ggggghhhhhhhh

[dragonlady7]

Am not packed for Pennsic. Garb is not finished. Thought I had just one more thing to do on the red kirtle, but did it and it didn't work (using eyelet tape as front closure-- no good), so, uh, that's not finished. Blue kirtle's skirt not finished. Did the polyester "wool-look" houppelande in record fast time, but it needs a bit of finishing work and it needs facings at the collar and needs to be hemmed.
And.... I busted the sewing machine!
Just as I finished the last long seam on the houppelande, the drive belt snapped. I'm not sure that's what the part is really called, but it's a rubber belt that connects the motor to the big wheel that drives the needle. It snapped, so I can run the motor all I want but the needle won't move. I know how to replace it-- when I first discovered the sewing machine, the belt was broken, but there was a replacement sitting right there in the case, still in plastic with a Jo-Ann's receipt from 1992.
I have to buy another one, and I just freaking went to Jo-Ann's, and don't have time to go back.

So I can use my sewing machine if I want, but I have to turn the flywheel by hand. Which is actually fine by me, but it's slow. Faster than handsewing, sure, but slower than using the motor.

Maybe I'll take the machine in to get serviced once I get back from Pennsic...

But anyway. I'm not finished with, like, *any* garb. But I won't be naked, and I'm bringing all my stuff to do some hand-sewing. By the second week I'll look OK. I hope.

I haven't started packing, but I have collected everything I need and don't need to go buy anything else, so that's something.

I am getting ready now to go to the local newspaper's office for a photo shoot. They're using me and Z as illustrations for their article on "Weight Acceptance", which I'm trying to convince the guy is more normally called either "Fat Acceptance" or "Size Positivity" by those who actually are involved in it. He can call it what he want, but it'll probably be taken more seriously if he calls it what most people call it. That's all I'm really saying there.
He wants me to pose with a bunch of beets, while Z poses with a bag of pork rinds. Because those are actual foodstuffs that we had in our house, and he thought it was hilarious that I won't touch the pork rinds because I think they're gross, but Z loves them. And is the skinny one.

Eh, I hope it turns out well. You know what I mean. I'm not exactly at my ease being set up as the poster child for the unrepentant fatties of my hometown. But I'm not ashamed either. And I'm glad the story's being done, I'm just nervous about it. That's all.

Anyhow, we should go-- I have to buy replacement beets, because the ones I already had, that I was going to use, the greens have gone a bit yellow in the fridge and just don't look good. So wish me luck.

Comments

[kkatowll.livejournal.com]

I'm of two minds on the "call it what we call it" thing. On the one hand, often people involved in something come up with terms that aren't obvious to outsiders (like "fund balance"...which means "surplus"). So reporters need to change those.
On the other hand, if you change things too much, the people involved in the issue sometimes won't recognize it and will wonder what the hell you're talking about.
I ran across that issue yesterday in regards to a lawsuit. Lots of people have been following this because it's a big police issue, and so many people know that the whole foundation for the city's argument is the Second Class Cities Law. But normal people have no idea what the hell that is. So I referred to it as "an old city charter, dating back to 1903" in my first reference. But a couple sentences later I said, "The charter, known as the Second Class Cities Law" so that those who have been following it would know which darn thing I was talking about.

As for this one...if he's gonna talk about thinness and fatness, I suppose Fat Acceptance wouldn't work, right? Otherwise I'd say that would make the most sense -- goes directly to the point. I don't like it when people mask something with another word -- like "weight" instead of "fat." Always use the most descriptive word, not the vaguest!
But size "positivity"??? Yikes. When did positivity even become a word?? If that were my only other choice, I'd give up on being concise and just write "people who like their bodies, even if they don't meet society's standards."

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Positive and negative both are made nouns instead of adjectives by the addition of the suffix "ity", kind of like "personal" and "objective". It's a pretty common word construction and as far as I know, positivity is a pretty well-attested word of not particularly recent origin.

Weight acceptance is just really vague-- that's why it bugs me too. Fat acceptance is the standard term, and is what most people who look it up find. But it does exclude those who fall off the other end of the chart and are sick of being judged for it too, though it's important to realize that the naturally underweight are usually not, hm, discriminated against by employers and the medical establishment, or denied housing or admission to educational establishments, or routinely excluded from the media at all except as the butt of jokes. So there's that too.

