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The Sun Times asks this morning: Is there justice for celebrities?

O.J. Simpson, Michael Jackson, Robert Blake, Phil Spector… What do all of these celebrities have in common? They are all men. Three of them allegedly killed intimate partners and one allegedly sexually abused a child.

I think a better, more accurate, but harder question is: Is there justice for victims of violence at the hands of men, famous or not? Just a thought.

In other Sun Times news:Lab technician fired for allegedly biting boy

”Taking a bite out of him like he’s an apple, this is heinous,” said James Buntin, the boy’s father.

I recognize that laughing at that probably makes me a bad person.

UAW is on strike. Fucking awesome.

I surprised myself with just how calm I was when my health worker had to get the bigger sized cuff to take my blood pressure. I didn’t blink when my size 14 jeans were uncomfortably snug after a turn in the dryer, even though the last time that happened, I had a fairly solid two-day nervous breakdown. I went shopping with my mother and bought not one, but two suits, and didn’t even cry once. It’s not like I thought all my body image woes were over, but I assumed that the catalyst for my next serious setback would be something obvious, predictable… catalyst-y.

But nope. It was merely this: catching my reflection in a mirrored surface in the middle of the deli section of a Whole Foods market on Friday night. It was the end of a long day. I was tired. I was wearing what is probably not the most flattering outfit I own. It was still unseasonably hot outside.* My feet were blistering even in my trusty Dansko clogs because I had done a lot of walking and a decent amount of sweating and wasn’t wearing proper socks. And I looked hot and tired and not particularly well dressed. Plus old. Plus fat.

And with the force of a storm swell breaking a dam wall, all of the awful terrible self-destructive things that the mean little voice in my head likes to say came pouring forth into my conscious mind, starting with the voice’s favorite term of self-assessment: What a fat piece of shit. The voice went on to berate me for ever thinking that I could be healthy and a size 16, for thinking that I could dress stylishly (or at least in a way that pleased me), for thinking that I could be attractive, for thinking I could quit dieting and still have friends, for thinking that I could have both food and love in my life, for thinking that I could be a professional, for thinking that I could be successful. How could I be any of those things, when what I really am is a terrible, awful, disgusting fat person?

It’s the voice of my particular personal brand of depressive episodes and it’s fucking insidious. I want to talk about it, but when I think about the effort it’s going to take to explain it all to my husband, I just feel overwhelmed with exhaustion. I want to ask for some extra attention and affection but when I open my mouth to speak, the voice warns me of the dire consequences that inevitably befall emotionally needy women. Besides, it says, he’ll just reject you so isn’t it better to sit quietly, being dignified and sad, than it is to let on how bad you feel?

For whatever reason, Sundays tend to be my breakdown days of choice, and yesterday I was right on time. I almost ruined a baseball outing to the Cubs last home game with my inexplicable tears (actual, I could explain them if I had the energy and the courage, but lacking both of those things is all part of the fun of the depression merry-go-round), but instead gambled by self-medicating with Old Style and, this time, I won. At least until I went to bed and, despite being well-dosed with Advil PM**, found myself unable to fall asleep until close to three in the morning.

I feel a little better today. I’m crazy tired and I chipped one of my front teeth at work today*** and I’m still waiting for an employer who offered me a job to come through with the salary info so I can make a decision****, but I went to the dentist for an emergency tooth filing and took the rest of the day off, and bought two sweaters at Old Navy*****. Then I came home and, after removing half my work clothes, called and spoke to the potential employer and engaged in salary negotiations while not wearing any pants, which made me feel kind of badass because I’ve never not just accepted whatever a potential employer wanted to pay me, much less in a state of pantslessness. And I’ve got therapy tomorrow and I start a yoga class on Wednesday, so there are positive, helpful events in my immediate future. And even though it’s going to be a nasty 80 degrees tomorrow, Wednesday is going to be 70, and highs will be in the 60s by the end of the week.

It’s as if my sleeplessness was symptomatic of the final fevered throws of an infection, and by giving the voice free reign over my mental state, I gave it enough space to burn itself out. The voice is still in there, yammering at me, but I don’t feel like I’m in thrall to it’s damaging brand of warped logic anymore. In fact, it sounds really stupid and shrill, and I’m able to drown it out by mentally yelling “POSITIVE SELF TALK! POSITIVE! SELF! TALK!” over it’s boring old litany.******

As a last ditch tactic, the voice is telling me to start dieting again. Actually, what it’s whispering is the seductive phrase, “Restrict. Restrict,” which was my particular favorite mantra during those times of dieting “success.” It’s telling me that Weight Watchers isn’t bad at all, and that this time I can really do it. I can lose weight and keep it off and have my picture featured in their dumb magazine, and that I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter Spray is a perfectly reasonably and edible substance. And that, ultimately, is that insipid little voice’s downfall, because I may very well be crazy but I am definitely not stupid.

