Body Stuff
June 25, 2008
Someone Who Really Should Be Named Joy
I know I'm being the laziest blogger in the world lately, but hey, I'm busy. And at least I'm interrupting my laziness from time to time to bring you headlines and videos some of you might not have seen already. Like this. Which is awesome, and made me cry, with the discussion of looking at pictures of ourselves taken we were 13 years old:
Posted by Holly at 8:20 AM | Comments (3)
May 27, 2008
That Which Is Evidence of Summer's First Real Foray into This Interminable Cold Late Spring, Being My Toenails
I have an absolute horror of cold feet, perhaps, because as my acupuncturist constantly reminds me, I am particularly prone to them. "Your feet are so cold!" she'll say, feeling my toes before sticking a few needles in them. "You must remember to keep them warm."
It's counsel I don't need. When I was young I always wore socks or footsies in all but the warmest months (which admittedly constitutes about half the year in Arizona). Living in Taiwan gave me an aversion to walking around the house without some sort of substantial slipper or flip-flop on--the second you walk into someone's house, including your own, you're expected to remove your street shoes and don "two syes," or "escape shoes"--so it's rare that I go unshod, even inside. If it's under about 85F, I have slippers on; if it's under 75F, I have on slippers and a pair of socks; if it's under 50F, I have on slippers and TWO pair of socks.
This makes it hard to paint my toenails, though I really enjoy a nice pedicure. Because not only do I have to take my socks off to paint my toenails, I have to leave the socks off long enough for the polish to dry. And if you apply multiple coats--and I often do, because that one-coat stuff doesn't usually work--that can take a long time.
At one point this past winter I tried cutting the toes off a pair of socks that already had holes in them, so that only my toes were exposed for painting; everything else could stay warm. It worked OK-ish, in that my ankles felt fine, but my toes got VERY cold.
So it's a big deal when it's finally warm enough for long enough that I can paint my toes in relative comfort. And that happened over this weekend, though after two nice days, it got crappy again. It was a pleasure to wake up this chilly, dark damp morning and see the shock of bright color on my very neat, nice toes, particularly since I have lovely (albeit large) feet, even if I do say so myself. It's one reason I like pretty shoes so much: they flatter one of the nicest parts of my body.
I would include a photo of what my toes look like, but I've already done it here.
Posted by Holly at 2:28 PM | Comments (7)
March 18, 2008
Stupidest Flesh Wound Ever
Yesterday I was fiddling with something in a cabinet under the counter and I stood up a little too quickly and a little too close to the counter top and scraped the skin off the bridge of my nose. It bled--copiously, profusely, excessively. I have to wear a band-aid across my nose, and it looks really dumb. It also feels unpleasant--it's much worse to have a sticky piece of plastic on your face than on, say, your finger or elbow.
And when, after trying to stop the bleeding, I went back to the kitchen and finished what I'd been doing, I found the bit of skin still clinging to the counter top.
In other words, yuckiness abounds.
Posted by Holly at 10:25 AM | Comments (7)
March 10, 2008
Not Unpleasant, But Still Not Attractive
It turns out that certain psychological states are simply unavailable to me when I positively REEK of Bengay, the first being any sort of inclination to engage in social interaction, even interaction via an unscented forum like the web. Another is the belief that I can write anything worth reading. No, when my skin and my clothes smell so strongly of Bengay that my cat won’t come near me, all I really want to do is lie down.
The smell of Bengay is weird, right? Most people will agree with me on that. And I might be the only one who feels this way, but I don’t find the smell unpleasant--I don’t think it out and out stinks--but I also don’t find it attractive. And it’s not just because I know it’s medicine often marketed to old people; it’s because it’s such a strong smell, from a substance that really freakin' HURTS if you get it near any mucus membranes, and because it makes you want to lie down. Seriously: I put it on, and I want to lie down. I suspect there’s some real physiological process going on there; something about how it increases blood flow, and makes your skin feel sensations ranging from mild tingling to out-and-out burning, and makes your muscles soften a little, and assaults your nostrils and tear ducts. I don’t know. I tried to find out what the side-effects of Bengay are, if overwhelming albeit short-term fatigue is one of them, but an entire series of google searches only turned up this bizarre story about a teen athlete who died from a Bengay overdose.
