open letter: the world needs to know
July 6, 2010
A web writin’ friend responds to a Facebook comment:
comment: Women of NY, I am begging you to please wear age and body appropriate shorts and skirts. I can’t begin to express how tired I am of being confronted with extreme jiggle and cellulite each time I walk out the door! Adding an inch or two to your clothing isn’t too much to ask is it?
***
dear commenter,
this group of humans we call “women”? they have fat on their bodies. this is normal and healthy and good.
this fat? it jiggles sometimes. and due to the influences of not only estrogen, but also catecholamines, insulin, and various thyroid hormones, in 90% of post-pubertal women, it manifests as cellulite. OMG WTF HELLA NASTY, RIGHT?
you, commenter, appear to be exempt from this universal female biology. you have a tiny waist and (i assume) cellulite-free legs. this much is undeniable: you are fucking beautiful. because of that, you are privileged in ways i will never understand.
your message is personal. i have cellulite. my thighs jiggle. i can’t always find clothes to harness, squeeze, and cover my fat in aesthetically pleasing ways. i’m sure you’re oblivious to this fact: when you talk shit on women’s cellulite, you are talking about me.
i am 5’11″ and i weigh one hundred and fifty five pounds (COLLECTIVE GASP OF HORROR!). according to the fashion industry, i am a BIG, FAT FUCK. they probably think i shouldn’t even be allowed to wear clothes, which is why they don’t make shirts long enough to cover my corpulent belly.
so you know what i do? i refuse to give a fuck about fashion, or propriety, and i put my energy into something more worthy of my time. i refuse to spend hours wading through the sweatshop-sewn wares of stores whose clothes don’t fit me anyway. i let my bellyfat peek through between my shirt and my jeans, which themselves are unflattering to my jiggly thigh fat. and i march my fat ass out the door, and i refuse to think about it for even another second.
commenter? don’t you dare tell me what i can and cannot wear – what i can and cannot do — as a result of my not fitting your beauty standard. don’t act like it’s some kind of personal affront when i decide to press my untanned flesh into a two-piece and enjoy a day at the beach. i think i look fucking hot, and if you don’t agree, well then you can go fuck yourself.
i’m so sick of denying myself the opportunity to live because i’m not yet skinny enough. i have spent my whole life trying to fit my natural frame into the mold of your waifish body. i have dieted, i have starved, i have fainted in the gym and in the streets. and you know what i realized? my body will not conform your beauty ethic, not ever. there is no runway model inside of me, waiting to jump out the moment i diet hard enough. i am just BIG.
so you know what? i quit. this whole idiot dieting game, this arbitrary standard of thinness, i refuse to play. i eat healthy food and i ride my bike for hours on end and then i work to accept the balance that my body chooses for itself. and it ain’t easy, because at every turn, i am bombarded with misogynistic messages just like yours.
if, for whatever reason, you think i’m skinny enough to be exempt from your attack, then you’re certainly talking shit about my friends, who i find sexy as hell because their bodies have curves. this message is for them, too, for everyone who has been told they’re “too big to be wearing that” by some self-righteous, skinny jerk like you.
facts: a full 50% of 11-year-old girls think they are too fat. 80% of 13-year-old girls have at one point been on a weight-loss diet. girls this young should be playing with their friends, writing secret-admirer letters to boys, climbing trees and doing cartwheels. instead, they’re consumed with shame and self-hatred, that for many of them will manifest as life-threatening eating disorders in a few years. and this, this is fucking bullshit.
commenter, i have an important message for you. every time you want to criticize anyone else’s body or fashion choices, i want you to SHUT THE FUCK UP. i’m dead serious, commenter: shut the fuck up. stop contributing to this toxic environment of body hatred. step outside your bubble of privilege and read some feminist writing on eating disorders, and when you think you’ve read enough essays, i want you to choke down a couple more. try to imagine how it feels to be me, or [any number of friends, names withheld], anyone else who doesn’t have a naturally “flawless” body, according to arbitrary magazine standards. try to step inside the mind of [friend], who is the skinniest motherfucker i know, but feels compelled to eat mustard packets to lose weight. think of us every time you want to pipe up with some snarky, misogynistic comment, shut the fuck up a little more.
i can’t in good conscience let a comment like yours go unchecked. i am angry, and it’s time that i stand up for myself.
