie, and then we saluted one another with clinking beer bottles and good cheer.
I can't WAIT for the end.
posted by lindsay at 20:24 :: 6 comments
: Digging at the Base of the Mountain.
I like to think that I have forever been the kind of woman who knows her body, and knows that she knows her body, not in a pretentious way but the most static way imaginable. This is how it is supposed to be, so this is how it is.
Mostly that is not true. Mostly, until maybe four years ago, I lived a life outside the body. One that was constrained, maybe, by the ways I could move, constrained but never colored. Never shadowed.
There are a lot of things I can say, about bodies. About all of your bodies. About the bodies I have known. My mother's, soft and warm in all the beaten blood ways of archetype. My father's, rough hewn all my life until it was - in a moment - reduced to the too-pink cheeks and grim smile that are the sum total of my memory, that lifeless facsimile in his casket. My best friends and myself engaged carelessly, glorying in the contact sport that is adolescence.
Our bodies are nothing short of miraculous and this is both a wonder and a dread fact, the undertow of which I tread against ceaselessly in recent days. My particular illness, my kind doctor with his furrowed brow, all these things have rolled me downhill to the dirty bottom where I run my fingers through my hair to catch tangles and spit dirt and detritus from my mouth, the dirty bottom this: the responsibility of being mortal.
If we are lucky, if we are smart, I think we learn to draw lines. We understand somewhere instinctively that there is a basic middle ground between Iron Man and the shaking drunk in the corner reeking of cigarettes and failure (what failure? the failure to rail against one's own baser pleasures?). My lines have been drawn for me this past year, baseball metaphors and tiny white pills that I never let linger long enough on the tongue to know if they were more than metaphorical in their bitterness.
I have been unkind to my body in so many ways. These were my three strikes: cigarettes, birth control, obesity. Then the ominous fourth, the omnipotent family history. A father dead at 45 from the same heart disease that killed his own father. I am lucky because I know my downfalls, I know exactly what I must not touch.
Cigarettes, birth control, obesity. Genetics.
Since March I have lost, on average, about one pound a week. This with careful deliberation, with a new kind of notebook constantly at my side, filled not with fanciful observations or brief snippets of poetry but with every single thing that crosses my lips. A handful of popcorn snatched from a friend, an ounce of creamer poured into my coffee. I have become a master of these things, I can eyeball a liquid ounce, weigh meat in my palm and know.
But even in this I have been unkind, because I have treated my body like a science experiment, and it has repaid me by becoming a stranger. The way it functions, the processes that make it mine, they have all changed, and it frustrates me, it infuriates me. I have been through something like this before, during that lost year in San Francisco, when the money was as tight as it was ever brave enough to be, and what I consumed was primarily found - day old pastries from my roommate's coffeehouse job, whatever Scott was kind enough to buy. Then I was calm with understanding; it was pure abuse, a price I paid for being inconsiderate, for never taking a moment to consider that truly this body is the one thing I'll ever have that is mine alone. Mine to own.
I am infuriated now because I do everything right. I read the labels and even if I want it, I put it back. I make my concessions, give up a midnight snack in favor of putting those two ounces of cream in my morning coffee. I have rigidly and without pity taken in 1400 calories a day, refused anything containing corn syrup, made the most of my allotment in stacks of vegetables, in carefully portioned lean protein consumed in at least a 1:2 ratio with carbohydrates. It feels ridiculous, it feels outrageous, it feels obsessive. But then I have to remind myself of this, which is an admission I have yet to make in a public forum: I have an eating disorder. It's not the sexy kind, it's not the acceptable kind. The media wouldn't give it much consideration because it's not the kind that makes you thin. But it's there, and I have to rage against it every day in the most basic of ways.
What I really want to rage against is the change. The loss of the simple comforts of knowing exactly what was going on in there and why. It isn't so bad that I get up some mornings and have to notch my belt a little tighter (though when it comes time to replace my clothes, my destitution may prove to be an issue), but there are things about being a woman - cycles and circles, rituals and rites - that feel utterly sacred. Like the fact of their existence should contain no loopholes.
Giving my body some of the respect it deserves, finally, should not have made us strangers. If anything, we should be falling in love all over again.
At the end, how will I wear it? When the mountain has fallen, I am a little uncertain about where I'm going to store my tools: someplace far enough away to be safe (from obsession, from envy, from the unrealistic expectation that being thin will change everything) but close enough to find at a moment's notice, should I need some visual reminder that I tunneled through. Where will I lay my hands in repose if not on the shelf of my belly?