You might be wondering why I smell like Bengay, and the reason is: we had a blizzard this weekend. I’ve already done the “shoveling lots and lots of snow really SUCKS” rant, so I won’t belabor that point. I’ll just state that between about 10 a.m. on Friday and 2 a.m. on Sunday, or a period of slightly less than 48 hours, we got 24 inches of snow, and unless I wanted to stay put until April, the snow couldn’t stay put. Hence the shoveling, which, as I’ve already explained, is accomplished more efficiently if you start it before the last of those 24 inches has fallen. I started going out Saturday morning and kept at the sorry business until Sunday afternoon.
Having to clear a driveway has helped me understand some of the processes behind the melting of the polar ice caps. It’s easy to melt snow and ice even if temperatures are below freezing, provided you have two things: sunshine, and an exposed surface that absorbs heat. If you leave even a thin layer of snow--say, an inch--covering your driveway, it will stay there. But if you clear a patch, even a small patch, and the sun comes out, the sun will warm the concrete, which does a really remarkable job of absorbing and radiating heat. So the light of the sun on top of the snow mixed with the heat from under the snow does a good job of melting stuff, and, provided there’s a way for the water to run off or that there’s not so much that it won’t just evaporate, you’ll have a clear driveway with a minimal amount of work, provided also that you’re willing to wait a while, because it doesn’t happen instantly. However, if there’s nowhere for the water to go, you’ve got to get rid of it yourself, or it will turn into a layer of ice as soon as it’s no longer getting direct sun. Anyway, apparently oceans warmed by climate change work as well as concrete in helping to melt ice from underneath. And the periods of re-freezing are getting shorter, so stuff melts more quickly, and stays melted.
OK. So I know that was a diversion but I’ve wanted to write about it for a long time. It’s just interesting to me that at least some of these processes scientists are telling us we should worry about aren’t arcane or difficult to understand; they’re actually quite logical and observable in our own lives.
But back to my driveway. Because the sun was out, I managed to get sections of the driveway completely clear, but I knew better than to tackle the mouth of my driveway, because there’s that thing that happens to a shoveled surface near the street after the snow plows come by.... And sure enough, Sunday afternoon, the plows came along and packed all the mouths of all the driveways with a bank of chunky, dirty, icy, compacted snow almost four feet high and six feet wide. There was no way I could manage that on my own.... So I paid a neighbor with a snow blower to cut through that. And even with a machine, it took him almost half an hour. it was serious business.
Clearing the part I did myself took many episodes of many hours, all requiring much lifting. After about the second foray out, I rubbed Bengay all over my neck, right arm and shoulder. It helped. It helped enough that I began applying it prophylactically, BEFORE I went out, so that so that my muscles got heated up before I had to heft that stinkin' shovel full of snow up over the drifts.... And while I felt a certain sense of pride that I managed to do so much hard manual labor, I also felt sore and exhausted--I’m neither athletic nor known for my upper-body strength. I am sure that somewhere there are people who can shovel and such for hours and feel smart afterwards, but I felt downright mentally incapacitated. I couldn’t do much for the remainder of the day but watch TV and knit. Even now, I feel sort of foggy. And I really hope that this was winter’s last hurrah and I won’t have to do it again for a good long while.
Posted by Holly at 2:24 PM | Comments (1)
March 4, 2008
Look, Ma, No Hands?
Like Gifted Typist and First-Person Narrator, I've got something nasty going on in my neck and shoulders. I injured something about a month ago during a week of travel--all that hefting heavy luggage onto the overhead racks or compartments in trains and planes--afterwards it hurt to lift my right arm above the level of my shoulder. But it got better after a few days, at least until this weekend, when I did something worse. I thought maybe yoga or a little weight-lifting would help the muscles heal, and I didn't think I overdid things, but apparently I was wrong....
