BABble

Last night, two of my videos on YouTube were flagged for violations. Let me clarify a few things here. YT is not in the habit of making sweeps to look for these things. I personally know people on YT with 5000+ subscribers and 200+ videos, and they’ve never been flagged. Compare that to little ol’ me, with under 20 videos and about that many subscribers.

Yeah. Someone got mad, and someone made it personal.

Last night, i very nearly deleted all of it: this blog and all of the resources i’ve created for the express purpose of helping the FA community, because someone got petty and went after the resources i created for myself.

The FA community is really the only place i could potentially have any “enemies” now. And no, i don’t normally think in terms of friends/enemies. But after what someone did yesterday? Kind of hard not to.

Whether or not i’m taking it all down remains to be seen. Yeah, i know it means “they” win, and i’m supposed to hate that or something. Right now i’m trying to decide if i care.

So yes, you anonymous asshole. You got a reaction. Yay for you. Aren’t you special?

The timing on this little vacation of mine has been interesting: later this month, this blog will hit it’s first year anniversary. Will i be back by then? Eh, possibly. Not sure. In the past few days, i’ve been doing a lot of thinking of what i’ve seen, heard, and learned over the past year. I’m thinking i might do a series of posts about this, but now that i’ve said that, it’s just as likely that i won’t. Anyway, it should go without saying that this is all In My Humble Opinion and Your Mileage May Vary.

Since we just had International No Diet Day, now’s as good a time as any to talk about the dreaded D word.

Strange Lindsay Fact: in my adult life, i have only ever gone on one diet - and it was for health reasons. No, really. I’ll spare you the details, but my body decided it didn’t like sugar. Eating anything with sugar would make me feel tipsy, and the full-body hangover lasted a solid week. So i went on a modified Atkins diet and in about 18 months went from a size 22 to a size 16. I didn’t hate the weight loss, but that wasn’t the primary purpose of the diet. The health condition proved a bit trickier, but is currently not a problem as far as i can tell.

I have never intentionally chosen to diet for purpose of weight loss. In my childhood, i did have a few odd diets inflicted on me. Anything from the “milk is bad for human children” diet to the “you don’t get to eat dinner tonight because you’re fatter than your brother” diet. Sometimes the choice was between going hungry and eating my Cheerios with apple juice instead of milk. Tough call, actually.

So yeah, this apparently makes me something of an anomaly within a FA context. I have never counted calories. I have no earthly idea what my average daily caloric intake is. I eat food because it’s necessary for the continuation of my personal existence, but also because it’s delicious. I could never do a food blog because, honestly? Unless it was something really unique and spectacular, i don’t think it’s worth that much of my attention. I like looking at pictures of food because there are people who treat it as an art form, and make really beautiful looking dishes. I enjoy food when i eat it, and then i tend to forget about it. I do have some food angst, but it’s not related to type or portion size.

As far as other people go? It’s really quite simple. A big part of my body acceptance process was taking ownership of my own body - and recognizing that this body i’m in is the only one i get to have any kind of say over what happens to/with it. On a certain level, telling people they should not diet isn’t much different from telling people they should diet; in either case, someone is trying to impose their thoughts, beliefs and ideals on another sentient human being. Telling someone they should or should not diet can be a form of invalidation, as it might be (or might be interpreted as) an attempt to deny them body autonomy.

If you want to present scientific and medical evidence as to why dieting is good or bad, that’s one thing. I personally feel that attaching moral implications to either side is just plain manipulative.

So whether you diet or you don’t diet - the choice is yours. Just make sure that the reasons behind your decision are Truly Yours as well. If someone ever tries to make you feel bad about that choice, the question is this: what do they get out of your decisions about your body? What do they have to gain from your body-related angst?

If you agree with me and my choices, that’s great and all… but if we disagree and i end up convincing you that i’m right? That’s a form of power. That’s also a form of validation that my own choices are right: if they weren’t right, how could i have convinced you?