*I think I have some sort of bizarro seasonal affective disorder, in that I dread summer, and get seriously depressed (like depressed depressed, not just kind of bummed out depressed) when the blessed onset of fall is interrupted by a bullshit week and a half of 90 degree days. Like now. God dammit.

**My cokehead college friends used to take this stuff to put themselves to sleep after a particularly enthusiastic binge so you’d think it would put me to sleep after a day of drinking beer in the sun.

***On nothing. I was looking for a highlighter and I felt this AWFUL crunching feeling and a little V out of the middle of my left front tooth just pulverized in my mouth in a truly nightmarish explosion of grit at which point I nearly passed out because I am a champion vasovagaller.

****Which is a whole other issue, because even though it’s kind of awesome to get a job offer as the result of my first and only post-graduate job interview, I don’t know that I actually want it. I only applied because it’s related to my area of interest and concentration, and I only went to the interview because it seemed like good practice. And now look what I’ve done.

*****I hate being so shallow that buying two sweaters would actually improve my mood, but there you go.

******I suppose I’ll really be on the road to mental health at every size when I drown out with voice with actual positive self talk, but you know, baby steps. etc.

My husband and I moved to Lakeview East/Boystown a little more than a year ago from Andersonville, which is the first place we lived in Chicago. Since moving here, one of my favorite neighborhood rituals has been to scuff down to Samuel’s Deli on the corner of Broadway and Cornelia on a Sunday morning to pick up six bagels (two poppy, two sesame, and two onion (used to be two everything until my blood pressure decided to get stupid and I had to start watching the salt again)) and some lox for a leisurely weekend breakfast.

I went a day early this week only to discover, as I stood in the unusually long line (Happy New Year, friends!)  that Sam’s is closing as of tomorrow. Tomorrow! And do you know what is going to take its place? A sports bar!!!

This puts me in the unfamiliar position of being unhappy about the opening of a new bar. Usually I am all for more bars. But seriously? The last thing that Lakeview East needs is another fucking sports bar.  Plus Sam’s had delicious bagels and matzo ball soup. Is this news sports bar going to have delicious bagels and matzo ball soup? Somehow I doubt it.

So farewell, long-standing neighborhood business and Sunday morning breakfast ritual. I can’t say I won’t drop into your replacement business for a pint some afternoon, but I can say that it just won’t be the same.

Beautiful, Also, Are the Souls of My Black Sisters has a great post up about the Lesbian Seven, with a link to a story at Workers’ World, Lesbians sentenced for self-defense: All-white jury convicts Black women, as well as a link to FIERCE, the group organizing support for the convicted women.

As Queer Woman of Color and Heart have pointed out, despite the incredible (and totally necessary) support for the Jena 6, not quite as much has been made over this very similar injustice in which lesbian women fighting against street harassment were convicted and sentenced disproportionately to their crimes.

I’d like to see Racialiscious pick up this story.

More links and some background at another of Heart’s excellent posts.

Edit: Women of Color Blog points out that Racialiscious did post a link about the NJ women on 6/28/07 in an excellent list of posts about the situation, along with the well taken point that just because nobody that I or other people have been reading have posted about the situation, doesn’t mean that nobody is posting about the situation. I have also been pointing to Women’s Space as having the go-to post with background info and links, and I should have been including more links from Queer Woman of Color or this one from LDNY along with it, at the very least.

Brownfemipower has a post about the football program of University of Delaware, my alma mater, and its persistent refusal to play HBCU Delaware State, where my mother went for a year while working towards her BSN. I graduated with Jeff Pearlman, but I had no idea who he was. I didn’t pay attention to the football program, either. I attended one game, an away game against Navy, but only because I wanted to go to Annapolis with some friends.

When I was in school, I was shamefully ignorant about race and racism — my own, my family’s, my friends’, and institutional racism. If I even knew that UD refused to play Del State (even though I was in school the year Pearlman’s letter was published in the Review), I doubt I would have grasped the implications. I wasn’t aware when I was at UD that the minority enrollment was six percent; the predominance of whiteness seemed perfectly normal to me, which is no surprise given that I grew up in a town that is 98% white.

