Aaaand We’re Back! (sort of)

posted by meowser

Okay, so first: Congratulations to everyone on Team Fat for NaNoWriMo, all 5 of whom (including yours truly) finished their 50,000 words!

If you NaNoed, feel free to use this thread to tell me what you’re doing next with your magnum opi. (Heck, if you didn’t NaNo and you have a magnum opus, you can join in too, if you want.)

Me, I’m zoning out for a few days, then (dirty little secret time) doing the sweaty work of putting my scenes in sequence, because I…wrote them all (except for the first two) OUT OF ORDER. Yes, that is how Not So Little Miss Right Brain rolls. I put my scenes on index cards (writing new cards whenever a scene idea occurs to me and I don’t have time to write it just then), then I write wherever my energy is going that day. That means a lot of jumping around.

Yes, you are allowed to write that way if you want to! Nobody’s going to stop you! (My favorite NaNo FAQ: “Can I write one word 50,000 times?” Oh, just guess what the answer is to that one. Can you imagine trying to explain that to the people you live with?) I have given myself the gift of not showing anyone my work until I feel like I’ve gone as far with it on my own, or even telling very many people the subject matter. I had to learn that particular “shooting my wad” lesson the hard way, I’m afraid.

So…I don’t know how much blogging I’m going to be doing from here on out. Some, probably, but I can’t quit or take leave from my job, and Remeron makes me dead to the world for 9 or 10 hours a day, and this book has been in my head in one form or another for at least the last 8 years, and I’m not gonna live forever…I’m sure you understand. But I’m still on the fat feeds, so if I do blog, it will show up there.

Oh, here’s an interesting bit of news: My psychiatrist has been so blown away by what I have to say about my experiences with Asperger’s that he has, with my advance permission, been bringing interns in to our sessions, and they have been knocked on their keisters too. So much so that he has asked me to do a presentation with him about it at a local hospital later this month! This will be my first public speaking gig, and I’m sure I will be sweating piss pellets once I start getting close to the date, which is right before Xmas. So, anyone who has done public speaking and wants to leave their bons mots about their experiences in comments, or write to me about it…blaze away.

GO TEAM FAT! GO GO GO GO GO!

Well, I Dood It

posted by meowser

I sent my letter to Sen. Wyden.

It should go out in Wednesday’s mail.

I sent it to the Washington, DC office.

I wrote it out in blue ink (PaperMate Eagle pen, not expensive, but not so cheap it leaks) instead of just printing it, figuring it might otherwise get lost among all the other black and white computer-generated pages. I printed, because my cursive looks like a first grader’s. (My handprinting at least makes it to fourth grade.) I used lined paper because I can’t write straight on unlined paper to save my life. (When I tried it, I actually wound up with part of a sentence on one piece of paper and part of it on another. Yargh.)

I made some minor changes (cleaned up an editing glitch in the second paragraph), but otherwise it’s what you saw here. It wound up being 5-1/2 handwritten pages (I print pretty big). I even put an extra stamp on the envelope, just in case.

Just reminding y’all, I’ve never, ever done this before. So if I can do it, so can you, if you think you might want to.

If I hear anything, I will update, even if it happens on my official blog hiatus next month.

Anyone Else Planning on Doing NaNoWriMo Next Month?

posted by meowser

I am. First time.

For anyone who doesn’t know, NaNoWriMo means “National Novel Writing Month.” The idea is you sign up (here) and during the month of November, you knock out 50,000 words, which amounts to about 5 or 6 double-spaced pages a day on average. Most people don’t finish. But enough do that the tradition continues, and since I’ve had this book (young adult novel) in my head for almost a decade, and it’s been nagging at me more and more lately, this might be a good time to get it going for real.

I actually had a near-miss on a different YA novel about 12 years ago; I was a finalist in a publishing contest with a book contract as the prize, and they didn’t pick a winner that year (they reserve the right not to). I revised it, got some more rejections, decided the problems were too big for me to fix, and gave up. Then I started to do some work on this book, brought my first few pages to a new writing group, and they got chewed up like an inexperienced tiger tamer. They told me it was awful, it stunk, kids wouldn’t like it, etc. So once again, I gave up. I’m good at that.

But it didn’t give up on me. All these years. So maybe that’s a fat hint that it’s mine to do, regardless of how it turns out. I am not going to say anything more about it (or offer it up for criticism, unless I have a specific question or issue I need help with), until I’m done with a first draft. I know better now.

So during the month of November, this blog will be on official hiatus. If you are doing NaNo and want to buddy up, feel free to leave me a message or email me privately.

Me Love Colors (Or: Yes, There Is Enough Purple Yarn on Earth to Cover My Entire Big Fat Ass

posted by meowser

Okay, enough heavy horseshit on this blog for now. Let’s talk about something fun for a change: Yarn! (And colored tights!)

The skirt you see above is my adaptation of a pattern in Stitch ‘n’ Bitch Crochet called “Violet Beauregarde.” This, it’s safe to say, is the anchovy of skirts. Either you love it, or you think it’s totally blecherous. Since I made the blasted thing, I think you can probably guess which side I lean to. As soon as I saw the picture, it was: “WANT. NOW. MUST MAKE.” And miraculously enough, the pattern even came up to my size.

There was just one problem. The yarn originally called for in the pattern was Tahki Cotton Classic. Now, this is a wonderful mercerized cotton yarn. I’ve used it on smaller projects quite happily. But this project was going to be a lot of frickin’ yarn. And Tahki’s is $6 for a hank. That’s 108 yards. Multiply that by the 16 hanks minimum I was looking at to make this skirt, probably more like 20 or 22 if I wanted it longer (which I did), plus mistake yarn — we’re talking about well over $100 worth of yarn if I went that route. That was so very much not happening.

But I did still want this skirt. Badly. So, I wondered, could I find a cheaper, non-yarn-snob-approved synthetic yarn in a similar gauge and color scheme? Turns out I could: I used Caron Simply Soft in Violet for the purple part, and Bernat Satin in Sea Shell and Maitai for the light and dark pink, respectively. The colors weren’t identical to the Tahki’s, but they were the same color family and complemented each other well. The total cost turned out to be about $22, a fraction of the cost of the Tahki’s.

It worked out fine, although the first ball of Maitai, for some reason, seemed to be just a tiny bit heftier (and duller) than the Sea Shell by the time I got around to using it.. I know about dye lots, but thickness lots? Never heard of such a thing. Something must have happened to it in storage. And when I ran out and got more of it later, the new Maitai was the same gauge as the Sea Shell, so I really don’t know what happened there. I salvaged it by sizing down to a smaller hook when I used the first ball of Maitai.

This was the first major clothing item I ever made for myself. Boy, what a learning curve. I found out the hard way to mark on your pattern what hook you’re actually using, rather than just picking up the one that’s printed on the pattern; I had sized up two entire hook sizes to make gauge, and didn’t realize it until I picked up the project later and thought the stitches I was making with the F hook looked awfully small. Also, I learned never to use frogged (previously knitted or crocheted and then unraveled) yarn to make a turning chain, because it will twist and make me feel like a doltburger for not being able to keep it straight. I can’t even count how many times I had to pull out my work and start over again because I kept messing it up. Fortunately, crocheting is fairly doltburger-proof, as crafts go.

(In case you’re wondering what those two little spots of Maitai and Sea Shell are around the middle of the skirt, they’re part of the end of the drawstring tie. The Maitai got a little loose, which I realized after the pic was snapped. I did tighten it up afterwards.)

And I still can’t figure out how to do double crochet rows in circles without there being an annoying gap between the last stitch and the first that I have to sew together. But it’s done! It took me a few months, but I actually did it. I made a clothing! (It was a great bus-ride stim, lemme tell you.)

