I Got Curious
So I tried the personality test. Got it from Vesta and BFDynamo. I rather like it.
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Your Personality Profile |
 You are dignified, spiritual, and wise. Always unsatisfied, you constantly try to better yourself. You are also a seeker of knowledge and often buried in books. You tend to be philosophical, looking for the big picture in life. |
Brainwashing, on MY TV?
It’s more likely than you think. (Over 9000 internets for whoever is as huge of an internet nerd as me and gets the meme. xD)
I don’t watch a ton of television, but a commercial came on NBC while I was watching Ellen that really got to me. There’s a new ad out by http://www.cancerproject.org (which seems like a thinly veiled promotion of the idea that obesity and diet cause cancer). And, well watching it for yourself.
Your typical PSA-style commercial. But the demonizing of food in this commercial is overwhelming. And, IMO, just another offshoot of the OMG OBESITY epi-panic. They can say that it’s about cancer until they’re blue in the face, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re pushing the Child Nutrition Act on all of us. Not to mention that Sandy’s covered that there’s no proof that nitrates or nitrites cause cancer in humans, not to mention that nitrites are heavier in the vegetables that they’re pushing than processed meats. My biggest problem with this being a commercial on network television is that it reaches so many more people than something that might be in say, a newspaper, on or the news. And most people don’t exactly check their facts when it comes to these things, they take what they see for granted. This sort of thing getting spread around is not a good idea. If they want to pull this anti-obesity shit, they should just call a spade a spade. Instead of hiding behind false logic, and trying to tell us that feeding us vegetables instead of processed meats will decrease nitrites, and therefore our risk of cancer, they should just come out and say that they’re puppets of the anti-obesity campaign. This all just makes me want to bang my head against a wall repeatedly, really. I mean, I know a lot of people don’t try to look into what they’re being told on health-related issues, especially when it’s being put forth by professional-sounding organizations, but really, it’s NOT okay that they’re engaging in this brainwashing. I know it’s old news, since they’ve always engaged in this sort of behavior, but it still gets to me. I shouldn’t let is get to me, but it does.
My Fat is Not Your Fat
While I’ve been coming to accept my fat as a part of who I am, I still find difficulty in accepting the form it takes on me. So, if you are struggling with how fat sits on you and just don’t want to be reminded about it, you might not want to continue reading. It’s essentially me being vain and insecure about my body.
It could just be “one of those days”. Sometimes I have them. But it’s beginning to feel more like “one of those months”. I can’t help that feel that my body is not as gorgeous as -insert pretty much any fatosphere blogger here’s- body. My fat does not sit on my stomach in a gorgeous, round shape. My fat rolls. I don’t know if it just grew this way around my clothing, since I wear pants pretty much always, or what. But it makes me insecure in almost every bit of clothing I wear. It’s like the front of my body comes in three lumps. One for my chest. One for above my waist, and one for below my waist. This makes me self-conscious when wearing clothing. I am constantly aware that my body is not shaped like “a normal person’s” body. I usually try not to let it hinder me from wearing what I like, but then I tend to also purposely stay away from anything that clings. I have shapeless shirts, and “camoflauging” tops and hoodies, which fit snugly, but usually have a bit more room in the front. I find my mind straying to thoughts such as, “well if only my body looked like this, I could wear this.” Which just seems utterly ridiculous to me, that I can accept having a fat body, but can’t accept the ways in which my fat body looks. So, I’m sending it out to all of you. Any suggestions for me on either how to dress for my body, or possibly even just work on accepting the shapes my body takes? I realize I’m also opening myself up for a myriad of trolls, but tagging this for the fatosphere, but my comment policy is still in effect, and know that I WILL delete anything I consider to be trollish. 
Streets of Fire
(Snagged this one from Big Fat Dynamo )
The Rules
1. Put Your iTunes/music player on Shuffle.
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer.
3. You must write that song name down, no matter what!
The Questions
1. If someone says, “Is this OK?”
Gold Heart Mountain Top Queen Directory, by: …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead
2. What would best describe your personality?
Goodnight Demon Slayer by Voltaire
3. What do you like in a guy/girl?
Crazy Little Thing Called Love by Queen
4. How do you feel today?
Bang Bang You’re Dead by Dirty Pretty Things
5. What is your life’s purpose?
Walking on Broken Glass by Annie Lennox
6. What is your motto?
Flow my Tears The Spider Said by Liars
7. What do your friends think of you?
Jesus Shootin’ Heroin by The Flaming Lips
8. What do you think of your parents?
Mr.Blue Sky by ELO
9. What do you think about very often?
We Don’t Need No Education by Pink Floyd
10. What is 2+2?
Wonderful from the Wicked Soundtrack
11. What do you think of your best friend?
C-C-C-Cinnamon Lips by OkGo
12. What do you think of the person you like?
Citizens of Tomorrow by Tokyo Police Club
13. What is your life story?
Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd
14. What do you want to be when you grow up?
Amsterdam by The Dresden Dolls
15. What do you think when you see the person you like?
Colors of the Wind Pocahontas Soundtrack
16. What do your parents think of you?
Miss Teen Wordpower by The New Pornographers
17. What will you dance to at your wedding?
It’s On by Superchick
18. What will they play at your funeral?
Hey Jude by The Beatles
19. What is your hobby/interest?
I’m Not That Girl from the Wicked Soundtrack
20. What is your biggest secret?
Everything Is by Neutral Milk Hotel
21. What do you think of your friends?
CANDY POP by Heartsdales (feat. SOUL’D OUT)
22. What should you post this as?
Streets of Fire by The New Pornographers
This was quite a bit of fun to do.
Reading Rainbow
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how, while I used to read 1-2 books per week, lately, I’ve been picking up books, only reading them halfway through, then just abandoning them. I’m not sure if I’m going through a temporary ‘readers block’, or what, but I just can’t seem to finish a book. So, here are some books I have finished, some I’d like to read, or just have no interest in at all. (Snagged from Fatadelic )
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you LOVE (I put an asterick by mine)
4) Reprint this list in your blog.
The premise of this exercise is that the National Endowment for the Arts apparently believes that the average American has only read 6 books from the list below.
5) Strikethrough those you hated or couldn’t get through
1 Pride and Prejudice- Jane Austen*
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (Gave up after book 5. Glad I did, after I heard what happened in later books)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible -
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell*
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (I’ve read a great deal of his work, though not all of it)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien*
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables- LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding*
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley*
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle(And a majority of the Holmes stories. I used to be quite a bit of a Holmes junkie, back in highschool)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down- Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Up next, BFDynamo’s iPod Meme. Because I’m a bit bored today, and have been going through a bit of a blogging dry spell.
What is Wrong with Me?
Warning: This post contains a bit of my personal ramblings, some having to do with me struggling with self-image, and struggling with an urge to diet.
There is this site that I often go to because, for the most part, it’s very interesting, and the discussion involves a hobby I’ve been meaning to take up (cosplay), and am very interested in taking up, though have not taken up as of yet (I know, it’s doozy of a sentence). But at least once a day, sometimes several times per day, there is one person who will start a post that might be (a little) fat-positive, but it devolves into fat-hatred, and calling people fat without even seeing them, telling them they need to “eat less, exercise more” (because we all know that it would solve THE WHOLE WORLD’S PROBLEMS if us fatties would just stop being sloth-like gluttons). That’s not even taking into account the amount of purposefully fat-bashing posts put up there. I feel like every time I come across one of these threads, piece by piece my FA sanity slips away. I get the voice in my head, the one that tells me “well maybe you should go back onto some diet, and make sure you get those hours of exercise in, or else”. I hate this voice, because it chips away at me, and I feel like I’m going to snap, and fall into some downward spiral of not eating enough because I feel like I need to lose weight. And I can’t be there, I just CAN’T. I’m aware that at 5′10 and 315lbs I am not the “ideal” for most people. But for me to finally be happy at whatever size I am is a long (and let’s be honest, still in progress) road, and it feels like it’s made of crumbling gravel right now.
The hobby itself has such an emphasis on physical appearance, but even so, it’s one that I know that I’ll enjoy, because (as bad as it as I am), I enjoy sewing things that will, once put together, become a wearable garment. But my dilemma comes here. For all that I enjoy the site, should I just stop going and preserve my sanity, stay on it but try to ignore the blatant anti-fat threads? GAH. HELP ME?
In other news, I posted a comment about this on the blog belonging to the lovely lady Bee, but I figured it deserves a post of its own. A photographer friend of mine is planning on putting together a book that celebrates the female body, in all its shapes and sizes, and he asked me if I’d be interested in taking part. I love the idea, but when he mentioned artistic nudes would be a part, I freaked out a bit, I’ll admit. I think that the last time someone’s seen me completely naked was when I had surgery, and I was out cold at the time, so it’s not like I even really thought about it. ANYWAY. The idea of being naked not only in front of one person for a photoshoot, but in front of anyone who buys the book scares me a bit. I sometimes still have trouble looking at my own naked body, so how would I be able to reconcile showing it to other people? I have a long time to decide, anyhow, since he said he probably won’t be getting around to it for another year or so, since photography is his hobby, and he has an actual job to pay the bills, and such.