Anyway, I don’t know where I’m going with this, exactly, except that in as much as I think about UD at all, I feel sorely disappointed at how little progress they’ve made. Like I’ve said before, Delaware in general tends to wallow in its white privilege. During my most recent visit to my parents, I decided that my strategy for coping with my racist family was to call them out on their racism. When they would make sweeping generalizations about Black people or Latino/as, or use racist words, or tell racist jokes, I tried just saying, “That’s racist.” And wow! You would think I had accused them of being murderers for all the denials and offense that they took, because my family, like so many others from the area, have never really had to examine their own racism. And that’s really sad.

I’m reading through the coverage of the Del State shootings, and might make a post about that soon.

Is it just me or is anybody else noticing this new trend in commercial storylines: a man and a woman are engaged in some sort of joint venture that involves an element of danger. The woman expresses, either expressly or impliedly, fear or apprehension and the man completely ignores her, disregarding her opinion and endangering her life so that he can continue some sort of pleasurable pursuit.

There’s a Bud Light commercial in which a man picks up a hitchhiker holding an ax over the objections of his girlfriend because, hey. The guy has Bud Light! The other commercial is for the Honda Odyssey mini-van in which a leering man is driving fast on a curvy road while the woman in the car clutches the “oh shit” handle and smiles nervously at him in between apprehensive glances at the road.

Women have worked hard to empower ourselves to speak up on our own behalf, and to refuse to shut up until we are heard, and yet both of these commercials make light of women’s expressed sense of danger. The message to men is that it’s acceptable to disregard what women say, because men have superior judgment and reasoning capacity. Plus, these commercials tell us, women’s lives are not as important as beer or being able to drive as fast as you want.

It’s not a big leap from the pursuits of fast driving or beer drinking to sexual gratification. In the Honda commercial, the camera cuts from tight shots of a woman’s hand grasping the handle to tight shots of the leering man’s face, lending a vague odor of sexual predation to the plotline. Picking up hitchhikers is the quintessential “don’t” for women travelers; rape or murder, we are told, are the logical consequences for women who extend assistance to strangers. Once you internalize the concept that it’s okay, even desirably masculine, to disregard women’s voices when driving fast or getting your hands on some beer, it’s pretty easy to apply it to a sexual context and justify disregarding a woman’s protestations of a man’s sexual advances. What these commercials are telling the largely male audience (they air during sporting events) is: “Women’s opinions don’t matter, so even if she says no, it’s totally okay to keep on doing whatever it is that you want to do.”

Rape culture, anyone?

Retraction! The Beer Guy about whom I posted after the cut was kind enough to comment to correct what I had written about him and his beer back story. I apologized in the comments, but I will do it up here, too: John, I am sorry for misunderstanding what you said regarding the role of Dogfish Head brewery in Delaware’s annual Punkin Chunkin contest. I also deleted the offending part of the post. If it’s any consolation, we have at least $75 worth of Dogfish Head beer in our refrigerator right now, so you are clearly doing something right. 

Last night the husband and I went to a beer and cheese tasting at West Lakeview Liquors. If there are four words that will motivate me to sit in a hot cab in rush hour traffic for an hour to get from the Loop to Roscoe Village/West Lakeview, they are: “free beer and cheese.” The beer was courtesy of Dogfish Head, which was born in my hometown and is brewed in the hometown of stepfather’s gigantic family, so I always get excited when there’s something Dogfish Head related going on outside the Mid-Atlantic seaboard.

We tasted their Midas Touch and Chateau Jiahu, both of which are reproductions of ancient beer/mead recipes. I thought those were a little sweet, but I have a pretty serious distaste for sweetish beers. The next was their Black and Blue which is a “Belgian Strong Ale fermented with blackberries and blueberries.” That was good, if a little high alcohol for me at 10% ABV. My favorite by far was their Punkin’ Ale, which is my favorite pumpkin beer in the world. Actually possibly the only pumpkin beer I really like, since it’s brewed with pumpkin and has a delicious spicy, warm flavor as opposed to having pumpkin syrup squirted in there at bottling time and tasting like pumpkin bubble gum. Finally we tasted the Raison D’Extra, which at 18% ABV (for comparison, Bud Light is 4.2% ABV) is more like drinking port than beer. As far as Dogfish’s high alcohol beers go, I prefer their World Wide Stout, again because Raison D’Extra (and it’s lower alcohol little sister Raison D’Etre) are really sweet.

