"The world is violent and mercurial": a quote in nine takes

"Can I leave the house like this?" A fat-shamed woman speaks

Older age brings with it some very strange goals, things you wouldn't ever have considered or even thought about before. Right now I am trying to train myself to go out of the house wearing shorts. I have lots and lots of pairs of shorts in all different sizes, left over from all my "thin periods" and "fat periods", though I always felt deep shame that I had to keep such a range of clothing and often just threw the fat clothes out.

I want to be able to go out, at least out of the house, with jelly-looking jiggly thighs, not that anyone cares in this age of 300-pound women in crop-tops with spaghetti straps and short-shorts that ride way up because of the fat. You see it every day, along with fat men whose entire bellies show because their shirts won’t stay down. The only alternative are “curtain” shirts like Daryll wears on those Save-on ads, the enormous tent-like shirt falling straight down from the fattest point of the belly.  To say the least, it is not a pretty sight, and life-threatening to boot (with people in their teens and 20s alarming me the most, 3-year-old children in tow and babies in the shopping cart). But no one cares or even thinks anything of it now. 

It has become such a new normal that, like texting while driving (or walking or getting married or having sex or giving birth, or attending a funeral), no one pays any attention to it any more. No one even sees it, because it's what people do now. If you're weird like me and don't even use a phone for anything except phoning, you are so far out of the orbit of the human condition that you often feel marooned in a kind of strange outworld of obsolescence. And God forbid you should say anything about any of this to upset the status quo, or you will be accused of being a hater or a "troll". 

But no one seems to know or remember what it was like to be fat-shamed at 132 pounds.

When I was growing up, being 10 pounds overweight was disgraceful, almost a crime, and you had to "go on Atkins” (now called “keto”, though it is the exact same thing. Last year it was "paleo", and no one knows yet what it will be next year). 

EVERYONE was obsessed with dieting and losing weight, and in high school I was stigmatized for being "too fat". I even overheard disparaging remarks about me, which people felt perfectly free to make because I was a sort of non-entity. When I was 16, my parents sent me to the doctor because I wouldn't come out of my room, and the doctor told me I needed to lose 30 pounds and "dress like the other girls do" (in miniskirts and hot pants) in order to attract a boy friend. I weighed somewhere around 140 pounds, which today I would just LOVE to weigh.

Throughout my teens, twenties, thirties, even forties, there were weight charts everywhere, in doctor’s offices, in women’s mags, in diet and exercise books and at every turn, and they were all the same: a rigid weight range according to height and frame size. My range was 120 – 135 pounds, with the implication that 135 was "too fat”. I dieted and dieted and dieted. The diets were ridiculous and often included alcohol, I guess to make them bearable. 

When I was nearer 120, I got masses of compliments from everyone, particularly from my older siblings' male friends, and was told I looked absolutely beautiful, totally transformed from the mess I used to be, and when I gained it all back – which I now know that 95% of people do after crash dieting, as your body clamours to pull itself out of an engineered famine – all the compliments just stopped. There was an embarrassed silence, and I felt drenched in shame. I had to get back on the dieting treadmill and try to beat my body back down again so I could be acceptable. I was sure I was the only person on earth who had ever had this problem, mainly because no one ever talked about it (because each person thought they were the only person on earth who had ever had this problem).

So is it any better now that fat is (supposedly) much more OK? What the hell happened to all those weight charts, and those ubiquitous booklets with those evil 10BX exercises, and measuring every morsel that went in your mouth and taking a tape measure to every conceivable body part and getting on the scale (and writing the number down) every single day? Even worse than that, looking in the mirror nude and concluding you were "fat" even at that magic number of 120 pounds.

The women's magazines were the worst: outlandish diets which told you exactly what to eat meal-by-meal each day of the week, so that you HAD to have exactly one half-scoop of low-fat cottage cheese, a canned peach half rinsed under the tap to remove all syrup, and a slice of dry melba toast for dinner, but ONLY on Saturday, to a total of maybe 300 calories. The diet would be followed on the next page with a recipe for a gooey, 3-layer, buttercream-frosted chocolate fudge cake. A recipe for bulimia, which fortunately I did not have (but could have - I believe society created that particular disease, which practically did not exist until the '70s).