The size skirt I made accommodated a 52″ waist and hip, and that was the largest size they offered. If you like this skirt and want to make it larger than this, though, I could probably help you figure out the math. The pattern itself isn’t that complicated; it’s all double-crochet stitches in rounds, pretty much. Even the shell stitching on the bottom is just a bunch of DC stitches, really. It just takes a while. And some brain-fart safeguards, if your brain functions anything like mine does.

Also, if you have the first edition of S ‘N’ B Crochet, you will want to take a gander at the errata page before you make anything. Apparently, they didn’t have someone who wasn’t the pattern author make these cute-ass things before they printed the book. Oops.

And then I ordered tights from We Love Colors to go with it. I was under the height limit but over the weight limit for the nylon/lycra A/B, and I have thighs and calves that go on for months, so I got the C/D. The fit seems pretty good, although I’ve yet to wear them all day to find out how they hold up. The tights in the photo are Rubine color (I also ordered footless in Light Pink). I will say this: Take the Web site representations of colors with a large pinch of salt, because the Rubine looked like a dark purple on their site and is much lighter than the picture. (And the Light Pink is a bit darker than it looks on the Web site too.) But I like it anyway. If you have any more suggestions for accessorizing this thing, fire away.

And now, off to Seattle for my birthday weekend, thanks to the magic of a 2-for-1 coupon for the Amtrak Cascades! I’m going to Experience Melted Plastic (first time ever) and Benihana’s (free birthday meal, I’m so there) on Sunday, my b-day. I am so stoked!

Europe et Fat

posted by meowser

If Brian at Red No. 3 ever does a Fat Hate Bingo 3 card, one of the boxes needs to be “Europeans are so much thinner and healthier!” Because nobody in Europe is “obese,” you know. Nobody. The “obesity” rate in all of Europe — and not just in the spendy tourist areas where poorer people can’t afford to live, but everywhere — is zero. Because Europe is one unified country, consisting of nothing but slender, year-round-bike-riding, never-smoking, never-boozing, never-drugging, organic-veggie-gobbling, sugar-free, walk-three-miles-a-day-in-addition-to-all-the-bike-rides, affluent-because-they-deserve-it, stress-management-genius HEALTH NUTS, who’d never be caught dead in a McDonald’s. Yeah. I’ve never even been on the continent — I got only as far as London — but I must call “80 pound bag of BS.”

Here’s a list of “overweight/obesity” charts from the WHO that pertain to Europe, the first one being the most recent, focusing on adults ages 35 to 64. (Sorry, but there’s no direct link to any of them, they have to be opened as spreadsheets.) Have a gander for yourself. Not one European nation has an “obesity” rate of zero, or even close to it. Not one. (And note that women are more likely to be “obese” than men, despite — or because of? — having more expectation of being thin.) Most of Europe has “overweight and obesity” rates combined that equal about ours. And if America has more who are “obese,” has anyone stopped to think that the difference between BMI 29 (“overweight”) and BMI 30 (“obese”) — or, for that matter, the difference between “overweight” and “normal” — is five shitty pounds? That’s all it takes to go from Lifestyle Role Model to Self-Destructive Carbon-Dioxide-Belching Machine. Even if you smoke two packs a day and the Self-Destructive Carbon-Dioxide-Belching Machine has never had a single cigarette ever.

What Does Health Care Reform Really Mean to American Fatasses? Part One In A Series

posted by meowser

I would like to start a dialogue here about the potential impact of the health care reforms being discussed in the United States and what they might mean for fat people. And in the interest of not having one post that goes on for three months that only two people will read (sorry Rachel, I did my best!), I’m breaking it into multi-parts. My readers from outside the U.S., I hope you’ll stick around, because I would very much like your input on this.

I’m getting very concerned that the “our health care system is fine, shut up and quit whining because everyone hates government-run health care” crowd is taking over this discussion, without a whole lot of input from people who have actually experienced government-run health care, in all its myriad forms. It’s not all the same, you know. Even within the same country it’s not all the same. (What a concept, huh?)

Please note that I’m not specifically calling out Sandy here; I am to the left of her on this issue, but JFS is far from the only place I’ve run into anti-universal health care memes. They’re everywhere. Insurance companies are spending barrels of cash — OUR cash, that they’ve raked in through our premiums over the years — to fight any kind of real public option, much less actual single-payer delivery. I personally don’t see single-payer coming to America any time soon (it’s not even on the table right now), so it’s not like they’d be out of business. You’d think they would like to have a system in America similar to that of France or Germany — where, in a nutshell, government-run care covers the basics and various forms of private insurance cover the rest. The insurance companies wouldn’t have to get dinged $200 here and $200 there for dinky-shit things like Pap smears and bringing 5-year-olds to the emergency room after hours to get antibiotics for ear infections. (I’ll be examining the “let them eat emergency rooms” theme in a later post.) And people would still want their policies for when they needed more than basics.

But I suppose insurance companies in France and Germany don’t rake in the billionaire executive and shareholder bonanzas that we have here. One thing I’ve managed to figure out over the years is this: Once people get used to living the high life, they don’t give it up without a fight. And we, as a society, have given them the message over the years that it’s just fine to hang on to all that through any means necessary. If it means they get to pull shit like rescission — canceling people’s policies on technicalities because they’ve become too high maintenance for the insurance company’s taste — hey, it’s all good. If it means people become not just uninsurable but actually unemployable because of a serious illness — feh, who cares about those luz0rs? (I broke my Great Orange Satan boycott to read that story, and it was totally worth it; if you’d rather not give them the clicks, it’s also here. But do read it, and if you still think people being umbilically dependent on their jobs for their health care is a fine thing, tell me why you think something similar couldn’t possibly happen to you, or to whoever carries your policy.)

Is that what people are really being told by the insurance companies and their corporate-media toadies to be afraid of? That the super-rich health-care profiteers will cease to live like kings and have to live like mere TV starlets instead?

What, after all, was that anti-UHC ad that made the rounds the other day — the one where the Canadian woman who’d been down-triaged for surgery for a noncancerous but still dangerous brain cyst and had to come to America to get treated — all about? Now, granted, someone probably fucked up badly triaging her and if so, they deserved to get sacked immediately for their fuckup. (Of course, it’s not like insurance companies in America don’t fuck up things like that every day on purpose, but never mind.)

But that’s not really the issue here. She wasn’t making a comparison between Ontario health care (Canada’s UHC is run by individual provinces) and private American insurance. She didn’t have private American insurance. She plunked down US$100,000 in cash to have that operation done. The kind of money, IOW, that most Americans can’t possibly beg, borrow, or steal, much less just access from their personal checking accounts, to pay for an operation. All her story proves is that if you can whip out a checkbook that’s padded generously enough, you can buy anything you want. That’s not news. Is that what they are telling us to fear, fear, fear — that we won’t be able to play front-cutsies in line by slapping a big wad of cash on some hospital administrator’s desk? It’s hard to imagine an America where personal money will buy no influence over health-care priorities whatsoever, but it’s harder still to imagine an America where nearly everyone who thinks they’re going to be that rich someday actually gets there.

And as for the spectre of rationing, we are already rationing health care in America. We ration based on ability to pay — not as in less wealthy people get less, but as in less wealthy people, especially those between jobs, get NOTHING NOTHING NOTHING (unless they are indigent enough to qualify for Medicaid or their state’s equivalent, and increasingly, not even then). We ration based on preexisting conditions that have become the equivalent of insurance-company cooties-for-life.

And yes, we ration on the basis of weight. We do that in four ways: By denying fat people insurance coverage entirely or tacking surcharges on it so prohibitive as to make it unaffordable; by rendering fat people (especially over age 40) essentially unhireable because employers are increasingly unwilling to take a chance on our supposedly high-maintenance bodies; by scaring fat people away from doctors’ offices through flat-out abusive behavior; and by doctors telling us that the treatment we want will be withheld unless we slim down. (I’ll go more into the subject of rationing in a future post too.)