Anyway, commenters suggested that Gifted Typist look into voice recognition software. And I thought, maybe I should look into that myself.... Dragon Naturally Speaking Standard seems like it would fit my needs, such as they are.... I mean, do I really need software that transcribes what I say? Has anyone used this? I type pretty fast, and I like typing, and I also like the way typing makes me reflect on what I write.... I'm not sure transcribing everything I say would make my writing better; it just would mean I could do it without hands.
Or maybe it would completely change my life, and I just can't imagine how.
Advice, anyone?
Posted by Holly at 9:49 AM | Comments (2)
January 21, 2008
Why I Need Glasses, At Least Tonight
A million years ago--OK, 16 or so months ago--I posted a picture of the reading glasses I finally had to get, because right on schedule, I began developing mild presbyopia in my early 40s. I like my glasses OK and wear them when I remember to put them on, which isn't that often. I keep them by my bed, so about the only time I remember to wear them is when I read before I (try to) go to sleep.
But tonight I tried to read something and there was just no freakin' way I could do it without glasses. Here's a photo of what I was trying to read:
My fingers mark the particular character I was looking for. Just for the sake of scale, here's another photo, including not only the book but my cat, so you can see how tiny the text actually is:
Looking up a character in an Chinese-English dictionary was always a challenge, particularly with older dictionaries in Taiwan, because to use them you had to know one of three things: 1) what the character's radical is (sometimes hard to determine even if you're thoroughly literate, and I never was--I was merely fluent), or 2) how to "spell" it with bo-po-mo-fo, a system I never mastered, or 3) how it is romanized in the wacky Wade-Giles system of romanization (which I didn't learn--at the MTC, we only learned Yale, which, despite being the easiest system for actually learning to pronounce Mandarin, is not the most popular system).
It was always an adventure to find a character even when I could read the tiny print of the dictionary, but now, well, it's quite the challenge. I finally found the character I needed, using a bo-po-mo-fo chart to help me sound out the phonetics of the character. It's this, ku, meaning suffering, bitterness, pain, a word I know well from my mission, because we were always being admonished to be "sying ku," to "toil bitterly."
Just thought I'd share.
Posted by Holly at 9:21 PM | Comments (4)
January 14, 2008
Dirty Christians, Over-Scrubbed Americans, Soap, Advertising and You
I feel dirty right now, and nauseated, having tried to read one of William Kristol’s editorials in the NY Times. Loathing and revulsion don’t cover the reactions I have to that man. I have despised him since he first came to my attention, back around 2002 when I started paying attention to the fact that there were evil people with power who really, really wanted us to go to war. I would say that I can’t believe the Times hired the guy, were it not for the fact that the Times credulously accepted the kinds of arguments Kristol and his ilk offered for why we should go to war.
Something else that made me feel dirty and nauseated was this article about the evil that is Facebook. I resisted Facebook for a very long time, but finally joined a few months ago, after people convinced me it was one of the more benign social networking sites out there. Wrong! It’s owned by some really dreadful people who are glad to give the CIA access to all your information. I looked into deleting my account, but it turns you can’t do that--you can only “deactivate it.”
But this is not a post about Kristol or the Times--or Facebook or spying. It’s a post about dirt and dirtiness and cleanliness, and Kristol et al is useful in that they show the way dirtiness and cleanliness are states of mind, the way things we think about can make us feel, genuinely (not just as a figure of speech), that we need to take a shower.
This isn’t a new idea. It’s covered quite well in Purity and Danger by Mary Douglas, a book about ritual filth and purity that I had to read in grad school and liked well enough that I read it again later, just for fun. I’m looking forward to rereading it this summer, both just for the fun of it and as research for an essay I want to write about that concept of contamination ever so important to childhood, namely, cooties.
As research for the same project, I recently read The Dirt on Clean by Katherine Ashenburg, which also made me feel I needed to take a bath--and then made me acknowledge something I already knew: I have more exacting bathing habits than most people, though I’m not afraid of germs: I just like being clean. Here’s another connection to Facebook: my profile there announces that “I love the simple, transient pleasure of cleanliness, as in crisp, freshly laundered sheets; hair washed so recently it's still damp; the minty freshness of just-brushed teeth. I especially love going to sleep in a clean bed with just-washed hair and well-maintained teeth.”