Eh, I dunno,

[alex-beecroft.livejournal.com]

Good luck with both Pennsic and the newspaper thing. It's absolutely insane IMO that anyone could consider you fat or think you qualified for a newspaper article on 'size acceptance'. You're well within the range of what I would think of as normal. And with all the exercise you do, you should be a poster child for fitness!

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

I know, I was a bit taken aback that he wanted to use *me* as an illustration, but I think the contrast with Z was just too great to ignore. He's so extremely tall and skinny and so, next to him, I'm very short and fat.

There's always a debate in Fat Acceptance type circles, whether it's good to have someone only a little fat being your spokesperson. (Joy Nash (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUTJQIBI1oA) gets flack for only being a size 16 or 18 or whatever she is.)
So I don't know.

The photographer and art director both seemed to accept me as being fairly representative of fat people, though, so OK, I guess. It's not like I didn't apply the label to myself first.

I doubt I'm even a statistical outlier. But according to the BMI charts that doctors use to determine someone's health, I'm obese, so I mean, there's that.

They did pose me holding a bunch of beets and wearing my roller skates, so obviously they mean to point out that my refusal to diet is not a complete rejection of a healthy diet-- quite the opposite.

But yes, I am worried that by putting me up as the poster child of fatness, anyone fatter than me, which is going to be almost everybody the medical establishment considers fat because I'm at the low end of obesity (though everyone "overweight" is below me), is going to probably still feel alienated.
I don't know if they intend to find anyone fatter than me for the story, or what. I didn't want to say, No, find someone better.

I do have a nice scary round number for my weight-- I told the guy 210, which is a big scary number and gives me a BMI of 30.2. (30 is the cutoff between overweight and obese.) In contrast, Z is 16.1, which is about a pound above the cutoff between underweight and "OMG you're dead". Anorexics are hospitalized at 16.0, and catwalks in Spain don't allow models below 18.0.)

[greenworldgirl.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't really know much about Fat Acceptance, but to me Weight Acceptance sounds better because it seems like it....I dunno, makes it accessible to more people? I mean you don't have to be fat to be unhappy about your weight, you could be thin or just feel chunky. Weight Acceptance seems like it could benefit more people, so maybe that is what he is getting at. And his target audience is probably pretty wide, not just people who are active in the Fat Community.

As for the rest, I dunno. Little communities can get so weird. It would suck if people were upset that you weren't 'fat' enough for their tastes, cause that would seem to defeat the whole purpose- presumably feeling good about yourself at your right weight. Sometimes people get into this clannish thing where they kind of try to outdo each other by taking their little thing to the greatest extreme. It would be kind of lame if you had to be super fat to be accepted by Fat Acceptors, which perhaps brings us back to the point that Weight Acceptance could kind of be a bigger tent, as it were.

Related to that- I think BMI is kind of a crappy way to determine health anyway. I think you must be pretty dense, because you don't LOOK 210 at all. If I had been guessing I would have said 180. Being a person that exercises and has dense musculature with a layer of fat on top isn't the same thing as a person who never exercises and really has a lot of excess fat. If you compared yourself to a person like that, your health wouldn't be comparable.

And I think it can go the other way too. There are healthy people and unhealthy skinny people. I don't know what Z's BMI is but I have a very unhealthy-thin sister. In her case it's because she is taking a medication that has weight loss as a side effect, but for her it's been difficult healthwise. I'd say she's maybe at a BMI of 17? Since she lost that weight, even though she tries to eat and take vitamins she still gets sick much more then she used to. She eats tons of sweet and fatty snacks, but the weight doesn't stay on her. Besides the frequency of getting sick, it also seems more severe, she gets pneumonia easily, and can be on antibiotics for months because her body can't fight anything off. Plus she's cold all the time...this winter she'd wear a pair of leggings with two pairs of pants on top, and our weather rarely gets below freezing. We get frost, no snow. But she'd still be laying sweaters and wearing a jacket inside the house. I've known other naturally skinny people, and they didn't have those problems.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