Now, given all that, do I think things could be a lot worse? Do I think it’s possible that what passes for health care reform in America could wind up being a total boondoggle, nothing more than a bailout for the insurance companies with no improvement in delivery of care? Do I think it’s possible it could lead to the government sticking its nose in our private lives where it doesn’t belong? Sure. I don’t believe “doing something” is automatically better than doing nothing. You can fuck up anything by underfunding and mismanagement and just plain old greed and corruption, whether the funding is public or private or a mix of both.

And here’s where my non-U.S. correspondents come in. I want you to give it to me straight, even if you think it’s not what I want to read. If you have experience with both U.S. and non-U.S. health care — as Deeleigh talked about here and here, and thanks, Deeleigh — that’s even better. I want you to tell me what you like and don’t like about your health care. I want you to tell me whether you think the relief of financial stress from not having to pay directly for care is offset by the stress of your tax burden and other quality of life measures.

And I want you to tell me if you’ve ever been denied care because you were fat. By that I’m not so much talking about the doctor being a giant dickcheese to you because of your weight, but actually denying you a procedure or other treatment you wanted until you lost X number of pounds (or, heavens forfend, got WLS). If you’d like to post anonymously, that’s fine. I won’t out you. You can also email your responses to me and I can post them without attribution if you would prefer that.

I’d also like to hear from you if you’ve experienced an American-based public health system — Medicare, Medicaid, VA, a state-run system, anything like that — and the same questions apply.

I’m also interested in hearing from health-care professionals everywhere on their specific experiences with this. Have you ever not been able to get a treatment approved for someone that you thought they really needed because of problems with a public provider?

And if this post inspires you to do a post on your own blog instead of posting in comments here, great! Feel free to drop links if they’re relevant to the topic.

Please note: I’m well aware that the discussion on this topic could get a bit heated, and I don’t expect an echo chamber where everyone just nods and agrees with me. I want real information based on real experience (not rumor), and I really, really want us to stick strictly to the exchange of ideas and exploration of issues. I’m telling myself this at least as much as I’m telling any of you reading this, but please let’s all stay away from things like flaming, personal insults, and ad-homs. (I especially do not want this to become a forum for Sandy-bashing, and Sandy, if you’re reading this, I hope you will participate in the discussion.) I work odd hours and sleep during much of the day and can’t be on this thread for much of the day (and if you are a first-time poster and your post doesn’t show up for a few hours, that could be why), but I will edit or remove any inappropriate material as soon as I get to it. Thanks.

OK, D00d Nation, THIS Is What I Want From You

posted by meowser

Pursuant to the “fat women are only useful inasfar as I find them fuckable” BS that Marianne takes on with such aplomb here, I would like to add to that theme. And this goes double for all the “butbutbut you can’t MAKE me find you attractive!!eleventyone!” d00ds of D00d Nation too (or is that t00?).

I honestly do not give one falling space turd about whether you personally find me attractive or not. I’m set there, thanks. If you want to hold out for a woman aged 21 to 23, between 5′4″ and 5′6″ tall, with waist-length naturally red hair, weighing no more and no less than 120 pounds, with exactly five freckles on each butt cheek, and none on the face, and you would much rather spend your spooge allowance spanking it into a washcloth thinking about your fantasy babe rather than getting it on with me or any other real-life human standing before you…that is absolutely fine. It. Does. Not. Matter. To. Me. At all.

Here is what I do care about, and passionately. I care very much about how you treat my boyfriend.

If you are a stranger, what are you thinking when you see him with me? Are you thinking about what must be wrong with him that he has to “settle” for someone like me? Do you think I must be his pity date and that he’s just too much of a wimp to let me go, or that I must “have something” on him that prevents him from leaving? Or that I’m just a fast fuck and that he couldn’t possibly like me, because you think no “normal” man who digs women possibly could? Would you ever be rude to him because of me?

If you are his peer, do you refuse to really be friends with him because he’s with me? Or refuse to invite us over to the house or out to a meal (when you’d happily invite just him) because you think the sight of us together would gross everyone out, including you?

If you are his boss, do you refuse to promote him because his partner (me) isn’t enough of a trophy for you? Do you regard him as being less intelligent and less capable than he is because of me? Would you refuse to hire him if you knew he had a fat woman for a partner?

And in any of those situations, if he did or said something to piss you off, would a cheap shot at his partner’s body habitus and/or his liking of it be one of the first things to jump out of your mouth?

If you can answer “absolutely, positively not, never ever” to every single one of those questions, and really mean it, we’re cool.

And if you can’t…why on earth not? Does everyone’s taste have to match yours, or it’s “wrong”?

Help a Fatass Out: Go See ‘Up’

posted by meowser

Typically of alter cockers my age and upwards, I don’t get out to movie theaters very much these days. But when a commenter on Shapely Prose whose name escapes me at the moment (feel free to identify yourself if it’s you) mentioned that Pixar’s latest film, Up, had fat characters who were not made the butt of jokes because of their weight, and that this was exactly the kind of thing Fatospherians should be showing support (read: entertainment $$) to, I had to agree. I even sprung for 3-D, figuring I didn’t go to movies that much and if I was going to go, I might as well have the value-add experience I couldn’t get watching at home. (For whatever it’s worth, though, not many people seemed to agree with me on that; besides me and Chris, there were about six other people in the theater for an early Sunday night showing.)

Well, lemme tell you: 2-D or 3-D, this movie rules. RULES, I tell you. I’m not going to describe the plot in a lot of detail; let’s just say a flying house, talking dogs, a colorful chocolate-loving bird, and an exiled scientist desperate to clear his name are involved, and leave it at that. What I loved about it was that, yes, this is exactly the kind of movie I want to see a lot more of, one where there was wonderful characterization and voicing, gorgeous scenery, and many funny jokes, and not one of those jokes involved the weight of either the pudgy 78-year-old white man (played by 79-year-old Ed Asner; the character looks amusingly like him, with some latter-day Walter Matthau and Spencer Tracy thrown in) or the even pudgier 8-year-old Asian American boy (played by newcomer Jordan Nagai). If the characters’ weight is acknowledged at all, it’s said to work to their advantage in what they’re trying to accomplish.

According to Pixar Blog, the studio is not putting out much merchandise on Up despite brisk ticket sales, thinking dolls of fat old men and fat little boys aren’t going to be what kids are clamoring for…but shit, if they do put out Carl (old man) and Russell (little boy) dolls, I’m gonna scoop them up, you bet. Both of these characters are CUTE AS DAMN BUTTONS. And I don’t just mean their looks, either. Part of this is how they’re written, but even more so, the marvelous voice skills of the actors. Ed Asner, boy, you’ve been missed. (He’s been working all this time, apparently, but it sure doesn’t seem like it.) Another bonus of this film is that it does, indeed, put a real-life fat old man in the spotlight (Asner will turn 80 in November), reminding people once again that, no, we fatasses don’t all cack by the time we’re 60. (It shouldn’t need to be said — shit, I create medical records for fat old people all the time — but for some reason, that idea dies hard for a lot of people. Wishful thinking, perhaps?)

