Quote of the morning

“I’m not trying to help you; I’m trying to have a fucking flamewar! So put on your asbestos longjohns and let’s do it like USENET!”

I didn't read the whole thread, I just read a thread about the thread, but if anyone wants to, the original thread is on a feminist blog called Shakesville and is about a video game whose premise is to stuff a woman so full of food she becomes too fat to walk, thereby making it more difficult for your enemies to abduct her because they need more guys to carry her. Yes, really, there really is a game like that. And the gamers, after the feminists and fat-acceptance folks objected, started a flamewar because OMG CENSORSHIP. As far as I can tell. Fortunately there are some really funny and articulate feminists who read Shapely Prose, which is where the secondary thread was.

Let's do it like USENET indeed. Love it.
(The thread on the whole is just masturbatory on both sides, but it amuses me immensely-- the Shakesville poster realized that she had been linked to somewhere and was getting a massive influx of illiterate trolls, so she set up an open thread for them, basically, and baited it with all her regular commenters, who spent the whole thing having an inside-joke festival. If there's a better way to deal with illiterate Internet troll invasions, I can't think of it. However, that page is on the verge of crashing browsers, so do use caution if you click.)

So yesterday I got an email from a reporter at the local big daily newspaper saying he's doing a story on "weight acceptance" and found me via Google to be one of his local sources. So he wants to interview me. Which is pretty awesome. But I'm not 100% sure what he means by "weight acceptance"; Z says if that's really what the story's about he wants to be interviewed about how he has come to accept the fact that at six feet three, he will probably never weigh more than one hundred and forty, maybe fifty pounds, no matter what he does, and how the acceptance that he will never be conventional in appearance has freed him to enjoy life more fully, though it still stings when people, even doctors, assume something's wrong with him, and make snide cracks about feeding him.
Har har.

But mostly, I'm just scrambling to get shit done for Pennsic. OMG. So much to do. I want to keep working until I have one finished choli that really fits me, but I did the better design up in thin muslin, so it's see-through, so I'd have to pick it apart and put a shell over it (using the mockup as a lining) for it to be wearable, and the one I did that was lined, I'll have to take in a bit somewhere in the front/shoulder area for it to be properly supportive, and it needs new ties put in. So bleh. No time. I think what I'm going to do is bring the fabric, notions, pattern info, and a bunch of materials with me to Pennsic, and hand-sew them there. Handsewing is no big deal on something as tiny and complex as a choli; machine-sewing it is hard because it's got these little fiddly bits that have to be eased in to one another (and OH MY GOD I could not have done it at all if I hadn't taken those 'lessons' with Aunt Ruta a couple of years ago, but just having observed her technique, it was really pretty easy if I concentrated-- I am SO making her a big thank-you something, I just don't know what. Anyone who can find me a cross-stitch diagram of an old farmer with a pipe, you would win the Internets FOR EVER, because that's part of a joke I want to make-- wait, where was I? Oh yes, easing in) and anyway the straight seams are like four inches long at most. So to hand-sew one of these would be simple, and also would allow me to line and interline it easily.
So I will be making cholis at Pennsic. Which means I have to finish the houppelande now, make a fabric belt which I think I will interline with *something* to make it stiffer but what I don't know, perhaps felt if I have any left but I only got a yard of it... where was I going again? Oh yes. I just want an overdress with sleeves, and the seams are so long and straight I want to do them on the machine before I go. But everything else, I will bring with, and I will do a bunch of handsewing the first few days, and then I will be fine. Fine! Fine I tell you.

What was I doing? I forgot.

Oh yeah, the real side effect of my constant low-grade Pennsic anxiety/excitement (it really is both) is that I have no attention span. And I keep doing no-attention-span stupid things, things that don't seem stupid at the time but are if you've been paying attention to the bigger picture at all. Like, um, for the past week, going to bed very late and getting up very early. And then wondering why I am so confused and easily-distracted. Yes. And then of course I'm so busy I never take a nap (which is my usual rationale-- I love staying up late, I love getting up early, I love napping, it's a perfect schedule if you have the time for it which theoretically I do...) so really, I'm pretty sleep-deprived by this point. Which means I'm a moron.

But my learning to sew is going really well. I should do another costume diary but I keep forgetting to take pictures. Of anything. For the record, I'm working on this in a polyesterish wool-herringbone-look fabric in dark red and very dark brown, which should be serviceable but not too heavy.

media!