I'm not worried about people getting upset about me not being "fat" enough, but I'm very worried about people assuming, since I'm the poster child, that there's some sort of abstract cutoff between "fat" and "too fat", and that Fat Acceptance or Size Positivity or Not Being An Asshole About Appearances or whatever you want to call the movement has a cutoff point.
Because that's a common misconception. Even the guy interviewing me was like, "Yes, but how fat is too fat?" and he went on and was like, "But what if you gained a bunch of weight?" In essence he was saying, this refusal to go on a weightloss diet is all well and good since you're not really all that fat, but what if you were reaaaaallly fat, what then, would you diet?

And that kind of happens a lot in FA. People start to accept that, because society's bar of what is "normal" is set so extremely low, it makes sense for those of us just built large to realize that it's pretty dumb to try to be a size 0 when your hipbones alone are already a size 10. Or whatever.
But then along comes somebody who's my height and a hundred pounds heavier. Say she's still pretty fit, and hikes a lot, and is a vegan. But is she "too fat"?

Such questions are missing the point-- which is not just that the BMI charts are ridiculous (something like 78% of people are outside the "normal" range on that chart, which I think is a pretty good reason to stop calling it "normal"), but that the whole idea of using the number on the scale to guage someone's worth as a human being is inherently ludicrous.

So I'm not worried that the fat people will think I'm not fat enough. I'm worried that those outside the movement will take me as some kind of representative, and will still believe that people fatter than me still deserve the same treatment they've always gotten. And I'm really, really worried that the people fatter than me who most need this movement will continue to believe that it's not for them, that they're still too big for it, or that it only applies to hourglass figures, or that it only applies to the very athletic, or that it only applies to girls who are too skinny to shop at Lane Bryant.
(I probably should have mentioned that in the interview. I'm too skinny to shop at Lane Bryant. I'm not even solidly a plus size.)

[greenworldgirl.livejournal.com]

Ah, ok. That makes sense.

[alex-beecroft.livejournal.com]

Those BMI charts are ridiculous. I only ever managed to get into the 'normal' range on those when I was ill with ME. I suddenly lost a whole bunch of weight and the doctor nodded approvingly, while I was going 'but I can't walk up the stairs!' Obviously sudden weight gain is a terrible thing but sudden weight loss must mean that I'm dieting. Sheesh!

For my own part I am concerned that I'm a size 18 now because I'm not exercising at all. But it's the not exercising and therefore being terribly unfit thing that's worrying me, not the size. I've been a size 16 all my life except for two years which I spent on a 1,300 calorie diet. I got down to a (British) size 10, and I've never been so miserable.

I think people need to realize that being thin doesn't make you any happier. If you can manage to be happy and relatively fit and healthy then what does it matter what size you are?

[alaindan.livejournal.com]

What kind of sewing machine do you have? Alanna has an old Singer that is bulletproof...but then again I have a Viking Rose that I've not yet manage to break.

Ahh the last minute rush to finish garb. I will be deep into that when I get back I think, I made another pair of pants and another undertunic, so I as well will not have to go naked. The period swimming hole is another matter entirely though.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

I have a vintage Singer knockoff that probably dates from the 30s. It's straight-stitch only and yes, is bulletproof, but the rubber part does wear out.


I'm camping right near that old swimming hole, so I expect there'll be a lot of nudity in my vacation. I'm bringing a bathing suit, though. Mostly because I have a really hot bathing suit I like to wear. (It's a repro '50s swimsuit and damn I look foxy in it.)

[alaindan.livejournal.com]

Oooh. Where exactly is the swimming hole then? It is high on the list for our trip, it has been a while since the last trip to a nude beach. heh.

And yay for foxy bathing suits. Mrowr.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

I do not understand the geography of Pennsic much if at all, so I'm not positive. It's down in the Swamp, is all I know. I'm camping with Three Swans.

[alaindan.livejournal.com]

Ok cool. We are in Calontir's camp. Stop by sometime if you get a chance, my SCA name is Kjartan Hakonarson and hers is Alanna Goodheart. We'll probably be the only Midrealmers in Calontir camp, and I'll probably be the only one with rapier gear there. Heh.