Asner might have been the only actor on earth who could have given Lou Grant (his character on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and its eponymous followup series, Lou Grant) the multiple dimensions he had; he made the drunk asshole boss both funny and deep, right from that first “I hate spunk!” interview of Mary. And yeah, he was catnip to women, too (especially to Betty White’s brilliantly played horndogette, Sue Ann), despite the fat japes made about him. Carl, by comparison, is merely grumpy, but Asner hasn’t lost a step off his timing, and Jordan Nagai — who has huge mouthfuls of verbiage to deliver as Russell — keeps right up with him. (And yes, not that Disney deserves a cookie for doing what they’re supposed to and hiring an Asian American actor to play an Asian American character, but it’s definitely the sort of thing to nudge them in the direction of.) And in case you’re wondering, the 3-D glasses do fit over regular ones. What you’d mainly get from the 3-D here is not so much Disneyland-ish special effects (no birds landing on your nose or anything), but a sense of actually being there in the middle of the action. Which I dug, myself. But I hardly think you’d be losing out by seeing it in 2-D, either.

Now, all I could ask are some films featuring fat old ladies and fat little girls. C’mon, Pixar, I’m ready.

I’m So Concerned For That Ugly Girl’s Health

posted by meowser

So I was fiddlefarting around on the Mets blog Amazin’ Avenue — I only lurk there sometimes to get the latest information about the team, I never post there. It’s not exactly a feminist haven, though (few sports sites are, especially if they’re devoted to sports played by men), and for some reason, tonight the subject of Beth Ditto came up when I was glancing at the open thread from tonight’s game. Maybe she was at the game? I don’t know, not having seen the entire broadcast. Anyway, one of the posters sniffed, wanting women to have a better body image is one thing, but “deliberately making yourself as unhealthy as possible is another.”

Which made me think, “Deliberately making yourself as unhealthy as possible? Really, dude nation dude? So all your favorite records were made by nonsmoking, drug-free teetotalers who never had unprotected sex with strangers?”

Quick Question

posted by meowser

I’ve been wanting to do more aspie/autie/brain-related blogging lately, not necessarily related to fat.

So if you could, please let me know how you would feel about my writing about that stuff here at Fat Fu. I’m not adverse to the idea of setting up a separate aspie blog and in fact might do it anyway, but I’d be curious to take Fatospherians’ temperature on that. Would you say your response to that question would be closest to:

1) No — posts only belong on the Fatosphere if they at least tangentially relate to fat in some way. Putting non-fat-related brain stuff on a separate blog would be better.
2) Sure — blogging about being autistic counts as intersectionality, fire away.
3) Don’t really have a strong opinion in either direction.
4) Something else (feel free to specify).

Thanks!

I Hate Metformin (A Rantlet)

posted by meowser

I wish I was a voice-file-editing wizard, because in order to get the full impact of the title and what it means to me, it needs to be read in one of those Yosemite Sam type of growls: “Ahhhhhh HAAAATES metfohmin.” Because I really do hate metformin (brand name: Glucophage) the way Yosemite Sam hated Bugs Bunny, and with a lot more justification. Metformin is not cute. It is not witty. It does not have soft pettable-if-only-it-were-real fur. It does not kiss its enemies full on the lips and then spin its ears to fly away. It’s just a big old nightmare, that’s all.

For those of you who are met-n00bs, lucky you, a bit of background on what this drug is. It’s supposed to be an insulin sensitizer, so it’s typically given to people with type 2 diabetes who are not yet insulin dependent, so they can make the best possible use of what little insulin their pancreases are able to come up with at this stage of the disease. But in recent years (I was first prescribed it in 1997), it’s also been commonly dispensed to women with polycystic ovarian syndrome, which I have, because one of the markers for PCOS is elevated fasting insulin. That means my pancreas is working way too hard, and for the time being, the net result is that my blood sugars, even after eating, tend to run a little on the low side. But if the pancreas continues to overwork itself, it could eventually burn itself out and bang, diabetes. That’s the theory, anyway, and hence metformin is supposed to slow down the overproduction of insulin so I’ll have more of it later on when I need it.

But I’ve never been able to stay on it. (Okay, here comes the grody part; that’s what you love me for, right?) Because here’s what else it does to me, besides sensitize my cells to insulin: It turns my digestive tract into a long, snakey blender set permanently on puree. I’m sure if you asked most people whether they’d rather have explosive diarrhea or be fat, they’d pick the diarrhea, but not me. Explosive diarrhea is my idea of an unacceptable side effect. I mean, really, think about it. You can’t go ANYWHERE without knowing exactly where the nearest toilet is, and when you get there it had better be unoccupied. Last I looked it was still legal to be fat in a supermarket (at least for the time being); I’m pretty sure it’s totally illegal to take a dump in the middle of a produce aisle. Yeah, I could wear an adult diaper, and I’m well aware that there’s no way around that for a lot of people, but you still have to change the damn diaper as soon as you know you’ve, er, used it. Which still amounts to finding and gaining access to the blasted toilet ASAP before people start complaining about the smell. Call me shallow, but I’d rather put off the adult-diaper stage of my life for as long as I can swing it.

So for years, the cycle has been that I’d stay on the met for as long as I could stand it, then discontinue and tell my doctor I can’t tolerate it. Then the doctor says, “Well, you really should take it,” so I’d start taking it again, and become Ms. Poopy Shorts again, and the doctor would give me shit (snerk) about discontinuing again, and the typical thing they tell you to do is take some Imodium or something to stop the flying poop. Well, I have a couple of problems with that. One, I firmly believe that if something is racing to exit your body, there’s probably a good reason for it, and messing with that every day could cause all kinds of problems later. For another, I really dislike the “take more drugs to counteract the side effects of the drugs you’re taking” syndrome. I already do that with psych meds, and it blows mountain-lion-sized hairball chunks. Because, where does it end? That’s why, whenever I create a medical report for someone older than about 60, they’re always on about 20 different drugs and getting more added every time they show up at the doctor’s. Iatrogenic illness, what a party.

And lately, especially after my month-long bout with antibiotics, which can do a number on your gut all by themselves, it’s gotten much, much worse. Let’s just say that at one point there was a race to a public bathroom and…I lost. Fortunately, this happened at the shrink’s office, and she had a pretty good sense of humor about the whole thing. Her belief is that I have all this wacky shit (snerk snerk) going on in my digestive tract (and my endocrine system) because I’ve spent my life under a ridiculous amount of stress due to untreated/unrecognized Asperger’s, and that “you’ll get your body back” when I finally decompress from it all (when, I ask?).

But you know, I’ve checked around the t00bz, and I ain’t the only one set on perma-puree by this not-so-little white pill, believe you me. It seems like more people than not actually do have digestive iss-yews with metformin, but since the result of all that time spent making personal deposits in Bank of the Sewer is often weight loss…oh yay, bring it on! ANYTHING to weigh a few pounds less! I don’t get neurotypical people sometimes, would they really rather crap their pants than buy them a size bigger? Evidently they would. Therefore, none of the pharmaceutical companies, to my knowledge, are offering any real alternative to the Big Met. I asked my gyno about that, since she has PCOS herself and I thought she might have some answers, but no, even she doesn’t know of any other than “take Imodium, and if that doesn’t work, then forget about it.”

So about a month ago, I decided to forget about it. That’s how I know for sure that the metformin was the guilty party; I discontinued for a week, the flying poop went away, and went back on it and the flying poop came back. Hard to get any more certain than that. After that I stayed off it for good, and decided I would substitute cinnamon extract, apple cider vinegar (dissolve in water or club soda, wait five minutes for the smell to dissipate, and add a splash of juice for flavoring), and alpha-lipoic acid, and just keep checking my fasting insulin to make sure it wasn’t creeping up on me.

And then a funny thing happened: I started getting way more productive at work. I get paid by the line, and my line counts the last couple of weeks have increased by over 50%. And they have incentive bonuses that kick in over a certain number of lines, so that means a substantial increase in pay. Now granted, I wasn’t earning squat before and this won’t make me affluent by any means, but dayyyum, I’ll take it. Am I certain that booting metformin out of my life is what did the trick? I don’t know, but I’d have to say it didn’t hurt.