All the cheese was courtesy of The Cheese Stands Alone, where I have never been but plan to make a serious pilgrimage to one of these days. We were so inspired by beer and cheese that we decided to have beer and cheese (and crackers and grapes and apples) for dinner, and so that is exactly what we did:

First, if you didn’t hear, the conviction of Michael Bell, the Jena 6 defendant who was sentenced to 15 years for aggravated battery, was overturned. This is not only fantastic news for Bell and his family, but also for the remaining defendants, and a really fantastic example of how collective action can work to address social injustice. Now let’s do the same thing for Renata Hill, Patreese Johnson, and the New Jersey 7.

Second, this Marry Our Daugther site that I fretted about earlier is, as fillyjonk pointed out in the comments, a fake. There’s a post up about it on Feministing, too.

And third and on a more personal note, my parental visit was a surprising success, both in the suit-procuring sense and in the general familial affection sense.  Although I missed the Renegade Craft fair, I did get to hear my grandmother the unwavering Democrat proclaim that she would “rather vote for [her] own ass than that damn Giuliani,” and that was a pretty good trade.

Kate at Shapely Prose and Good with Cheese both have interesting posts today about “accomplice eating,” or the inability to eat food just because you want it unless somebody else eats it with you. It’s a normalizing behavior. You can justify feeding yourself what you crave but only so long as somebody else (and preferably somebody thinner) will eat with you. Because if you eat it by yourself, it feels like cheating or sneaking or lying to your boss about an illness so you can sit at home locked in your room doing drugs all day. But if you eat with a friend, that’s like cutting class to smoke a cigarette or having sex in a department store fitting room. Together, eating becomes illicit and exciting, while alone it’s just pitiful and slovenly and sad.

Or at least that’s how it worked for me.

And being on Weight Watchers made it even worse. I was already so limited in what and when and how much I could eat that when my husband, who is thin and very much a free spirit when it comes to eating actual meals, would remark that he wasn’t particularly hungry for dinner, or just wanted some soup from a can, I would nearly have a nervous breakdown. I would want to shake him and yell, “Don’t you know that I haven’t eaten anything since lunch? How can you not eat when I need you to eat so I can eat!” And it wasn’t a long leap from “How can you not eat when I need you to eat so I can eat” to “You clearly don’t love me or else you would let me have dinner!” He would offer to cook for me, or to order anything I wanted, or go to the store to buy whatever I might feel like eating but what he didn’t understand was that I didn’t need food. We had food. What I needed was for somebody else to eat dinner because eating alone was just not okay. Eating alone meant that I was eating when I shouldn’t be eating. I had become so removed from what my body actually wanted, so dependent on points and food journals that I couldn’t trust myself to eat without a guide.

Taking my husband’s appetite personally? That’s just oozing with crazy. It’s still a challenge, but it’s getting easier.

You know what is awesome about taking a hard line no-diet, size acceptance stance? When somebody brings cake to work to celebrate her birthday, you can eat a piece and instead of spending the entire day castigating yourself, figuring out how many meals and snacks you need to skip to make up the points, you can just smile and think, “Man, that was some freaking delicious cake.”

Megan over at Good with Cheese got me all excited for fall this morning so I shelled out $5.40 (HOLY SHIT) for a venti, nonfat, triple shot, three-pump, no-whip pumpkin spice latte* at Starbucks on the way to work. We’re getting free pizza for lunch today because it’s Rosh Hashanah**, and I was treated to lunch and dinner yesterday so my weekly allowance was burning a hole in my pocket and, well, hello delicious $5.40 cup of coffee. Welcome to my belly. And I have September Girls by Big Star in my head, which is an awesome improvement over the Foreigner/Phil Collins medley that was running through there yesterday. Things, as they say, are good.

So despite my boundless joy at the arrival of fall in Chicago, my upcoming weekend is not without stress. You see, I have a job interview on Tuesday. This is good news! This is my first post-graduation real job interview opportunity, and it’s going to be good experience even if I don’t get the job. But I don’t have a suit. Or at least, I don’t have a suit that fits me.

Some very brief history: a have this suit, see. My mother bought if for me. It’s the standard issue law student black three-piece suit, suitable for interviews, mock oral arguments, and networking events. When I bought it, it was a little tight across the back but I was planning to, and did, lose weight so that it fit just fine. For about a minute. Then I gained the weight back, the suit got too tight, and as a result took on this terrible significance. It became symbolic of my success as a legal professional, my success at weight loss, my value as a human being… if I could only fit into that fucking suit, the law journals would publish my articles, CALI awards would be mine for the asking, and job offers would rain down from the heavens.