The diet debate isn’t simple. Not by a long shot. Hell, if it were simple, a debate wouldn’t be necessary. Both sides engage in cherry picking and apologia. Both sides get pretty fervent on the matter. Both sides are right on some points and wrong on others. Neither side is completely correct, and neither side is right for every single person out there.

What both sides seem to so often miss is that the decision lies with the individual. No ifs ands or buts. No caveats, no clauses. If it’s not your body, it’s not your decision.

There are some potential counter-arguments to that stance, especially in the context of relationships. In those situations, it’s important to know what one is asking of the other. In each situation, the compromise is only as fair as it is informed and mutually agreed upon. Then it’s a matter of “if it’s not your relationship, it’s not your decision.”

I find that the more i learn, the more i think about this, the less i am able to take sides. I know what works for me, but i also know that what works for me doesn’t work for everyone.

I’ve said it a whole bunch of different ways already, but i think this one phrase sums it up almost perfectly: live and let diet.

As far as talking about it, not talking about it… on the boring scale, with 1 being “ninja pirate monkey flipping out like whoa” and 10 being “college football”, i’d put diet talk at about an 11 or 12. (Note: IMO, “watching paint dry” is around a 7 or 8, so that should tell you how i feel about college football.) So i don’t want to talk about it because i think it’s a tedious topic. If someone starts talking about it, i either tune it out or change the conversation. One of the neat things of having done phone based tech support for several years is that you learn how to work a conversation.

One of the things i’ve said in the past is that “dieting is antithetical to fat acceptance”. (Luckily, i’ve also said that i’m allowed to change my mind once in a while.) Whether or not i still agree with that might be entirely irrelevant - the louder voices in FA have said they do not want any dieters in their midst. Whether or not they are actually representative of the majority of the fat acceptance community is irrelevant, as no one seems interested in being louder to the contrary. I don’t care enough either way to pick a side, so i’m certainly not willing to duke it out for either side.

That being said? I do think being exclusionary is antithetical to the concept of acceptance. I don’t have a resolution for that problem. But it is a problem.

I’m taking a partial vacation from the fatosphere. Now, my version of a vacation is a slightly odd one, and you might not even notice the difference.

The difference is that i will not be reading the fatosphere.

This may not sound like a big deal, but i assure you, keeping up with 100+ blogs on a regular basis? Is a big deal. For me, anyways.

So what’s all this mean?

All unfinished side projects related to the fatosphere are on hold. The ones that are already set up and running will most likely continue as normal; i’ll read the list and check the board as usual (they’re both fairly low-traffic anyways). I will not be taking down, removing, or deleting any resources that i have already set up and made public - but i will not be developing them or adding to them at this time.

If there’s something you want me to see, or something you think i should know? You’ll need to let me know about it via e-mail; if you do not have my email address, you are welcome to use the contact form on this site.

I don’t know how long this vacation will last. There is no set time limit other than “when i feel like i want to come back.” Could be a few days, could be a week or two, could be a month or three.

I may or may not post during this time; if i do, please do not take it as an indication that i am paying attention to everything anything going on in the fatosphere.

I am not permanently removing myself from the FA community. I will still be available to anyone who wishes to contact me privately.

That being said, anyone who wants to remove me from their blogrolls has complete and total amnesty to do just that. I will not take it personally if anyone wishes to do so. Frankly, i won’t even notice.

I am not doing this because i am burned out; i am doing this so that i do not become burned out. It is a preventative measure.

This post has comments disabled because it is not up for public discussion. I am open to discussing it privately, so you may e-mail me about it if you wish.

Almost a decade ago, i found myself in a perpetual cycle of what i now call “emotional bulimia”.

I decided that once i’d gotten rid of all of my emotional baggage, I would be able to move on with Having A Good Life. So i’d strain my noggin, thinking “What baggage had i not yet unpacked?” Then, i’d figure something out - sometimes it was something valid, but honestly sometimes it wasn’t. I’d coast on that for a while, but gradually, i’d start to feel bad again. It would build up, and i would feel worse and worse about myself. Then would come the next catharsis, where the cycle would start all over again. Always, i would tell myself that i was making some kind of progress. That This Time, It Would Be Different.