The puzzles of the flesh I know will not be unraveled in a single day, metaphor being what it is, but terror holds me back even more than laziness and the unfortunate psychology of the world from which I come.
posted by lindsay at 18:40 :: 2 comments
02 October 2008 : As far as I will go
Do you think Sarah Palin kneels by her bed every night and prays to Jesus with all of her heart that Katie Couric will get tangled in one of her bra straps, doing such irreparable damage to her vocal cords that she will never again be on television?
I use this fairly tame fantasy because I doubt that even the nation's political leaders (god save us) are so filled with hubris that they ask Jesus to kill people for them in spontaneous and brutal ways (how naive am I? You can say it, its okay).
Nonetheless, I love Katie Couric so much right now I'm thinking of sending her some chocolates, and perhaps a strapless bra. Every time she asks Madam Palin a question, Madam rambles incoherently about nothing (seriously, have any of you not met a second grader or two who are more coherent and cohesive and eloquent than the possible future vice president of this country), and Katie Couric has to repeat the question at least once, trying to get some semblance of a real answer out of her. And that expression, oh the expression on my new true love's face every time the necessity of repeating the question becomes clear...
That, I'd like to burn on the inside of my eyelids. Thanks.
posted by lindsay at 17:25 :: 2 comments
One of these days, I swear, the thing itself will be reason enough. I'll run headfirst like so much falling laundry into whatever it is that needs no justification. It happens, I know it does, unlike Hollywood romance and painless change.
Until it does, I'm going to make every effort to stop it, already, with the pretense.
posted by lindsay at 23:38 :: 0 comments
16 October 2008 : One Side of the Conversation.
What he said: I think you should stop worrying about school and just go over there. You'll run into someone, somewhere, who's doing something and needs your help, and it won't be hard at all.
What he meant: Stop pussying around and put your ass on a plane to Africa already, because I am so tired of hearing about it. You know you can do it if you want it, so who the fuck cares about all the bullshit that worries you?
(I like him because he keeps me honest.)
posted by lindsay at 11:25 :: 0 comments
11 October 2008 : After the Revolution (Glib, people, GLIB)
Without going into details, I'll go ahead and tell you two things that are important in my life.
One, my friends and I are slowly preparing ourselves for survival after the downfall of civilization (the phrase "every animal has enough brains to tan it's own hide," has almost lost meaning due to repetition here at the Dorchester).
Two, most of my friends and I are obsessed with post-apocalyptic fiction in both book and movie form. Especially if the apocalypse came in the form of zombies or viruses (re: 28 Days Later - ARE YOU KIDDING? A VIRUS THAT CAUSES THE APOCALYPSE BY TURNING PEOPLE INTO ZOMBIES? This is the greatest movie ever made).
This is all just background information so that I could tell you all that my friend Snakes had a dream the other night in which the apocalypse came in zombie form.
And what did he and I (and I think Jenny) do?
We perched in the window drinking beer, poking our heads out on occasion, watching the ruckus and shooting the zombies. Protecting our land as it were. Snakes taught me proper rifle technique, and the best way to target a lurching zombie, and then we saluted one another with clinking beer bottles and good cheer.
I can't WAIT for the end.
Labels: Charmed I'm sure
posted by lindsay at 20:24 :: 6 comments
: Digging at the Base of the Mountain.
I like to think that I have forever been the kind of woman who knows her body, and knows that she knows her body, not in a pretentious way but the most static way imaginable. This is how it is supposed to be, so this is how it is.
Mostly that is not true. Mostly, until maybe four years ago, I lived a life outside the body. One that was constrained, maybe, by the ways I could move, constrained but never colored. Never shadowed.
There are a lot of things I can say, about bodies. About all of your bodies. About the bodies I have known. My mother's, soft and warm in all the beaten blood ways of archetype. My father's, rough hewn all my life until it was - in a moment - reduced to the too-pink cheeks and grim smile that are the sum total of my memory, that lifeless facsimile in his casket. My best friends and myself engaged carelessly, glorying in the contact sport that is adolescence.
Our bodies are nothing short of miraculous and this is both a wonder and a dread fact, the undertow of which I tread against ceaselessly in recent days. My particular illness, my kind doctor with his furrowed brow, all these things have rolled me downhill to the dirty bottom where I run my fingers through my hair to catch tangles and spit dirt and detritus from my mouth, the dirty bottom this: the responsibility of being mortal.