I remember, almost with a sense of trauma, a horrible article featuring the model Cheryl Tiegs. This woman had the usual model's body type of 5"11" and perhaps 105 or 110 pounds. Though she reassured us that "not every woman can attain my weight level," she nonetheless provided a healthy weight-reduction diet (and a weight chart with height and frame size. She had no frame, so it was easy for her.) She talked about how important it was to enjoy your meals every day, and that food was important because it represented a "warm connection to life". (This is just one of those things I vividly remember, for some reason.) She then laid out what you should weigh (or COULD weigh if you were halfway serious about looking good). At five feet you should weigh no more than 100 pounds, and for every inch over five feet, you were allowed to add three pounds. This meant that my "acceptable" weight was 112. I hadn't weighed 112 since I was 14 years old.

The battle for me, right now, is “can I wear shorts outside?” Just that. Can I go out of the house in them? A huge step further: can I wear them to Walmart? Walmart is Fat City, as nasty people take surreptitious photos with their phones of fat, ill-dressed people, likely poor, that end up splattered all over social media. Though I am the only person who has ever mentioned this, or even noticed it, TV documentaries about obesity ALWAYS show very fat people waddling along the street without showing their faces. No one thinks this exploits anyone because they are, of course, "anonymous" and have no power of veto, so can freely be used as examples of "what not to be". What if you saw yourself being held up for such contemptuous (and potentially worldwide) ridicule? 

But the issue for me is: can I allow myself to show jiggly legs that are the product of losing and gaining and losing and gaining and losing and gaining? The emotional scarring has gone very deep from literal decades of damage, of hating myself because society told me I'd better hate myself until I lose that weight once and for all, keep it off forever without deviating a pound, and make myself acceptable to the world. 

I still feel funny and sort of uneasy putting on shorts, though I can now fit into the mid-range that every yo-yo dieter has in her wardrobe, along with unrealistically tiny things that I couldn't get my leg into all the way up to "size elephant". Sometimes, like the morbidly obese ladies sporting spaghetti strap tops, short-shorts and bare midriff, I just tell myself not to give a rip. Nobody else does. Nobody's looking, which is probably true (and a relief, actually, though older women often complain that they have become "invisible". Nothing would make me happier than to BE invisible.) 

It's the new normal, so I’m doing it anyway, and carrying myself as well as I can. I never really thought about how sad it is that a woman who may be overweight but isn't obese by any medical standard can't wear shorts. She just can't. You don't, when your legs aren't thin or firm, or if they feel jiggly when you walk. If you do wear them because it is insufferably hot, you stay in the house. 

I'm going out of the house in shorts now, realizing that no one really looked at me in the first place. Though I hated how I looked when I was young, I now see that - oh, I can't say it, so I will let the photos of my younger self tell the story. Do I really look fat in any of them?

EAT PIE

We are the World! (excerpt)

The earnestness with which people sang this lame little ditty is lamentable, but it's kind of an artifact of its times. Even Bob Dylan stood there, not really singing but looking very uncomfortable. 

Amazing skating gif!

Bullwinkle's Corner - the 1961 commercials

"It's not that I don't trust you, William Tell,
But first I have some Cheerios to sell!"

Some of the best commercials of the era. For certain, the best animated commercials. And for double-sure, the best Cheerios commercials.

Along with The Flintstones and Top Cat, Rocky and Bullwinkle was among that rare cartoon series which was shown in prime time. Along with the continuing adventures of "Moose and Squirrel" in Frostbite Falls, we had Peabody and Sherman, Fractured Fairy Tales and the inimitable Dudley Do-right. Attempts to turn these into live-action movies were a miserable failure. You had to be there. 

Meantime, here's an obvious animation mistake that reveals just how low-budget these things were in the '60s. It was the style then. Characters could appear and disappear, and either nobody noticed, or nobody cared.