To be fair: having survived emotional, physical and sexual abuse from an early age, there was no shortage of trauma for me to work through. To add to the problem, i’ve got large gaping holes in my early memories; things that i only know of because they had to be legally documented. So there was no shortage of material with which i could play the What If game. And also, to be fair: i have dealt with no small amount of my issues. I’ve learned a lot about myself, and come to a point in my life where i can even forgive the people who abused me.

But back when i was in the midst of all this, i couldn’t be happy if i didn’t have the internal conflicts, the internal drama; if it got turned into external drama, well, that was a source of validation. Sometimes i cringe when i think about the unhealthy ways in which i used to deal with these things… especially the bits when i lashed out at people who weren’t involved in the original abuses. I don’t beat myself up to the point of saying i’m ashamed of these occurrences, but believe you me, i’m sure as hell not proud of them.

It ain’t pretty - not to go through, and not to watch someone going through. It’s ugly as hell to watch in a group context, because all too often it becomes directed at a relatively innocent bystander. Someone says something, and all it takes is for one person to say they found it “triggering”. Before you know it, other people are speaking up and saying that they, too were hurt by the original statement. Meanwhile, the person who made the statement is getting all of this bile and vitriol aimed in their direction, regardless of the fact that they were not the original cause of the underlying problem. They just happened to inadvertently “trigger” the response.

I’ve seen this sort of occurrence in almost every online group i’ve spent any amount of time in, and even a few offline groups. I’ve taken part in the group purging (something i’m not proud of), and i’ve also been the scapegoat. Thankfully, it doesn’t happen all that often; it’s just really fucking horrific when it does. Whenever i see the word “trigger” come up in an online forum, i wince because i know what can come next. If someone points it in your direction, you’re not allowed to defend yourself against it. It’s a rather effective form of emotional manipulation, and it’s a gag order. The only “acceptable” responses you can give are profuse apologies and mea maxima culpa.

I feel that this sort of thing is especially dangerous in an online context, because it’s all too easy to forget that there are real people behind the words on the screen. It’s too easy to turn off the computer and act like it never happened, too easy overlook the consequences it has on the people who have seen it or borne the brunt of it.

Here’s the thing: for someone who has genuinely been traumatized by an event or a series of events, catharsis can be a valid and helpful part of the therapeutic process. It becomes a problem when a person’s sense of well-being relies almost exclusively on a cycle of catharses, and/or when these purges are directed at an innocent bystander who inadvertently “triggered” it.

I do not want to discourage anyone from exploring and dealing with their emotional issues. Far from it: i want to encourage folks to work their issues out - but in a way that doesn’t hurt other people. If you are only able to unpack your emotional baggage by unloading it onto the people around you, then no one can ever be well. At that point, all we’ll be doing is playing hot potato, hoping that we’re not the next one to get burned.

I think people get Interesting in spring.

I remember when i lived up north, spring was almost worse than winter because it was a great big Not Yet season. Not yet warm enough to go without a jacket, not yet summer break, not yet out of the winter slump.

But down south? Oh boy, people get their summer on early. Already, the trees around my house are going insanely green. Birds are chirping up a mad storm, squirrels are being extra sassy to the dogs staring at them through nose-printed windows, and all over the place i see evidence of the annual emergence from hibernation.

Maybe it’s the pollen; certainly we’ve no shortage of it ’round these parts. Today the pollen count is only 135. Last week it got up to 1,000, and the week before that it was around 3,300 - yes, really. So in spring, i tend to blame a lot of stuff on the omnipresent pollen.

So yes, people. People being interesting, indeed.

I’ve already told you about my Target Frenchman; that was Wednesday. Yesterday was the Stoplight Smoker.