And I don’t know about you, but I like things that don’t hurt.

The Hidden Virtues of Superficial Lip Service

posted by meowser

Buffpuff, who doesn’t blog anywhere near often enough to suit me, the other day blogged the following regarding the infamous Gruen Transfer mock-ads:

I’m not trying to infer that fat discrimination is worse than racism, anti-Semitism, ableism or homophobia nor am I trying to say it’s exactly the same in nature. They’re all different, they’re all life blighting, they all still go on and they all stink. What I am saying is that here, in my experience, sizeism has yet to be acknowledged as a form of discrimination at all – by the media, the government, the medical profession or anybody else save a handful of those who experience it. There is no public discourse, no self-examination, no glimmer of change on the horizon, no protection enshrined in law which, given that we we make up half the UK population, is shameful. That doesn’t make tackling sizeism more important than tackling any other type of discrimination, but it does mean there’s an awful lot of work to be done before it’s taken as seriously.

I completely agree.

Now, before anyone starts yelling “Oppression Olympics!” at Buffpuff or at me, rest assured that neither of us confuses a social justice movement being taken seriously, or at least being given lip service, with actual lack of prejudice or hate. We’re well aware that none of those other prejudices are “over,” or can no longer be considered serious problems — of course that’s not the case, or all those social justice movements wouldn’t still exist. I haven’t changed my mind about fat hate being a repository for all kinds of prejudice people feel they need to talk in code about.

What I want to know is, when are people going to have to start talking in code about us? (And when I say “us,” I of course mean the part of “us” that’s fat, regardless of whatever other identities we inhabit.) When is being vocally against human rights and humanistic treatment for fat people going to cost anybody anything ever? Bear in mind that the mock-commercials in question were being created to “sell the unsellable.” Us. We’re what’s unsellable. Of course fat rights is a big fat joke! All you people have to do is eat less, and everyone will like you just fine! (That is, if you don’t belong to any other stigmatized groups, either.)

Almost everyone thinks this. Even most of our fellow fatties, who still imagine they’re just a few passed-up sodas and spurned candy bars away from the acceptance they crave way more than sugar. That’s how bad it is, folks; if you showed me a really naturally-skinny person and a really naturally-fat person side by side, and I knew nothing else about either one of them, and you asked me which of them would be more likely to be down with fat acceptance? I go with the naturally-skinny person. Every time. I’m really not kidding. Why? I have no clue (although it could have something to do with the fact that the really skinny people know they couldn’t attain anywhere close to my BMI if they tried). But when I try explaining this stuff to people, I’ve noticed over and over again that my odds are better with people with BMIs under 22 who don’t diet than with people with BMIs over 32 who do. If fat people were on their own damned side, fat acceptance wouldn’t feel like shoving an anvil off a five-mile cliff.

I’m in total agreement with those who say the Gruen Transfer presentation was appallingly sexist, smug, smarmy, and self-congratulatory (sssssss), and I continue to maintain that there is no such thing as someone who truly loves everyone but fatties. What’s happened is that fashion has changed so that people such as these telegenic young(ish) white men are now required to give their share of superficial lip service to being against other (although certainly not all other) forms of prejudice.

Look, I grew up in the suburbs in the 1960s and 1970s, at a time when American suburbia was all white-flight haven. In those suburbs, I was surrounded by white people, Jewish and not, who were visibly relieved they didn’t live next door to poor black people (although they were also visibly relieved when there was an affluent black family around who spoke the King’s English better than they did). These same people also despised George Wallace and Richard Nixon and everything they stood for, and voted for JFK and Lyndon Johnson and were outraged by things like segregated bathrooms and voter literacy tests, and were thrilled to see the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts passed. They may not have wanted to live next door to poor black people, but they were downright proud to vote for people who made it easier for those poor black people to vote too, and to move about in public without being dogged by Jim Crow.

Is that good enough? Does that prove lack of prejudice? Of course not, squared. But it was something. Superficial lip service in favor of black civil rights by whites, arguably, is what finally got the law changed, even if white people took their sweet time coming around to it. (And yes, I’m well aware that there were white people who were true believers and put their lives on the line for the civil rights movement in ways that totally put me to shame, also, including women who would later go on to spearhead second-wave feminism.)

Same went with the women’s movement, as we called it when I was a baby fatty. No, we couldn’t get the ERA passed, even with a majority of Americans in favor of it, because Schlafly et al managed to convince just enough people in the exact right places that it would require men to wear pantyhose and take their wives’ last names, and 7-year-old girls to use the men’s room and have to be exposed to strange men whipping out their willies to pee. Silly shit, but boy, it was effective. But a whole mess of other, smaller laws did pass and mores changed along with them (Daisy’s Thank a Second Wave Feminist post lays this out spectacularly) that allowed women to get medical care without their husbands’ or fathers’ permission, and wear pants to school and work, and have their own credit, and about a squillion other things that women nowadays take as givens. Is that because people forgot all about sexism all of a sudden? Need you ask? Nope, superficial lip service struck again. (The swelling chorus of millions of women who all seemed to realize simultaneously that they were getting the fuzzy end of the lolly for no good reason didn’t hurt, either.)

I don’t care if people like me or think I’m pretty or healthy or nice or that I smell of sandalwood soap (not elderberries!), or any of that shit. Okay, maybe I do (at least give me credit for my deodorant working), but that’s not the most important thing to me at the moment. Most of all, I want the fucking laws off my fat ass. I want it to be illegal for people to pull the kinds of shenanigans the airlines have pulled on us. I want it to be illegal for people to refuse to hire us or to fire us or to spurn us for promotions or to slap fines on us just because of our weight. I want it to be illegal for schools to refuse us admission or landlords to refuse to rent to us because we’re fat. I want it to be illegal for insurance companies to refuse to cover us, or doctors to refuse to treat us for the problem we came in for, no matter how potentially deadly, until we get thin. And if we can’t make it entirely illegal, I want it to be extremely painful and costly for them to do those things. I want it to be more than a few of us who have been labeled fringe goofballs saying it shouldn’t be. I don’t care why people protest on our behalf. I just want them to frigging do it.

Hell, I remember when things like same-sex marriage and trans rights were considered just as “unsellable” (says the woman who lost her job as a teenager in 1980 for saying she thought gay people should be allowed to get married to each other and adopt kids). There’s still untold miles to go in both of those battles, and plenty of hatebags to defeat, and millions of people who are way more prejudiced in either or both of those areas than they’d ever cop to. But would anyone who’s paying any attention at all claim those causes are “unsellable” to almost everyone now? Things can change, drastically and quickly, so I wouldn’t say there’s no hope that our rights will become “sellable” too. However, one thing I will say — and once again, I’m with my fellow Jew Buffpuff on this — I’m not among those offended that someone would compare the plight of the Jews to that of fat people. No, there haven’t been fat pogroms or concentration camps, and I’d like to keep it that way.

But I also know that when there have been violent uprisings against Jewish people (and not just in the last century), they didn’t come out of nowhere. It took decades of escalating scapegoating and hatemongering before those eruptions took place. Nazism was not a one-decade fluke where people temporarily lost their marbles; any Jew could tell you that. And as long as fat people are portrayed more and more often in popular and alternative media as the Awful Ugly Greedy People Whose Fault Everything Is, and with our rights actually becoming more curtailed than they were a decade ago, I’m not willing to say it couldn’t happen to our fat asses (Jewish or otherwise), too. (And yeah, I know all too well that “my” people have been some of the leading fetishizers of thinness, unfortunately, because stoutness has an unbreakable association with the dreaded shtetls and thinness has long been linked with fitting in with upper-caste WASPs.) I’m a lot more concerned that people won’t learn from what happened to the Jews than that they’ll think about it too much, frankly.