So I lost weight, again, and fit back into the suit. For about a minute. Then came exams and the bar and the return of all not only the weight I’d lost to get back into the suit, but almost all the weight I’d lost on my last big Weight Watchers endeavor three years ago. I had a couple near-nervous breakdowns and finally some wonderful things happened involving my self-conception and a realization that I can just love this body instead of constantly torturing it into being something that it clearly does not want to be and I gave the suit away to a beautiful and dear friend who wears it well.

And then I got a job interview, which I knew was coming eventually, and now I just need to find a suit that fits my body instead of insisting that my body fit that damn suit. Which would be no problem except that I’m going to visit my family this weekend, thus requiring me to go suit shopping with my mother. Who bought me the talismanic size 12 success suit. Who put me on my first diet. Who is naturally petite and who never quite understood what to do with her smart, lovely, but incurably fat daughter.

I’m already a little nervous about going home because I plan to “come out as fat” (thanks to on-reserve!) and let my mom know that I am done with dieting, done with self-created and self-perpetuating disordered eating, and ready to enjoy my body instead of battling it. She loves me dearly, and I think she will be accepting of my decision if that’s what makes me happy. But then I’m asking her to put a financial stamp of approval on my decision and by my beloved fat body an interview suit.***

Also? We have totally opposite taste in clothing and she has spent my entire life trying to force me into outfits that she likes. I just keep having flashbacks to a particular shopping trip when I was about nine years old. We’d gone to Penny’s and all I wanted in the whole world were this pair of jeans with a roller skate appliqué, complete with actual laces, on the back pocket. All she kept picking out for me were these horrific plaid smocked-top, lace-trimmed dresses from the “husky” section. After an hour of this, I just started bawling in the dressing room because 1) omg husky????? and 2) Mom, I’m already having enough trouble at school because I’m fat. Are you really seriously going to dress me like a chubby Little House extra? Not only did we leave the store with no school clothes, the memory of that shopping trip haunted every other joint shopping venture we ever attempted. Eventually, the specter of my adult self reduced to tears in a Macy’s dressing room while my mother shoved kindergarten teacher smock dresses under the door at me so revolted us both that we just stopped clothes shopping together.

Until now, when forced by circumstances we must embark together to procure that most dreadful article of tailored modern clothing. Failure is just not an option, unless I want to cruise into my first professional lawyer job interview wearing a wrap dress, orange tights, and clogs. Which is really something I’d feel safer busting out after I get hired.

*I feel like such a heel saying this, but I’ve noticed that the Starbucksers seem to like it better when I speak Starbucks instead of fumbling my way through the order in standard English: “Ummm… I’ll have a large latte, but with skim milk, and an extra shot of espresso, and like half of that syrup stuff. Oh oh oh and no whipped cream.” Saying “venti, nonfat, triple shot, three-pump, no-whip pumpkin spice latte” might make me feel like a dingaling, but it’s certainly more efficient.

**Most of the senior partners here are semi-observant Jews, so us left-behind Gentiles usually get free pizza on high holidays as a consolation prize for not being one of the Chosen People.

***I’m just assuming she’s going to buy it, since that’s how she do, although I’m perfectly able and happy to buy it myself.

There have been three fatal shootings in the “developing” neighborhood of Uptown in the last week.

Sun Times: 3rd man shot to death in Uptown
Tribune: Uptown neighbors wary after 3 slayings

This quote from the Trib story caught my attention:

“Quite frankly, I’m not surprised at all,” said Katharine Boyda of the Graceland Wilson Neighbors Association. “This has been brewing for months.”

As neighborhoods across Chicago change and poorer residents are priced out of homes and apartments, they come to Uptown, lately bringing gangs and drug dealers with them, Boyda said.

“This isn’t random violence,” she said. “It’s retaliation. It’s fighting for territory, and we’ve got to start recognizing it for what it is.”

When I read that, I think that “recognizing it for what it is” requires a thoughtful, intentional development plan that ensures that current residents have affordable housing, that locally owned businesses are supported and allowed to thrive rather than forced out by chains, that the wealthy white people who are moving in to the neighborhood be sensitive to the existing neighborhood culture rather than act as if there was no culture at all before they got there.

To me “recognizing it for what it is” means recognizing that there is an existing community–rather than assuming that because there’s no Starbucks, no Borders, and no white people, there is nothing there–and striving to be a part of that community, instead of “revitalizing” it until it meets the standard upper class, white, redevelopment norm.

I wonder if that’s what the Graceland Wilson Neighbors Association has in mind?