The Breck Girl of the Horsy Set

Horse playing piano

Just because it's Tuesday.

Baby Goat Flood at Sunflower Farm

"O lost your mumbet": old people on Facebook

BLOGGER'S NOTE. Am I making fun of "old people" in posting these? I just think they're funny in a silly, whimsical way, hopefully not poking nasty fun at an age group we are ALL going to end up in (if we are so lucky). "O lost your mumbet" is classic, as are the bean comments and profile pictures which are wildly askew. I confess I flounder at the thought of technology and stick to the few vastly-outdated things (like this blog, which was once described as "embarrassing") that I know how to do. I am a desktop person in a Smartphone world. The rest of it, well, cream of corn suits me fine, babies hanging from sunflowers are adorable, and unpleasant granddaughters are a reality which, though I don't want to face it, is comforting to see identified as one of the nastier realities of grandparenthood.

Victorian women in hats

Black crow blues

, , , Or is THIS causing the tornadoes?

Talkback 16: Cars Causing Tornadoes?

I think this person may be on to something. Hey, look at the increase in tornadoes recently! Either Satan is loosed upon the world, God is bringing down his hammer of wrath, or it's just cars causing them by driving around in circles. Given a choice, which one would YOU prefer?

Sea Foam Candy Failure

This video is a perennial favorite, mainly because I have been trying to make Sea Foam Candy for approximately fifty years and have NEVER had it turn out. No matter how closely I follow the recipe, when I make it, it tastes carbonized and scorched, or else so gummy and sad that your first impulse is to spit it out.

It was brave and good-hearted of this woman to post this disaster, which is quite dramatic after all, and could have been even worse if she had spilled any of this molten lava on herself. Liquefied sugar has the power to dissolve human flesh. There are sixty million YouTube videos showing you how to make this "simple" candy (and it IS simple, if you only look at the ingredients). It's one of those things that is all method, in that the syrup must be cooked to exactly the right temperature before adding the baking soda. The woman even uses a candy thermometer here, so the temperature is exact, but it makes no difference whatsoever.

This woman is right to call the recipe a "science experiment", for the seething sugar slurry (which inevitably calls for a tablespoon or two of vinegar) combines with a spoonful of baking soda to create something like one of those volcanoes we used to make for a middle school science project. The baking soda, a caustic substance, is dumped in all at once and stirred violently to prevent the whole thing from overflowing the pot onto the counter. Molten sugar is a particularly evil substance, cooking down ever more thickly and darkly, until the sudden violent injection of thousands of tiny gas bubbles triggers a fulminating monsoon. 

But the worst aspect of this evil stuff isn't the method, or even the success or failure of the result. Even the best sea foam candy (or sponge toffee or honeycomb or yellow man - yes, it really is called that in Ireland for some reason) leaves you with a nasty surprise. Once you have chewed your way down through all the sticky sweetness, you're left with a bitter, metallic, even caustic taste in your mouth, as if you've taken fireplace ashes and mixed them with Comet cleanser. It's the baking soda, and if you keep on chewing you're left with a hard little nub of it. How delightful. Let me wash out my mouth now.

I had a wonderful Nigella Lawson video on this, and now I can't find it. She said this was a "Cornish" recipe (baloney!), and that the original name was "hokey-pokey". Myself, I thought that was a dumb dance you did at wedding receptions, but never mind. Nigella was remarkably smug as she cooked up the "gol-den cah-ra-mell" on the stove, then snuck naughty little bites of it while in the back of the limousine on her way to the dinner party. I just couldn't relate. Just how does she deal with that nasty little nub, the Revenge of the Science Project, as "hokey-pokey" inevitably turns back into the caustic chemicals from which it was created?

The bluest eyes

Queen of elegance

Trapped in amber: a very weird dream

(From my journal, August 10/19)

I had the weirdest dream about Sternthal (ed. note: a doctor I went to for years, who used to dismiss, demean and bully me). I don’t usually remember dreams, but this one was so strange. I was fiddling around with an amber necklace with huge stones in it, golf-ball-sized, and very ornate. I was taking it apart for the purposes of re-stringing it in different designs, and huge rocklike beads were suddenly loose in a sort of rock pile, along with a lot of smaller ones. But then I found myself standing in some sort of mysterious lineup of people. 