I don’t know the person who made the comment, I only know the girl that reacted to it (who pens on a personal site under l’anguish) and blessed me with deep, deep sigh of content.
-CJ
life lessons
June 24, 2010
Maggie Mason talks about things she wishes she’d known before 20.
2. Get off the couch. If you find yourself playing hard to get, don’t pretend to be busy. Just be busy.
8. Be polite. It keeps doors open, lessens the potential for misunderstandings, and increases the odds of getting invited back to the beach house.
10. You look good. There’s no such thing as the hottest person in the room. Everyone is attracted to something different, so just take those odds and run with them.
I was inspired. Obviously you have to experience something for it to be your own personal lesson. But I would have been okay with someone whispering these in my ear during a particularly rough spot I had between nineteen and twenty.
A few of my own:
- You are not invincible. Unprotected sex does get you pregnant, turns out.
- You don’t know everything and that can be pretty cool.
- Find a talented artist before you let them put permanent ink in your skin. Just because they’re open doesn’t mean they’re good. Coming from someone with a few ‘re-dos’ in her future.
- This too shall pass. In a few years, the most embarrassing and regretful moments won’t matter. Patience is key.
- Be kind. You have no idea who will end up being your boss.
- Recognize your dislike for someone as jealousy when that’s all it is and then compliment her hair.
- First impressions can be a huge load of crap. Give everyone a shot.
What lessons would you teach little you?
-CJ
for thought
June 9, 2010
a text from my sister, last night:
My friend just sent me this. I think this is one of the greatest quotes I’ve ever heard. FWD: “I wanna get in a bar fight and a car crash and get stoned. And then I’ll decide who I am. Nobody decides who you are. You do. You say ,’Wow, I fucked up there. Let’s not do that again.’ And you work and you sweat and you bleed. And that’s what makes what makes you you.”
Essentially the premise of Fight Club, sort of.
But there’s something to said about the reserved power that comes from adrenaline and desperation and fury. It’s inside of us but so many will continue to lead a life that never asks them to tap into it. For safety and sensibility and common sense – I get why some may not ever want to know about what they’re capable of. Based on experience or, shit, genetics, some poeple need to keep the lid sealed, certainly. And it is not to say that you don’t know yourself if you don’t experience life threatening moments and the like, but can you imagine who you may meet in the event that one or more of your powerful, untapped canisters is broken open by a surge of adrenaline unlike one you’ve ever felt before? If someone harmed my child, I may meet a killer that looks and talks just like me but I wouldn’t recognize myself. Or in moments of desperation to save my own life or someone else’s, what could I find myself capable of doing with the odds stacked against me?
I equally do and do not want to know these things.
-CJ
aaaaaare you shitting me?
June 8, 2010
I trust you know what to do with this information: http://www.japanla.com/detail.php?design=2265
Also, eat it Captcha. There needs to be less steps between my URLs and me, not more.
-CJ
a bit of advice
May 27, 2010
I was watching Nurse Jackie a week or so ago, when a patient is admitted for a bullet to the head and she requires surgery. To calm her, Edie Falco’s character promises she will be there with her right when the girl wakes up from surgery. The young girl ends up waking up alone and tells Jackie later to, ‘keep [her] fucking promises.’ That part was a mainline direct to a very specific memory I have from my first and last (LAST, dammit) hospital admittance.
My birth story just sounds hackneyed seven and a half years after the fact but one tiny detail of it was this: Scared shitless, having just been shot with a spinal and preparing to go into emergency surgery for the first (AND LAST) time in my life, it was all I could do but hang my head over my basketball shaped tummy and cry. My super thick hair was making me crazy (my ponytails are as thick as Redwoods, no shit), sticking in my tears and my mouth and my panic had brought my temperature to a healthy six billionty. This mound of hair was helping to cool me off not at all. I asked a number of people to help me find something to put it up with, to no avail. Be it my age at the time (17) or the fact that I was not a human but a dollar amount because I had kickass union insurance; I was not taken seriously for virtually anything. The drug use they interrogated me of (refusing to accept my sobbing no, no, no but believing it when my mom answered them for me), my insistence that I was going to puke while crucified on the surgery bed and having no use of my arms/hands… (I repeatedly asked the anesthesiologist to remove the oxygen mask and he repeatedly told me I was fine and patients always thought they were going to be sick. According to him, ‘fine’ is having your vomit sent back into your mouth because you’re STUCK in a fucking MASK. What did leak out went down my neck and into my hair. I smelled of roses for my stay in that shit hole, LET ME TELL YOU.)