Many thanks to Heart for the reminder about the injustice visited on seven New Jersey women who dared defend themselves against street harassment:

Buckle [the harasser] approached one of the women, Patreese Johnson, who stands 4′11″ tall and weighs 95 pounds, gestured toward her crotch and said, “Let me get some of that.” When she and the other women said they weren’t interested, they were lesbians, Buckle shouted, “I’ll fuck you straight, sweetheart.” At that point Johnson’s girlfriend shot back an insult, something about Buckle’s jeans and tennis shoes being cheap, Buckle then called one of the women an “elephant,” and yelled at another that she ”looked like a man.” Then there was a fight. Surveillance cameras show Buckle choking one woman and holding clumps of hair ripped from some of the women’s heads. The women said Buckle spit on them and hucked a lit cigarette at them; Buckle says one of the women spit at him.

During the course of the altercation, the woman Buckle had directly sexually harrassed retrieved a 99-cent steak knife out of her bag and went after Buckle with it in an attempt to defend the woman whom Buckle was choking.

. . .

Three of the women pled guilty to attempted assault and served six months in jail. Four of the women went to trial. None of the women had criminal records, and two are parents.

. . .

[The judge cracked] jokes with Buckle at trial about how expensive Buckle’s jeans and tennis shoes actually had been, yukking it up with the jury when a police officer, called to testify, donned rubber gloves while handling Patreese Johnson’s knife. No forensic tests were ever done on the knife and there was no evidence hers was the knife that cut Buckle, nor was there blood on it. In the clear absence of blood stains, the judge mocked the police officer for donning the gloves and cracked a joke about the officer seeing “germs” there.

. . .

Renata Hill [was] sentenced to 8 years. Patreese Johnson, 19, who wielded a steak knife against Buckle but did not stab him (video surveillance evidences Buckle was stabbed by a man who joined the fray later), was sentenced to 11 years. She, like the other women, had no criminal record.

Read more at Women’s Space: The Margins here and here, and at Queer Woman of Color here.

You can sign a petition to show your support for these brave women here. Information on how to support the New Jersey 7 here, here, and here.

Yay, indie rock! It’s been a long time since I’ve been to a show, what with law school and the bar exam ruining my life for the last three years, so it was with much excitement that I joined my husband and two friends at the AV-aerie last night for the Thank You/Lord of the Yum Yum/O’death/Dan Deacon show.

We missed Thank You, but Lord of the Yum Yum and O’death were pretty great, even though the bass player of the latter band was a disconcerting composite of like three of my ex-boyfriends. He did a lot of screaming, though, and that was pretty sweet, if you like that kind of thing.

Dan Deacon, who was the only performer that I’d heard of before the show, was super excellent. He set up his equipment on a table in the middle of the floor, which I guess is the way he rolls, and a minute into his first song, some over-zealous fan knocked a vocorder off the table and broke it. After getting everything squared away, while singing a little song about getting what he deserved for not playing on the stage, he recruited some big strong people to stand protectively around the table and got back to rockin’.

I’m not one for tight crowds or for standing with my face crammed into the sweaty armpit of a smelly hipster, so I stayed away from the fray and against the wall where I could have room to both dance and breathe. My husband stood to my right, and to his right, standing perched precariously on a folding chair, was a very short woman who was seriously on the nod. Now I have very judiciously and intentionally stayed away from junkies for a number of years now, so at first I was kind of pissed off at her for making me care about whether she fell completely off the chair instead of just dancing like a carefree crazy woman, which had been my intent. She stood there, holding a can of Coke, her eyes shut, wavering, then she would slowing bend her knees and sink down as if to sit on her heels, tipping forward at an alarming angle. Just when I thought for sure she was going to fall face first into the crowd, she’d catch herself, stand up straight, and start the process all over again. She did this so often that I finally stopped paying attention to her and got back into the music, until, of course, she toppled over onto my husband. I grabbed her elbow and suggested that, for the benefit of us all, she try sitting down for awhile. She agreed to at least sit back on the windowsill, and that, nearly an hour later, is where she was when the show ended, still holding a can of Coke, still with her eyes closed.

Meanwhile, in front of us, three girls who would have looked equally if not more at home in the the Wrigleyville Barleycorn as they did in a Wicker Park supermegaindierock performance art space, aggressively freak danced each other, Coyote Ugly style, which seemed a little incongruous but hey. Dan Deacon brings out the best in all of us, I guess.