I tend to chain-smoke in the car, because i hate driving. Hate hate hate. If i still lived in Chicago i wouldn’t own a car. So there i am, at a stoplight. I’m watching an interesting scene unravel in front of me: a tow truck that’s come to the rescue of… a tow truck. Seems a tow truck had broken down in the street and what else could come to the rescue, but another tow truck. I found this highly amusing, but i’m easily amused.

Naturally, this was causing a bit of traffic congestion, so we were kind of crawling/sitting there for a while. I was listening to some music on my MacGuyvered*-out mp3 player. It was something i hadn’t heard in a very long time. That day, i’d gotten a slew of my old CDs out of storage and ripped them onto my computer so i could listen to them on my commute. It was stuff i hadn’t heard in ages, and styles i don’t normally listen to.

So there i am, smoking, listening to Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn album. I hear someone saying something somewhere in the traffic - but thought it was the tow truck drivers talking amongst themselves. Then i realize that it came from the car behind me, as i saw him in the rearview mirror - getting out of his car, and jogging up to mine.

“Hey, can i have a -”

Smoker’s karma is very important - someone asks you to bum a smoke? You give it to ‘em and offer them a light. So i had a cigarette ready for him before he finished his sentence. He said thanks, jogged back to his car and got in. I watched. He looked disturbingly like John Mayer. I shrugged, smiled, took a drag from my own cigarette and realized i hadn’t been listening to the song playing on my mp3 player: “Smoke”.

I burst out laughing, making the tow truck guys stop and stare at me. I grinned at them, noticed the light just then turning green, and drove off.

I like seeing the patterns in the world around me. The strange bits of connections, of synchronicities. There was no great big meaning in what happened yesterday in traffic. It was no life-changing event. Just a strange moment. I like the Strange, the Weird, the Odd, the Unusual - it feels like home. I wonder what else Today will bring. And whatever happens, there’s always Tomorrow.

Good times.

* - people keep stealing my fm transmitters, so i stopped buying them. Instead, i listen to my music on a computer speaker that has no power source, and as such - no volume control. But for months now, i’ve had this computer speaker sitting openly in the console of my Jeep, and no one’s yoinked it yet.

Yes, this is going to be another one of those posts where i ramble on about something for a while and eventually get to the point around page three. But bear with me on this one, ‘kay?

I have a long-standing fascination with languages. I grew up in a multilingual household - my dad is fluent in English and Italian, and he knows enough French and German to get by. My stepmum is fluent in English, French and Italian, and has occasion to study Japanese and Russian. I started learning French in 6th grade, and studied language all throughout high school - one year of German, three years of French. I’ve never been able to get the feel of German, but i’ve had more than a few native French speakers compliment me on my French accent.

One year, for my (16th? i can’t recall the year) birthday, i asked for Chinese lessons. No, really. It was only a three-week course, but i still retain everything i learned there. Not much, but i can count to ten (with only one counting modifier, ge), and say “thank you” and “i don’t know”. The words for “table” and “window” are tossed in there somewhere. My Chinese instructor actually asked me who had put me up to this - he thought i was fluent in Chinese and that one of his friends had sent me there to pull a prank on him. He said my accent was too good for someone who’d never spoken it before.

When i was working in tandem with an au pair from Sweden (for a mom who worked ~60 hours a week, where an au pair can only work 35 hours a week), i tried to study a bit of that. The day that i found out Icelandic was basically Old Norse? I went nuts, my friends. Absolutely nuts.

Ahh, but Russian is the language that gets the blood thumping for me. In high school i was obsessed with codes. I took all of my class notes in a code i’d developed so well that i could write it in cursive. When i got bored with the creation process of that code, i went on to learn Cyrillic. I stopped that one because i couldn’t find any resources for cursive Cyrillic at the time - and because there were some letters i just couldn’t get the hang of writing (the De, for example). I’ve taken it up again, recently. I do want to learn Russian, but first i need to learn the Cyrillic alphabet.