It’s tempting to say the “support” of people who (I think) are assholes is worse than no support at all. And I still don’t intend to allow diet or yay-weight-loss talk on this site, for the simple reason that I don’t get much of a safe haven from that stuff elsewhere and neither do most of my readers. But as far as whether or not you, yourself are actually dieting or hoping to become thin(ner), and want to know if you can still work for fat rights and say your own fat is no good? Or what if you think fat is unhealthy, but that all the things I mentioned should still be illegal? Let’s just say this. There’s a huge difference — I mean, the size of the Grand Canyon — between who I feel I can stand behind as a movement leader and who is “fit” to be a supporter. I hesitate even to type the latter part of that sentence, because it sounds as if I have some kind of Fit Supporter Rule Book and I really, really don’t.

But just because I don’t want to hear about your diet or applaud while you pull out the waistband of your fat pants doesn’t mean I hate you, or don’t want your support. (I think most people in fat acceptance have meatspace friends and relatives who diet and don’t hate their guts for it, even if we don’t want to hear their blow-by-blow weekly scale reports.) When it comes to getting the laws and the culture changed, we need all the support we can get, even from calorie counters, even from people who are decidedly not perfect in other ways. If only the pure of heart could effect any sort of change, we’d be in big-assed trouble.

I Caught a Troll! I Caught a Troll! I Caught My Very Own Troll!

posted by meowser

OK, normally I send posts like this straight to spamville. (Not that I get very many, but still.) But just because I’m in a blasting-plastic-fish-in-a-barrel kinda mood, I thought I’d offer this particular one up for your moldy-pea shooters. Disputing my claim that choosing the fries over the salad was hardly going to make a difference of 100 pounds to anyone all by itself, our troll, thinking I’m fat just because nobody ever bothered to teach me calorie voodoo math before I hit junior high (thereby proving that sie has not read ANYTHING else I’ve posted here), schools me thusly:

-Choosing the fries over a salad CAN mean 100 pounds or more. If you consistently choose fries over salad thats a daily dose of grease, cholesterol, starch….fries provide very fattening calories…not to mention if you consistently chose salad you would be getting a daily dose of complex carbohydrates, vitamins and other nutrients with considerably less calories (that is if you are eating a salad with a modest amount of dressing, not a soup). Do a little experiment and purchase a couple of rats. Keep one of them on a regular diet of water, fruits, nuts and vegetables. Keep the other on a regular diet of processed foods (soda, chips, fries, burgers, cookies). It will not take long to see the physical differences that diet effects. You could probably even switch the diets of the rats and and see the effects follow the diets. You will quickly find it is within everyones genetic range to weigh a lot.

Sure, people have the genetic capacity to grow large, obviously or it wouldn’t happen. However, claiming that fat is not a matter of choice but a matter of genetics is absurd. Consider the following example:

There are x amount of cigarette smokers with lung cancer. They have developed lung cancer because it is within their genetic capacity to do so.

Wooookay. One of these days I’m gonna do a whole “why fat isn’t like smoking” post, but let’s take the lung cancer part first, just because it’s so tickly. Yes, it’s true, some people are genetically far more predisposed to forming metastatic cells in their bodies at a relatively young age than others, regardless of environmental factors. That’s probably why very few smokers actually die of primary lung cancer, even though the vast majority of people who get primary lung cancer were heavy smokers at one time. See the difference? It’s statistically impossible for 97% of smokers to die of lung cancer. Don’t some of them die in car wrecks or fighting wars or something? It’s far more common for smokers who continue to smoke heavily for decades and die of natural causes to contract COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), which leads to respiratory failure and emphysema. In fact, it’s about, oh, eighty times more common than lung cancer, and other than in a few cases where there’s a congenital alpha-1-antitrypsin deficiency, is caused almost entirely by chronic exposure to serious pulmotoxins (of which cigarette smoke is one). And while you certainly need a genetic tendency to enjoy tobacco (or at least not have a complete aversion to it) to take up smoking, and genetics can certainly affect one’s ability to quit, starting smoking is completely voluntary (even figuring in that it usually happens in one’s teens, when feelings of immortality tend to peak). Becoming fat is not nearly so voluntary for most fat people. You can get really fucking fat doing everything your doctor tells you to do. I did.

Which brings me to They Who Have Come To Enlighten Me’s first point. Which is that if rats eat fries instead of salad, they’ll gain 100 pounds. Or something like that. Leaving aside that TWHCTEM obviously has never met anyone with a hummingbird metabolism, much less lived with someone like that and observed on a daily basis what they actually eat, let’s explore what “fries versus salad” actually means to most people. No, it doesn’t mean you eat a large order of fries (or hashbrowns, or the equivalent) with every meal, every single day, on top of everything else on your plate. I don’t know of anyone who has ever done that; even binge eaters usually want more variety than that. Maybe some movie star did that to (temporarily) gain weight to play a fat character, I don’t know.

But most of us who are not trying to gain weight, we don’t do that. What we do is, once, maybe twice a week when we eat fast food or go out, get fries on the side. (Yes, I know some people are much more frequent fast food consumers, but most people past college age don’t have fries 10 times a week.) How many more calories is that than a salad? Well, it depends. If your idea of a “salad” is all non-starchy vegetables and no (or the merest hint of) dressing, croutons, nuts, or anything else, and your idea of an order of fries is enough to build a hut with, probably a lot. Although still not enough to make a 100-pound difference in body weight without way more help from your metabolism than most of us get. But consider, if you will, that most of us are going to eat maybe 10 to 30 fries at a sitting, depending on size of said fries, and that ordering a plain, dull salad will almost certainly mean we will be hungrier later and crave a snack — come on, if you’ve ever dieted, you’ve been there. “I’m being soooo good! I’m eating a big bowl of veggies! Yay me! And boo all the fry-snarfing pigs!” And then — maybe not the same day, but surely someday very soon — appetite wins out over the dieter’s high, and before you know it you’re putting Chunky Monkey up your nose. (Ow.)

This is what happens when you give people plenty of food and free will to feed themselves how they choose. We value those things, do we not? You’re not really suggesting that we get put in…um…cages and have our captors feed us when they decide we’re hungry instead of us, right? And really, if the idea of people eating McDonald’s for lunch every day bothers you that much, if you really do think it’s any of your goddamn business, open a damn fruit stand in a poor neighborhood or some other produce desert and give them an alternative. But spare me the finger-rubbing smugness. Geez.

Okay, I’m done. Your turn.

Fat, Major Depression, Asperger’s: Where the Social Model Meets the Medical Model

posted by meowser

This is my first-ever post for Blogging Against Disablism Day! Which actually was yesterday. But I did write it then and didn’t get a chance to post it until now, so hopefully it will make the list. If not, click the picture and go read the awesome posts there anyway!

Until very recently, I would have refused even the very idea of considering myself a “person with disabilities.” (And please note the plural, about which more later.) It’s not that I didn’t always have conditions which limited my ability to live the kind of life I thought I wanted to be living, or which caused me great pain. And it’s not as though I thought being thought of as “disabled” was icky to me or anything. It was more like, how dare I? How dare I call attention to myself when other people needed and deserved the attention more than I did? I have a job, albeit one where I telecommute. I can get up and down stairs, albeit more slowly than most people. I’ve used assistive devices only for short periods of time when I had an injury. I don’t have a degenerative or terminal physical condition or horrible, intractable physical pain. I can bend, stoop, twist, reach, cook meals, shop for groceries, drive a car once in a while, manage to get my cable modem bill paid before they switch it off, clean up cat vomit, read, write, wash my clothes without ruining them (usually), crochet, pick up a musical instrument once in a while…all kinds of things. If I take birth control pills, I can even avoid the five-alarm menstrual cramps and killer PMS and migraines I used to get when I was younger (and don’t get me started about the first GYN I saw, who refused to prescribe them because “there’s a death rate on the pill” and thus I couldn’t get them before my mid-20s…gah). By those standards, I am not a person with disabilities, to be sure.