The evening ended with a group sing-a-long to the epic song “Wham City”:

There is a mountain of snow
Up past the big glen
We have a castle enclosed
There is a fountain
Out of the fountain flows gold
Into a huge hand
That hand is held by a bear who had a sick band
Of ghosts and cats and pigs and bats
With brooms and bats and wigs and rats
And great big dogs like queens and kings
And everyone plays drums and sings
Of big sharks, sharp swords,
Beast bees, bead lords,
Sweet cakes, mace lakes,
Oh mamamamama

Please, please let this be fake.

I have so much to say about this but I’m still too hungover right now. But check out the testimonials. They’re terrifying.

A couple of episodes into season two of Project Runway I decided my life would be much better if I scorned my own sub-par biological father and declared that my new father was Tim Gunn. Imagine! Tim Gunn as your dad! He’d be loving and supportive of your creative endeavors while gently guiding you back into the flock if you happen to wander astray by staying out past your curfew, picking up a drug habit, or making yet another bubble skirt.

And so it was with great glee that I read that Bravo is playing the Jenny Jones to Papa Gunn and my currently distant relationship by enabling a beautiful father-daughter reunion before the November 14th premier of season four of Project Runway in the form of Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style.

The show is a little fluffy, but generally enjoyable. I am dying at the look on Tim Gunn’s face as he observes Veronica Webb paw through guest Rebecca’s underwear drawer, though. Oh and also his “purely visceral” reaction to Veronica’s leggings suggestion.* However, I’m not entirely sure that putting women in garbage bags is actually a good way to build self esteem. Also, instead of Carl Kassel, I think I’d rather have Catherine Malandrino’s voice on my home answering machine. No offense Carl.

But wow. The guest, Rebecca, is beautiful and totally Hoboken, NJ awesome. And thin by anybody’s definition. Yet one of her biggest gripes is her big hips. Tim repeatedly tells her she looks great, but then he also helps her pick out empire waisted silhouettes to hide her body. At one point she refers to herself as being properly classified as one of the “girls who are heavier on the bottom.” As if we needed any more proof, this just demonstrates how pervasive and insidious and harmful and deeply internalized the messages that our bodies are imperfect, wrong, bad, unacceptable, no matter how closely they match the societal ideal. Even when you’re right there, it’s still not perfect enough.

Next week’s guest, according to the teaser, is a fat woman who has lost a considerable amount of weight over the last two years and doesn’t know how to dress her new body. Now, I don’t know how to dress my new body, either. (I didn’t know how to dress my old body, for that matter, but that’s neither here nor there.) But my new body, which is really my actual body, isn’t a new thin body. It’s my very own fat body that I am learning how to really love, and how cool would it be for my own adopted father to teach me how to make it work? Alas, I don’t think prime-time fashion television is ready for that particular jelly.

* I quite like wearing leggings. I am confident that Papa Gunn would, Christ-like, forgive me for that sin.

I find Jezebel problematic in a lot of ways, but this cracked me up.

Still, such a statement would come across as more radical and less hypocritical if Jezebel writers weren’t also breathlessly blogging about fashion week at the same time.

Via Feline Formal Shorts via Angry Asian Man: Suspects Sought in Brutal Beating

I post this because it happened in Delaware, where I’m from. Those unfamiliar with the state often think of it as a giant suburb, or a New England state. But in reality it’s an agricultural state that is south of the Mason Dixon and three-quarters white. It’s a state in which racism can fester, unexamined, because the white people live largely in a vacuum of privilege where their perceptions are rarely challenged. (True fact: I never knowingly met anyone Jewish until I went to college. I’m sure I knew Jews, but being Jewish just wasn’t something you admitted to, at least not around my racially-insular WASP ass.)

Delaware Senator Joe Biden, as much as my neo-con Republican family members might hate to admit it, is actually quite representative of Delaware’s population. As a matter of fact, calling her “clean” is one of the highest compliments my grandmother believes she can pay to a person of color.

The article highlights another fascinating fact about Delaware: we have no state-native television station. We have to piggy-back off Salisbury or Baltimore Maryland in the southern half of the state, and Philadelphia in the northern half. I’m guessing that’s why Action News couldn’t be arsed to actually report where in Delaware the beating took place, other than at a 7-Eleven. I mean shit. The state is small, but it’s got more than one convenience store.

Note: This post gets more hits than any other on my little blog. I am keeping a close eye on the comments, and while I won’t delete any comments just because I disagree with them, I will delete any that are hateful, racist, unreasonable, or fail to support their contentions with at least some semblance of a logical argument. I am also not going to respond to most comments because I think there is better debate happening elsewhere, and I honestly don’t have time to pay proper attention to such a discussion here. Thanks!