My stepmum and i have long shared a fascination with the way things don’t always translate very well - especially idioms. When she was studying Russian, she learned that the phrase “out of sight, out of mind” is a perfect example of this. Translate it into Russian, and then back into English… and it comes back as “blind and insane”. Makes sense, nyet? And yet it’s totally not what one might have intended to convey.

Should you find yourself at a dinner party in France, satisfactorily fed and being offered another course, do be careful to never say “non, merci, je suis plein” (”no, thanks, i’m full”). For starters, saying non is adequate to indicate you don’t want any more; the merci is acting as a contradiction. If you did want more, you could say merci and it would be as good as a “yes”. So “non, merci” comes across as indecisive - no, yes. (Ignore that bit, seems i was misinformed. Oops. Heh.)

There’s also the eensy problem that the last half of that sentence (”je suis plein“) just informed your host(ess) that you are pregnant. Because in French, saying that you are “full” is an idiomatic way of saying you are full with child. “Would you like some more paté?” “No, i’m pregnant.” Way to break the ice, there.

Given that idioms tend to also be regional within a given language, why is it we English speakers can be so certain that our own turns of phrase will always be understood? If i ask to borrow a “rubber”, what am i asking you for: erasers, galoshes, or condoms? Woe to an old British acquaintance of mine who learned this sort of thing the hard way in San Francisco, where she unwittingly asked if it was okay to “light a fag”… “fag” being slang for “cigarette” on her side of the pond.

I could go on for years with more examples, but perhaps i’ll spare you and get to the point.

These sorts of cultural idioms and idiomatic phrases aren’t limited just by region. Common language does not equate common ground. Yes, you and i may technically speak the same language - if we are to use so broad a brush as the entirety of the English language. However, in the case of slang or idiom within a microculture… well, it gets complicated.

Microculture is an interesting word, and an interesting concept. This is where i’m going to start quoting Ben, because this is a particular fascination of his (whereas i consider myself a mere dabbler in this particular topic). So for the rest of this post, wherever you see quotes, it’s Ben i’m quoting.

The premise of this idea is very simple: if a social form has any of the earmarks of a distinct culture, it may be classified as such and the methods, jargon, etc that we use for understanding cultural identity and interaction may be applied, no matter how small this group may be.

Ben and i have our own microculture, our own shared lingo and terminology. When i look at him and say “go team!”, he knows that’s another way of saying “i love you, and what’s more, i love us.” My old roommate can look at me and say “lacquer” - and we will both instantly collapse into giggles.

Consider this proposition: where there is a cliché, there is a culture. Clichés are idiomatic expression, collections of words that impart a meaning beyond their literal import. We find examples of this not only in broad cultural groups but in small ones as well. There is no circle of friends too small to have an inside joke, no family without phrases that evoke event and history, no interest group without a degree of internal language. We generally consider these arrangements of meaning as jargon, shorthand, an efficient means of expression, and they do serve that purpose. More, through the manner in which those phrases are constructed, related, and retired, they indicate trends of concept and language, a rough set of “rules” by which linguistic forms are invented as needed.

Big stuff there: where there’s a cliché, there’s a culture. Given that there are no shortage of clichés regarding fat and fat people (and even fat acceptance), i think it’s certainly safe to say that we have our own culture. Taking that into account and going a step further, we have our own language.

Or rather, we should, and we think we do.

I’ve said it before and i’ll say it again: self/body/fat acceptance is a process - and we are all on different parts of that process. I’m going to be a horribly naughty person and say that yes, some people are further along the path than others.

Some people have found out about the fatosphere from news articles, some have found it through links in feminist blogs, some have found it through links in ED-related blogs, some have found it from links on anti-FA sites, some have randomly stumbled onto it while googling diet tips. The list goes on, but however we got here, sometimes it seems that we’re all using words and phrases that are shorthand that make sense within the context to which we’re most accustomed - not the microculture in which we are now taking part.