But now that I know something about the social model of disability (i.e. disability is subjective and depends upon being able to complete the tasks society expects of you, which may or may not be reasonable) and the medical model (i.e. you, PWD, are deficient and something to be fixed), it’s interesting to compare the two models with all the medical records, thousands upon thousands, I’ve created over the years. People don’t just go to doctors or hospitals when they have serious, physically painful or life-threatening problems; often they wind up there because in America (and not just here, either, although that’s the part of the world I know) between the ages of 18 and 50, maybe later, you are expected to be a bundle of energy and accomplishment. And millions of people, gods know how many, can’t hack it. You are supposed to sleep only five or six hours a night, grab a cup of coffee, and go go go go go. You are supposed to be able to handle (most of) the following, and probably more, for those 32 years without a hitch:

- working and going to school at the same time, often “full-time” at both

- having a healthy, honest, loving monogamous relationship (and commencing said relationship young enough to “start a family”)

- raising a family of well-behaved, happy, safe, wonderfully nourished children (note plural!) who are thrilled to eat all their greens and run around the neighborhood with a group of equally wholesome friends who all remain so up until they go away to college (and of course your children must all go to college!)

- lifting heavy objects and hoisting them up and down stairs for hours at a time

- driving defensively but not overly so every single day without your head exploding from three hours of horn-honking traffic

- being able to keep jobs through multiple rounds of layoffs because of how completely cheerfully industrious and useful you are

- staying trim, lithe, and youthful-looking even if your family tree is going to fight you on that every step of the way

- always eating lots of veggies and whole grains

- always avoiding sugar and fried food, and having the presence of mind to feel guilty when you do cave in and eat them

- never smoking or overindulging in alcohol or drugs

- if you are pregnant, never ingesting anything “bad” or being too sick to work as hard as you always have right up until the moment of delivery, and being ready to pop right back to your desk undistracted the minute the episiotomy heals

- working out every day without your workout and diet program leaving you too injured or ill or stressed to continue

- having a mortgage, a reliable car, sparkling clean credit and lots of savings

- always being able to smile, smile, smile and act like you’re on top of things when you know the people around you can’t handle how you’re really feeling (and they usually can’t)

- having enough of a social life that people don’t become suspicious of you, but not picking the “wrong” people to associate with

- developing a career (or having a partner with one) that will impress people when you tell them what it is

- and never, ever be too sick, too tired, in too much pain, or too overwhelmed to beg off from your appointed duties for more than 48 hours (longer if you are more affluent and have people who can cover for you)

You’d think that those expectations existed because the vast majority of people aged 18 to 50-whatever could actually keep all this up. But really, it’s not true. The reams of medical records I’ve created is the proof in the pudding that what we expect of “healthy” people in this world is ridiculous. A lot of people can’t even think about living that way; a lot of people start out living that way until serious illness or injury arriving out of the blue throws them a curve; a lot of people try, try, try to live that way thinking they have to and break under the strain, sometimes for good. It’s not just that people are considered to have disabilities because they don’t live up to society’s standards, it’s also that society’s standards themselves often create disability — i.e. actual loss of ability and serious pain — where it otherwise might not exist if we weren’t so rough on each other.

I’m one of the ones who can’t even think about measuring up, and never could, although I felt plenty shitty about myself about it and spent untold energies clobbering myself for it.

For starters, I am fat. I started out being merely a bit heavier than average, thanks to polycystic ovarian syndrome; once I started on psychiatric medications in my late 20s, I gained more than half my body weight again. Being fat in and of itself does not impede my functionality, but it does more or less eliminate me from many people’s Good, Attractive, and Capable Person Lists. People thinking you can’t do stuff, and thus not getting the chance, often winds up materially identical to not actually being physically able to do it. Looking “healthy” is much more important in this world than actually being “healthy.”

Which brings me to major depression. When I say I had serious depression from the time I was 11 years old, I am not kidding around. I mean that I felt like I wanted to die, and came close to acting on that wish, enough times that it really did threaten my life, and the rest of the time felt like walking through rapidly hardening cement. Depression was like a pack of trolls living in my brain alternately spewing razorblades and ether, telling me I was complete garbage and deserved nothing but censure, then taking a vacuum hose and sucking up the last of my adrenaline so I couldn’t fight back. It cost me time from work, it cost me friends, it cost me fun, it cost me achievement, it cost me relationships, and most of all, it cost me ME. Being fat is a million, billion times better than that any day of the week, let me tell you.

And then we come to Asperger syndrome. I have gone back and forth on whether I consider this a “disability” or a “difference.” There are things I’ve come to love about being aspie; I like that my brain comes up with things a neurotypical person might not. Given my very late diagnosis, though (age 44), and all the years I had to struggle with this not knowing what the hell it was, it’s been suggested to me that the severity of my depression is linked strongly to having my reality denied for so long from such a young age. (I’ve seen studies that have put the rate of suicidal ideation among aspies at around 50%; I’m not surprised.) And since so much of success in life is connected to being able to decode and respond immediately to people’s unspoken wishes, and be physically graceful, and squelch what you are really thinking and feeling for the sake of propriety, of course we aspies are usually shut out of the rat race. We must find another way to live, and tell all those expectations to go stuff themselves, or we die.

Fat, major depression, Asperger’s: linking rings. Hard to separate one from the rest. You could, if you wanted, make the argument that my true disability is the depression — and really, if I could have one of those three things “cured,” without causing myself undue harm in another department, that would be the one I would choose. I am not one of these people who romanticizes this condition; it SUCKS. There is nothing romantic about not being able to sit down with your favorite musical instrument because you think every sound you make is the sound of horseshit. There is nothing romantic about thinking that anyone who claims they like you just feels sorry for you, even if they have chosen to co-own a bed and three cats with you. There is nothing romantic about being scared to fucking death you’re going to swallow every pill in the house or go have something dry cleaned just so you can have the bag to suffocate yourself with. There is nothing romantic about feeling terminally stuck in the driveway in neutral for decades upon decades. There is nothing romantic about having to miss work, and even lose jobs, because you can’t stop crying for days even though nothing bad actually happened. You can KEEP that shit. KEEP it. I’d gain 100 more pounds if it meant I’d be guaranteed never to feel like that again. You cannot possibly imagine the sweet relief of remission unless you’ve experienced it. This, because nothing else has ever worked for me no matter how hard I’ve tried, I need doctors and their evil annoying pills to keep under control. Maybe forever. If people think that’s something about me that actually needs fixing — a disability according to the medical model — I can’t in good conscience argue.

But would the depression have gotten that bad without the sheer hate heaped on fat people (especially fat female people) in this society, or without the thousand-tiny-cuts hostility that NT people demonstrate towards those of us on the autism spectrum? I’m sure it would still have existed — it’s not like I don’t have plenty of thin, neurotypical wet blankies in my family tree — but would it have been THAT bad? Kill-myself bad? Everybody-hates-me bad? Hard to fathom. When are we going to ask, as a society, “are we making people feel shitloads worse, both physically and mentally, than we really need to?”

I’d like to know, and so would my doctors.

My Seat, Your Seat, His Seat, Their Seat

posted by meowser

I’m a fatass, but I have skinny partner privilege. If you are a fat woman with a thin partner, you probably have some inkling of what I’m talking about. The fact that C. is thin (and yes, neurotypical, albeit geeky) means there are probably a lot of people who think better of me on first meeting than they would if my partner was also fat. If he likes her, maybe she’s not so bad, I can hear Nice People thinking. (I suppose there are some douchehoses who wonder what’s wrong with him that he has to “settle” for me, but I put them in a separate phylum of dungbrain.)