Via my precious Chicago Sun-Times: Michael Bell’s sentenced reduced from 22 years to 15.

But guess what? That’s still ridiculous. The judge reduced the sentence by tossing out the conspiracy conviction. That means Michael Bell (Black) is still considered guilty, in the eyes of the law, of attempted murder for participating in a beating that sent Justin Barker (white) to the hospital, where he was treated and released for minor injuries. Barker went to a party the next night. Barker also participating in race-based harassment and violence against Bell and other Black students at Jena High. Now that doesn’t excuse a beating necessarily, but it should have an impact on the prosecution’s case against Bell. I’m a little rusty (as in totally in the dark) about Louisiana criminal law thanks to its roots in French common law, but considering that dueling was legal in the state until at least 1890, it would make sense that resorting to fisticuffs in response to somebody hanging a noose from a tree that you tried to sit under would be socially, if not technically legally, acceptable.

But of course, as it was in the dueling rules of the 19th century, so it is for the criminal court system today:

Only gentlemen, not laborers, mechanics, or blacks, were eligible to use pistols on the field of honor. Gentlemen were presumed to be planters, military offices, or professors. The status of ministers, news-paper editors, physicians, and bankers was less certain. Whatever the case, people of the “lesser sort” were denied access to the dueling field; they were to be dealt with by caning or horsewhipping. (Source)

The prosecuting attorney in Jena, Louisiana never should have been allowed to prosecute these kids for attempted murder in the first place. The judge should have ordered a directed verdict for the defendant, or whatever the hell the equivalent of a directed verdict is in Louisiana, when the jury convicted him of attempted murder and conspiracy. At the very least, the judge should have given Bell the lightest sentence possible under Louisiana’s sentencing guidelines. It’s all just such a sham.

Michael Bell has a long, tough court battle ahead of him, and he’s going to need all the help he can get. You can send donations to:

Jena 6 Defense Committee
PO Box 2798
Jena, LA 71342

Another miscarriage of justice:

Via Racialicious, which is maintaining Jena Six-related bookmarks on Del.icio.us here. (You can subscribe to a feed of those links to keep up with new information as the folks at Racialicious post it.) Finally, here is a link to the petition referenced at the end of the above video. It’s free to sign, but if you can spare even $5 for these kids’ defense fund, that will help.

My husband loves tennis and just recently joined a tennis team at work, prompting the purchase of some new shoes and the restringing of an old racket. This great post about Althea Gibson, who was posthumously inducted into the US Open Court of Champions on August 15, at Beautiful, Also, Are the Souls of My Black Sisters is thus very timely in a personal way:

Althea was an American sportswoman who became the first black American woman to be a competitor on the world tennis tour and the first to win a ‘grand slam’ title in 1957. She is sometimes referred to as “the Jackie Robinson of tennis”. Only three years after Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball, Althea did the same thing when she was admitted to the 1950 U.S. Nationals. She went on to make history at several major tournaments capturing the French Championships in 1956, and Wimbledon in 1957, and returned to a ticker-tape parade upon returning to New York, and an official welcome at New York City Hall. She responded by winning the U.S. Championships. For her accomplishments that year, Althea earned the No. 1 ranking in the world.

I started this blog for two reasons: 1) I got tired of emailing my friends interesting links along with fascinating commentary, which they then summarily ignored; and 2) I found great inspiration and solace from the fat acceptance community on the internet and I wanted to play, too. Egotistical though I know it is, I have too much to say about too many different things to limit this blog solely to body image issues, but a big part of what I want to write about relates to my personal experiences in the realm of fatdom. So, after the jump, I bring you the first installment of the story of me and my fat bod - Manifatso, Chatper One: Diets I Have Known.

Read the rest of this entry »

1. I have a classifiable shape, and that shape is Figure Eight. Despite having always prided myself on being indefinable, this comforts me immensely. I even look like the drawing! Well, except for the hair and the coloring and the fact that I don’t wear high heels.
2. My fat upper arms are going to help me live longer.
3. Neuroscience (translated into understandable people talk by Harriet Brown) tells us that eating when you’re hungry is good for your health. Imagine that!

Bonus good news: In a clothing-related breakthrough, I did some successful shopping, and I have made the executive decision to put all my beautiful but way too small vintage dresses up for sale on Ebay. While I am a figure eight, I will never be a size eight again, and friends, this is all right with me. But more on that later.