While the FA movement has been around for a while, the fatosphere itself is still relatively young. Even as it grows, new people come in with their own contexts and backgrounds. In order for us to get through our rough patches of miscommunications and misunderstandings, we have to have the self-awareness to acknowledge that we sometimes are not actually speaking the same language… and the patience to work out the details. If we don’t, we’ll find ourselves in an ever-expanding (as more people join the conversation) cycle of growth and stagnation.

Not only does this sort of thing interfere with the ways we communicate amongst ourselves, it interferes even more with the way we are viewed from the outside. Doubly so: if we can’t reliably talk amongst ourselves without language or phrase-based misunderstandings, how can we expect people to understand what it is we’re trying to say?

Get a liberal and a conservative debating a point of political contention. The Liberal is speaking Liberalese and English, the Conservative is speaking Conservatese and English. The Liberal is using the Liberal rules to indicate when he is speaking L-ese or English, The Con is using Con rules to indicate when he is speaking Con-ese or English. Neither of them know when the other is speaking L-ese/Con-ese, the languages they don’t share, or English, the language they do, because they don’t share the same rules for interpreting and informing the other that a language swap has occurred.

Now, assume they’re both Mets fans and get them talking about baseball. They may still starkly disagree, but they are far more likely to understand each other.

The solution implied is to find a way to get them to talk about politics in the LANGUAGE of baseball instead of the Lib-ese/Con-ese, English mess described above.

How can we convince culture in general that our “out of sight, out of mind” is not actually “blind and insane”, if we can’t even get that across within our own microculture? Maybe we should use baseball terminology - at least then we’d have a well-defined context to work with.

I’ve had a post that i’ve been working on for almost a week now. It’s been much on my mind in the last day or two, and i feel like i’ve got to get it out there before it stops being relevant. Truth is, i don’t think it’ll stop being relevant anytime soon.

Anyways, i’m going to give you a bit of a teaser by telling you about something strange that happened to me today - an odd bit of synchronicity.

I had to stop at Target after work; we needed a rather odd assortment of things: a new mattress pad and fitted sheet for the bed, windshield wipers for the car, and maybe a pair of earplug-style headphones for me.

As i was going up and down the bedding aisles, i nearly ran my cart into a strange looking man. Tall, heavy-set, swarthy. I was silently playing “guess the nationality” based on his features - something i do from time to time. (Side note: people frequently think Ben is any of the following: Greek, Spanish, Arabic… and never correctly guess that he’s of mostly Scottish descent.) I apologised for nearly ramming him with my shopping cart and went along my way.

And passed him again as i was headed to the electronics. He smiled at me as we passed each other. I smiled back in a friendly-yet-standoffish way that you tend to find in the South.

And who should i nearly hit with my cart in the automotive department? Same dude! Weird. Was he following me? Seems unlikely as we were generally finding ourselves walking in opposite directions. In any case, this time as he passed me, he said something.

“Bonjour.” In perfectly gorgeous French. Not “bone-joor”, but more “boh-zhouh”. Without even batting an eyelash or missing a step, i said, “Salut“. And kept walking.

Didn’t even hit me what had just happened until about two minutes later, as i was staring at the book of windshield wiper measurements for my Jeep.

Saw him again in the parking lot; he was leaving the store as i was driving out. I stopped to let him cross to the other side of the lane, and he gave me a huge, ear-splitting, shared-secret grin.

Who knew that some stranger in Target in the middle of Atlanta, Georgia would say hello to me in French? And why on earth did i say hello back to him, in a more personal form of French? I love these odd little moments. They seem to happen more to me when i’m on the right track with something, almost as if i’ve tapped into some kind of magical Something Or Other. They haven’t happened in so long, and to have this sort of thing happen today almost feels like a sign.

I find it entirely too amusing, given the things that have been on my brain as of late. Hopefully this strange event will give me the last piece i need for my next post, and i won’t have to keep you in suspense for so long.