And nowhere am I more acutely aware of skinny partner privilege than I am on an airplane. When I fly with C., I don’t have to worry that I will get stuck next to Fatphobius jerkwadius who will howl to the flight attendants that OMG HER FRIGHTENING SADDLEBAGS ARE TOUCHING MY SUPERIOR LEG MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP. Only now, I’m planning my first trip on a plane without him in about eight years, at a weight about 20 pounds higher than it was the last time I did it. (I’m going to Pittsburgh to scout out locations for a possible move; he’d be moving, too, but he’s been there already and figured it would be cheaper if only I went out this time.) And all this BS with United’s “fatties pay double and wait endlessly on standby for the privilege maybe for days, and you’ll have to book a hotel room at your own expense too if you’re stranded overnight, fatass” policy has me quaking in my 18-inch-calf boots, lemme tell ya. Even if I avoid booking United, which I plan on doing unless this meatheaded nonsense gets chucked out the window in the next week, I’ve been to Seatguru and checked it against my vintage 1997 copy of Judy Sullivan’s Size Wise. And guess what?

ALL OF THE AIRLINES’ COACH SEATS HAVE GOTTEN SMALLER.

Yes, that’s correct. If you encounter any paid media news accounts of this story, they will tell you that airline seats have stayed the same size since 1960, while we’ve just been snarfing our way into bigger and bigger sizes. (Okay, they haven’t worded it quite that way, but you know they want to.) The paid media won’t tell you this lest the lose their airline ad business, but unless they had eensy-beansy seats in 1960, which was before my time — in which case they got bigger by my first flight in 1972 before getting smaller again — I can tell you that the statement that airline seats haven’t gotten any smaller over the years is hooo-eeeee. From Size Wise:

Airline seats vary from 18.5″ to 23″ wide, depending on the aircraft and its configuration….the 727, 737, and 757s have a 3/3 configuration with 19″ seats. Airlines with 3/3/3 or 3/4/3 configurations use an 18.5″ seat.

According to Seatguru, all the major domestic carriers today use planes with 17.0″ or 17.2″ coach seat, with the exception of Jet Blue, whose seats seem positively generous at 17.8″. In other words, the chances are good that in just the last 12 years, your seat got an entire 2″ smaller. And as commenter liz said on the SP “FUnited” thread, “And it further allows them to make the seats even smaller because the problem will always be the fat ass (no matter how skinny) and not the seat.”

Exactly. I want to say to all these people who think this plan is such a hot idea: “What on earth makes you think you won’t be next?” They’ve already chopped 2″ off the seats, what’s stopping them from chopping even more and then getting to double-charge even more people? (And almost all of them female people, as Kate astutely put it, since a woman needs only wear an average pants size to be in danger of not fitting, whereas a man of average height usually needs to be going on about 400 pounds in order to have any part of his body not fit in a single seat.) All this dribbledrool of YOU CAN’T EXPECT US TO RETROFIT THE PLANES WITH BIGGER SEATS FOR THE FATASSES BLAAARGH MONEY MONEY MONEY is exactly that — dribbledrool. They already did it in the other direction. (Newsflash: Some planes already have bigger seats in them, and they could easily fly those aircraft instead. They know this. They are pulling everyone’s superior legs.)

And once again, this is coming down to — hiss, boo, groan — the very idea of the alleged “choice” involved in being a horizontally gifted individual. I personally don’t think civil or social rights have jackall to do with “choice” — I don’t give a damn if you were born Jewish or you converted, we both get to stay out of the pogrom. But unfortunately, a lot of people who have a lot of clout do use that standard for determining people’s rights, and I’m beyond certain that that is the dynamic that is happening here. Elsewhere on the “FUnited” thread (over 400 comments and counting! way to go, Shapelings!), commenter Sue reports calling up United and asking some more questions about the two-seats-for-fatties policy:

I am so angry. I just called United and politely asked if I had to have two seats and how would they know it… They said yes blah blah blah. Then I asked what about a person in a wheel chair that takes up a lot of space…would they have to buy two seats as well? He said no. I then went on to say if I got a wheelchair, then I would not have to pay for two seats? He said that was correct. I then lost it. I am shaking with rage right now.

Right. Because if you are a wheelchair user, or you have other medical equipment that causes you not to fit into a single seat, the airlines’ official stance is that it’s not your fault and you shouldn’t be punished. If they see you with an assistive device at the gate, they don’t ask if you need it because you started a barfight, or because you huffed a couple of spray cans of Aqua Net and plowed your Harley into a giant redwood; most assistive-device users need their equipment for reasons other than that, so the few with self-inflicted injuries aren’t separated out and treated unequally. (Although, of course, fatasses with assistive devices routinely get accused of having eaten their way into disability, most airline personnel will keep schtum about such thoughts even if they have them.) Probably a lot of this has not so much to do with them having the utmost respect for PWD so much as recognition that U.S. law will not be on the airlines’ side if they deny a medical equipment user equal access.

But bottom line is, people feel okay about punishing us fatasses who don’t have medical equipment, because the default assumption is that we chose to ascend to the highest possible BMI category by being oh-so-careless with our diet and oh-so-slothful with our movement. Like choosing the fries over the salad makes a difference of a hundred freaking pounds or more. Even if you are the kind of extreme binge eater who did put on serious weight bingeing, it’s still not a matter of conscious choice, for cat’s sake. You still have to have the genetic capacity to become the size you are, fries or no fries, binge or no binge. (Not to mention that you also have to have the genetic capacity to binge.) And as with the medical equipment, you can’t tell by looking who needs it because they just do and who needs it because they fucked themselves up horribly, and frankly, it shouldn’t matter anyway.

O Canada, why do you have to keep proving again and again how much smarter you are than your blowhard egotistical neighbor to the south? One person, one fare — no, that does NOT mean a 600-pound person gets to sit on you for five hours, what it means is that someone whose width, or other reason for not fitting in a single seat, is sussed out ahead of time and comped the extra seat. Yeah, that’s right. They just give it to them, pending presentation of official documentation of said physical condition at check-in. None of this mix-in-a-salad-if-you-don’t-like-it crap, which always seems to come from people who mix in a fuckload less salad than I do anyway. And anyone who thinks a second seat is just the ginchiest gift from God should be forced to be strapped against a seat divider on a cross-country trip and feel that thing digging into their back the whole time. Ow, ow, owwww. Nobody wants to be crunched up against that seat divider, trust me. It’s just that sometimes shit happens and it’s necessary.

But it’s just bewildering that people would choose to hate on us instead of unloading their frustrations on the airlines for being so incommodious. Speaking of which, that woman on Kate’s segment, who complained about her 2-year-old paying full fare? Does she know that they used to only charge kids 2-11 half fare? I know this, because when I was 12 years old circa 1975 (probably before this woman was born), my parents begged me not to wear any jewelry or makeup to the airport so I’d look younger than 12 and they could save some money. I refused. (Does any 12-year-old girl want to be mistaken for 11?) But undigressing, why would they resent us so, unless we thought we could Do Something About It? Yeah, I’ll tell you what I could do about it. I could go off my meds again, and eventually fit into one 17″ seat with canola-oil ease. That is, if I didn’t commit suicide before becoming appreciably smaller. If someone got stuck next to me when I was seriously depressed and having screaming/crying jags, even if I got to be a size 8 they’d still be lodging complaints.

And no, I’m NOT just going to stay home, either. Not all the time. Add that to the list of things I don’t owe Fatphobius jerkwadius.