I finally made actual human-to-human contact with a brunette nurse, who promised to find me a rubber band. Light beamed down on her, choirs erupted. I had a saving grace and my first deep breath.
In the operating room, things happened and babies were born and blood was motherfucking everywhere (leave it to me to make the story of life as visibly morbid as possible). I came to under a heated blanket and my newborn daughter’s dad is sitting next to me. Where he came from, I couldn’t understand, and where I was laying was a whole other mystery in itself. Whatever went into those needles in my hand and back knocked me senseless. Squinty faced, I saw the brown haired nurse. She was the only other person in the room, with her back to me and what I did think of was not my first coherent thoughts as a parent or my premature baby’s well being, but: that bitch promised me a rubber band.
In such a sensitive, scared state of unknowing – that was a personal attack. She did it on purpose. She wanted me to suffer. She was an awful, awful person and she would PAY.
Which, free of IVs and the like, I understand is untrue. Maybe she turned the damn hospital on its head for me and her resources failed her. Maybe she just agreed with what I wanted because she knew, correctly, that I would mellow the fuck out. (I might have been a little… how you saaaay… uncooperative throughout some portion of the evening.)
But I knew what that fictional patient meant when she scolded Jackie, all too well.
Do: keep your fucking promises. You have no idea what they could mean to someone.
-CJ
“You can still boo him for being an asshole…”
May 17, 2010
During the much anticipated UFC Machida vs. Rua rematch last weekend, viewers were also subject to Josh Koscheck being a prick. He also fought against Paul Daley in the co-main event. During which he was the recipient of a supposed illegal knee to the head while he was clearly down. He put on a show to make the ref aware of what had happened and audiences were bombarded with four and a half trillion replays of Daley’s knee grazing Josh’s ‘fro, resulting in what everyone thought was deserved boo’ing at Koscheck for being a lying bitch.
Turns out:
http://www.cagepotato.com/do-we-all-owe-josh-koscheck-apology
Just before the knee that didn’t contact comes one that does. Hard. And the replay was incorrectly displayed to leave out the crucial, illegal hit.
” [...] he actually did get hit by an illegal knee in his fight against Paul Daley. You can still boo him for being an asshole in general, but at least give him the common courtesy of not calling him a liar.”
In the name of fairness, I’m relieved this was cleared up. We take for granted that we’re shown accurate replays.
Daley also hit Koscheck after the final bell, an understandable move being that I want to do the same every day of my life, but waaaay illegal. Dana White, on Daley’s dirty move:
“He’s done,” continued White. “I don’t care if he fights in every show all over the world and becomes the best and everybody thinks he’s the pound for pound best in the world; he will never fight in the UFC ever again.”
Josh Koscheck is one of the least likable fighters in the sport. I love watching him lose and cheering against him. But I’m glad this worked in his favor if only to remind people that we’re not seeing every second as clearly as we think we are and that the rules of the UFC are honored, no matter what.
-CJ
hindsight
April 13, 2010
I used to share my car with my boyfriend.
TWICE I found someone else’s lipstick in my backseat…
I am not nearly as naïve anymore.
-CJ
fed up & helpless
March 19, 2010
It’s finally time for the economy to be on the receiving end of my fist.
Between the increase of hours without the additional pay, loss of unemployment to cover the original 10% pay cut my department took, increased medical/dental/vision – I am depleated of optimism.
I want to be able to afford my kid’s insurance and daycare – neither of which is happening.
“We’re just not an industry that goes out to dinner and a movie anymore. We rent DVDs and eat frozen pizza.”
Greetings to every day of my life.
Sorry. I am in a FOUL mood this morning.
-CJ