And in other, other news. I know that many of your lovely ladies out there are sewing wizards (I, sadly, am nothing more that somewhat proficient), and I was wondering; do any of you know how to scale up a pattern from a pre-existing one? I found one which is perfect down to the last detail in New Look for a dress I want to make for a costume, but it only goes up to a size 20. So I was wondering if any of you had advice for it (it would be greatly appreciated!)
Last One’s Up.
Yes, here I go to also tout Dr.Horrible’s sing-along blog to the masses. I first heard about it through a webcomic I read, so when it started turning up around the fatosphere as well, I was tickled. So yes. The last installment is up. And if you haven’t already, go watch it! It’s down by Sunday. Twist ending! Pretty awesome. More good music. <3
Good Things in Unexpected Places
I found this gorgeous piece of artwork in the unlikeliest of places (let’s just say that the whole site in general is very fat-negative, and I’m not going to mention it here). But, not only did I find this piece there, but the thread it was in was (almost!) fat positive! It wasn’t fat-negative, that’s for sure. And it made me happy to see it. <3
Edit: Bad thread is bad. Still some are fine, but now, it’s devolved into assholes. >.>
“Realize” This.
New commercials have been cropping up for this Realize Band (I say new because this is the first time I’ve seen them, though they could have been on longer). Now, I feel the need to mention that my mother said, “would you think about that?” I firmly said no, and the subject was dropped (Thank goodness for that). Of course, the whole thing, like all surgical bands, is based off the idea that fat folks overeat, so of course that’s why we’re all so fat. Ugh.
Anypants, I decided to look into the thing, not because I had any interest in getting one, but to see what they had to say for themselves. A link to their site can be found here. They have a section on testing your gastric operation knowledge, because “some may be factual, and some could be completely wrong.” Okay, I’ll bite. So I took the test.
First question, not too bad. Blah, blah, 1-2 pounds per week, which as we all know, is safe and maintainable, as long as you eat right and exercise. Second question has the patient cutting out all high calorie food and drink, and “follow a specific eating and behavioral plan in order to lose weight.” Someone help me realize how this differs from something that doesn’t require putting an unnecessary piece of plastic in your body? Question three, relatively normal. I find it interesting that they did use the term restrictive though, since they’re trying to sell a product. Oh, but apparently question 4 is an ABSOLUTE MYTH. According to them, the “benefits” of gastric band surgery are not ONLY weight loss, but decreased blood fats, blood pressure, and diabetes (because don’t you realize fat is unhealthy? ). Another study apparently says that it decreases medication use, and improves quality of life. Because fat makes us miserable, and we can’t possibly be fat and happy. That would be silly! The stuff of fantasies, even. Question 5 involves telling folks that they’ll need emotional support, which, hey is something I can agree with. But then again, I think that any sort of change requires emotional support, if it’s available at all. Question 6, bands need adjustment. Well yes, I’d imagine it would, since you’re inserting a foreign object into the body. Oh, but of course, they can’t help at the end but insert a dig into there about how if you don’t listen to the, you’ll regain the weight, you uncontrollable fatty, you. Question 7 just involves hospital stays (only an average of two days, outpatient, ooohboy!). Question 8, this one involves online food journaling, and online help! Let’s modernize keeping the fatties skinny, that’s the only way to keep ‘em hooked.
Myth versus fact quiz aside, I also decided to check the risks page. Now there’s some light reading. Oh, the risks aren’t light, there are many, many of them, but not once do they describe any of them, and of course, right after the first section, they just have to mention that “Risks are associated with any type of surgery, including abdominal surgery. These risks are greater for individuals who suffer from obesity.” So, don’t worry about the risks! They could happen in any surgery. But, they’re worse for you, fatty, because the surgeons don’t like operating on you folk.
I could go on, but I’d just recommend checking out the site for yourself. Or not, if you think it would be triggering. I have never once in my life even considered gastric surgery, and man, this certainly doesn’t even come CLOSE to changing my mind. It’s obvious that they cater to those who are desperate to be thinner, and prey on insecurities. The whole thing just disgusts me, that idea of someone messing with my biological processes, whether it is gastric bypass surgery, or, as this is about gastric banding.
Actually Back
I thought I’d be gone a bit longer, but I came back early, and decided that I had so very many things to say about my experience at Anime Expo (which will henceforth be referred to as “the Con”), that I didn’t want to wait. Unfortunately, despite being back, I’m also quite busy at the moment, so I’ll be working on an entry piece by piece, putting together my personal experience, as well as things I observed/heard/etc around the Con relating to FA, and my own struggle with fully practicing it.
So, entry coming in a few days, so long for now! (pictures too, maybe? This one’s a very big maybe.)