When I got to the front, I could see that Sternthal was sitting there by himself on an elevated chair, not saying anything. I didn’t know what the other people were doing there, but when it got to be my turn I presented him with an exact duplicate of the original necklace, only it was much smaller for some reason. He took it and I don’t think said anything, but just stared at me with big creepy unblinking eyes. Didn’t say thank you or acknowledge me or the gift, as if it went without saying, it was only his due, and it was about time I delivered on it. Even that I should be grateful for the rare and (of course) undeserved chance of being able to do this. Then I moved on, and that was the end of it.

I DO have a lot of amber jewelry, because years ago I went through an amber phase (amber was wildly popular then), and I DO often dismember jewelry, particularly necklaces, to make doll jewelry. It hasn’t been worn in years and years and is just sitting there. But the Sternthal thing is weird. Lining up seems like people paying some sort of weird homage, or presenting him with something, but I couldn’t tell. Except for staring at me with huge dark creepy unblinking eyes out of The Fly, he didn’t even acknowledge me or what I gave him. 

He was obviously the most important person in the room, and all the others were just whack jobs or nut bars or whatever-it-is you call chronic mental patients nowadays. They're just people who go around shooting up shopping malls and schools for no reason. (Their huge gun collections have nothing to do with it.) They were paying obeisance, because that was what they were supposed to do – in fact, it went without saying, you just “did that”. It was not a choice on anyone’s part, but neither was it something they did not want. They simply had no will, and “did that” because they “did that”. They had been erased.

I couldn’t see the others really, never saw any faces but just identical bodies, though I was aware they were there and moving. I thought of futuristic movies like 1984 and Metropolis, but that comparison may have come after I woke up. People trudging mindlessly forward in a line. He looked like a cult leader that you had to go up to and pay homage to, and in fact you were supposed to think (if you thought at all) that you were very fortunate to be able to do so. It was a bit like coming up to the front at a fundamentalist church to be "saved". I also thought of Scientology for some reason. Strange. 

I just had the thought that it’s interesting I gave him jewelry, which seems personal because in the past I had worn it many times, but I gave him a DUPLICATE of the original necklace which was much smaller and would be worth less. Big amber beads were “a thing” then, ugly as they seem now. So while I gave him the necklace, I still had it, and a more valuable version of it to boot. 

If you want to dig deeper, well, the amber necklace (which looked like something out of The Flintstones, though some of the beads were much smaller) has connotations of being “trapped in amber” and thus frozen in time. The faceless people lining up with no will is pretty obvious, and extremely creepy. But I did not have totally negative feelings, and felt sort of – what? Again, the feeling I should feel privileged to be able to be in this lineup and present him with gold, frankincense and myrrh.

Giving him a duplicate without the larger stones was weird. I used to prize amber jewelry, but have lost interest in it and never wear it, or any other jewelry, especially not rings since my hands became such a ruin. But it used to interest me a lot, and I spent a small fortune on it. It was worth something to me. (Was I handing him a version of myself that I no longer wanted or needed? Now there's a thought.)

What it means isn't exactly clear, but it seems loaded with symbolism. Though I no longer see that destructive doctor, I felt trapped in the relationship for over twelve years, and in fact was told by multiple sources that he was the best in the business, I was extremely lucky to be able to see him, he had a waiting list a mile long, and there was no other option for me anyway because of the nature of my illness. I should be grateful to have all that understanding from someone so competent. I can't erase my history, which I long to erase so very often, but just try to go forward without an amber noose around my neck.

Monday Morning Insight. I just remembered something so appropriate, it's almost funny. My subconscious having me on? My relatively-new family doctor, who is the only doctor I have ever had with whom I feel listened to, is named Amber. Amber Jarvie. It's just too strange to NOT be true.