So, that was interesting. Talked to the dude from the newspaper for a while. We did bring Z into it, to make my case that your body does what it does and is the size it wants to be, and can only be affected so much by diet and exercise-- because he and I really do eat the same amount, only I exercise a ton more, and he's so skinny and I'm... well, not.
So he wants us both to come in to get our picture taken for the story, which is pretty exciting but also scary.

He seemed to really want me to eat more than Z, and was pretty hung-up on what we actually eat-- but he's a foodie, so that kind of makes sense from him.

Anyway, I'm not sure I managed to make my primary point, which is that nutrition and activity/exercise levels for someone really are pretty separate from their appearance, by and large, barring exceptional issues, and the whole point of Fat Acceptance, for me anyway, is that since these things are and should be separate, it really is nobody's business what I look like, and I'm tired of always feeling apologetic about it. I am the size that I am. I eat what I eat. I do what I do. They're not really particularly related. My eating habits and exercise habits have fluctuated wildly throughout my adult life, and have had very very little impact on my appearance.
And my appearance is nobody's business except the person with whom I'm sleeping, and even that doesn't give him license to try to change it.

I did make my point that you have a) one life to live, and b) one body to live it in, and if you make the modification of that body your #1 priority, you miss out on a whole lot of other stuff. So my point is, you should use food as something to enjoy but also as nutrition, and leave everything else off of it-- don't abuse food like a drug, for certain-- and you should also use exercise as something to make you feel good, not something to change what you look like, especially since it may or may not even have any effect. (Or at least, may or may not have the desired effect.)

Anyway. He asked me how fat is "too fat", and I said I don't think that's actually a good question. He rephrased it and said "what if you got in a time machine and saw yourself five years in the future and you'd put on 100 pounds? Would you think 'I've got to do something about that'?" And I said... Well, I would assume that I'd put on 100 pounds for a reason, and I'd want to address that reason. Whether I'd developed some kind of binge eating disorder or was suffering from depression that left me unwilling/unable to do my normal activities, or perhaps sustained an injury that kept me from exercising-- the underlying problem is what's important, not the fact of the weight itself.
He hadn't heard of Health at Every Size, so I hope he looks that up-- that's a pretty good explanation of what I was talking about, I think.
I don't care what the number on the scale is, or what the size tag in my jeans (provided I can find any) says. The point is, if the rest of my house is in order, then I'm happy. If I have access to satisfying food that meets my nutritional requirements, if I can move my body in ways that are at least entertaining if not enjoyable unto themselves, then my body will be the size that it is.

Ehh, anyway. We'll see how this goes. I don't know anyone else locally who's interested in the politics of fat, either way. I did recommend he speak to one of my teammates who is a plus-size model. I don't know how she feels about being labeled that way but it's a label she uses on herself, despite being much smaller than me. So I figured, she'd be a different viewpoint for sure.

So we'll see how this pans out.

FA stuff

I think I may attempt to shift focus and put the Fat Acceptance / Size Positivity rants primarily onto one or two of the other blogs I have (I know, right?) and try, try to keep this blog mostly for personal things. (I'll probably crosspost links, if I can, though.) e:strip is the one that gets a lot of Google traffic, and I have a Wordpress one I wasn't linking to from here yet because I update it infrequently and wanted a sizable backlog before I "went public" with it. I may not actually link directly because I don't necessarily want any traffic from it to find this site. That one is *theoretically* anonymous. But I probably can't manage to keep it that way. (I just didn't want to have to censor the crap out of everything, and thought I'd try my hand at censoring out the identifying info instead. Hm, yeah. Well, whatever. I'll link to it from e:strip and stop linking to here.

Oh what a tangled Intarwebs we weave.
Hopefully I can convince the reporter guy to link to e:strip if he links anywhere at all.

The best part is how Z got in on it. I'm tired of seeing all this Fat Acceptance stuff where people are like Oh you're just saying that because you're fat. I'm not. I would say it if I were skinny too, I like to think-- basically, my appearance is none of your goddamn business, and also, you can't judge how healthy someone is by looking at them.
People also often have, as a first response to finding out about this stuff, the reaction that "But life is hard on skinny people too!" so I'm hoping this can head that off at the pass and get them to think about something *else*, for once.
Anyway.
I just hope this journal doesn't get mentioned, because size positivity and related topics tend to bring trolls out of the goddamn woodwork and I don't need that. Especially since I will be out of town when the story is published, and decidedly offline for the long haul.
Bleh.