If we are lucky, if we are smart, I think we learn to draw lines. We understand somewhere instinctively that there is a basic middle ground between Iron Man and the shaking drunk in the corner reeking of cigarettes and failure (what failure? the failure to rail against one's own baser pleasures?). My lines have been drawn for me this past year, baseball metaphors and tiny white pills that I never let linger long enough on the tongue to know if they were more than metaphorical in their bitterness.
I have been unkind to my body in so many ways. These were my three strikes: cigarettes, birth control, obesity. Then the ominous fourth, the omnipotent family history. A father dead at 45 from the same heart disease that killed his own father. I am lucky because I know my downfalls, I know exactly what I must not touch.
Cigarettes, birth control, obesity. Genetics.
Since March I have lost, on average, about one pound a week. This with careful deliberation, with a new kind of notebook constantly at my side, filled not with fanciful observations or brief snippets of poetry but with every single thing that crosses my lips. A handful of popcorn snatched from a friend, an ounce of creamer poured into my coffee. I have become a master of these things, I can eyeball a liquid ounce, weigh meat in my palm and know.
But even in this I have been unkind, because I have treated my body like a science experiment, and it has repaid me by becoming a stranger. The way it functions, the processes that make it mine, they have all changed, and it frustrates me, it infuriates me. I have been through something like this before, during that lost year in San Francisco, when the money was as tight as it was ever brave enough to be, and what I consumed was primarily found - day old pastries from my roommate's coffeehouse job, whatever Scott was kind enough to buy. Then I was calm with understanding; it was pure abuse, a price I paid for being inconsiderate, for never taking a moment to consider that truly this body is the one thing I'll ever have that is mine alone. Mine to own.
I am infuriated now because I do everything right. I read the labels and even if I want it, I put it back. I make my concessions, give up a midnight snack in favor of putting those two ounces of cream in my morning coffee. I have rigidly and without pity taken in 1400 calories a day, refused anything containing corn syrup, made the most of my allotment in stacks of vegetables, in carefully portioned lean protein consumed in at least a 1:2 ratio with carbohydrates. It feels ridiculous, it feels outrageous, it feels obsessive. But then I have to remind myself of this, which is an admission I have yet to make in a public forum: I have an eating disorder. It's not the sexy kind, it's not the acceptable kind. The media wouldn't give it much consideration because it's not the kind that makes you thin. But it's there, and I have to rage against it every day in the most basic of ways.
What I really want to rage against is the change. The loss of the simple comforts of knowing exactly what was going on in there and why. It isn't so bad that I get up some mornings and have to notch my belt a little tighter (though when it comes time to replace my clothes, my destitution may prove to be an issue), but there are things about being a woman - cycles and circles, rituals and rites - that feel utterly sacred. Like the fact of their existence should contain no loopholes.
Giving my body some of the respect it deserves, finally, should not have made us strangers. If anything, we should be falling in love all over again.
At the end, how will I wear it? When the mountain has fallen, I am a little uncertain about where I'm going to store my tools: someplace far enough away to be safe (from obsession, from envy, from the unrealistic expectation that being thin will change everything) but close enough to find at a moment's notice, should I need some visual reminder that I tunneled through. Where will I lay my hands in repose if not on the shelf of my belly?
The puzzles of the flesh I know will not be unraveled in a single day, metaphor being what it is, but terror holds me back even more than laziness and the unfortunate psychology of the world from which I come.
posted by lindsay at 18:40 :: 2 comments
02 October 2008 : As far as I will go
Do you think Sarah Palin kneels by her bed every night and prays to Jesus with all of her heart that Katie Couric will get tangled in one of her bra straps, doing such irreparable damage to her vocal cords that she will never again be on television?
I use this fairly tame fantasy because I doubt that even the nation's political leaders (god save us) are so filled with hubris that they ask Jesus to kill people for them in spontaneous and brutal ways (how naive am I? You can say it, its okay).
Nonetheless, I love Katie Couric so much right now I'm thinking of sending her some chocolates, and perhaps a strapless bra. Every time she asks Madam Palin a question, Madam rambles incoherently about nothing (seriously, have any of you not met a second grader or two who are more coherent and cohesive and eloquent than the possible future vice president of this country), and Katie Couric has to repeat the question at least once, trying to get some semblance of a real answer out of her. And that expression, oh the expression on my new true love's face every time the necessity of repeating the question becomes clear...
That, I'd like to burn on the inside of my eyelids. Thanks.
posted by lindsay at 17:25 :: 2 comments