I like being clean so much, in fact, that I feel slight psychological and physical discomfort if I violate my own idiosyncratic ideas of what is clean and what is not. Emphasis on slight discomfort: my attitudes aren’t extreme enough to constitute a phobia or a compulsion, but they do require an adjustment whenever I visit people, as I also feel uncomfortable answering the question “Why do you need to take a bath before bed if you’re going to take a shower in the morning?” and guilty about using up my host’s hot water.
I recommend this book, though it has a considerable ick factor: it’s just not that cool to read about people who never once, NEVER ONCE, washed their hair, who, in fact, had a grand total of two baths during their entire time on earth: one at birth and one as preparation for burial. But all in all, the history of bathing in the West from the time of the Romans (who loved being clean almost as much as North Americans do) is a fascinating topic, and Ashenburg does a good job with it.
A rough overview: the Romans loved bathing and cleanliness, but early Christians hated it. That’s right, Christianity is the only major religion that has no real interest in physical cleanliness. This is not an entirely bad thing on one level; Jesus was willing to hang out with people others shunned, and argued that there was nothing intrinsically “unclean” about menstruating women or people with various illnesses; he also maintained that it was silly to worry so much about purifying your exterior if your interior was somehow defiled. But his followers took this argument to an illogical extreme, claiming that to be filthy was a sign of holiness. It wasn’t until Victorian England that people were taught in Sunday school that “cleanliness is next to Godliness.”
Then, long about 1000 a.d., people in Europe started to discover that it felt good to A) take a bath and B) hang out with your friends who were also taking baths (because few private homes had bathrooms, most baths were taken in public facilities) and C) be clean after the bath. Bathing and cleanliness were on the rise until the bubonic plague hit; ideas of disease at the time held that bathing made you more susceptible to the plague, because it opened your pores, and so bath houses across Europe were shut down, which was a bad thing plague-wise, since it meant people didn’t get rid of the fleas actually causing the plague, but a good thing forest-wise: having enough fuel to heat all that water was a major cause of deforestation back in the day.
The Renaissance was filthy, just filthy, but it wasn’t that people didn’t care about cleanliness: it’s that they believed bathing could kill them. Instead, if you wanted to be clean, you changed your shirt (which was the basic undergarment most people wore) a lot, because a clean linen shirt was thought to act as a wick that drew impurities out of the body. However, plenty of people put on their shirt or shift and left it on until it fell off in tatters--or until it had to be taken off for medical reasons, which could involve pulling away chunks of flesh as the garment came off. The court of Louis XIV seems to have been particularly dirty, since Louis didn’t like to bathe and had really bad breath. (In fact, for centuries, it was considered bourgeois to worry about bathing: only the middle class needed to care if they stunk, and until the mid-20th century, a lack of indoor plumbing was a sign of wealth in the grand homes of the British landed gentry: why install pipes to carry hot water to a little room if you were rich enough to hire men to carry a fancy-ass bathtub into your bedroom, set it by the fire, fill it with warm water boiled downstairs in the scullery, then haul the whole thing away after you’d had your bath?)
Baths began to make a come-back in the 18th century, for reasons of health, not cleanliness: medicinal waters were thought to cure disease. But once again, when people started taking baths, they discovered that doing so felt good. Along the way to the present day love of bathing was a debate about cold vs. hot water for bathing (Charles Dickens LOVED a cold shower every morning) and concerns about the use of soap.
Soap. We are so reliant on it now that it’s hard to believe people once advocated doing without it, and that a real battle was waged to convince people of soap’s necessity. It’s something of a truism that the goal of advertising is to make you feel insecure, and it turns out that was true from the get-go: modern advertising was created as a way to sell soap, and the way to do that was to convince people they would stink without it, and would therefore lose out on love, friendship and success. The same technique was used for mouthwash: No one would tell you have halitosis; they’d just avoid you, and you’d never know why. You know that saying, “Often a bridesmaid, never a bride”? It comes from an early ad for Listerine.
North Americans bathe more than anyone else, and care more about our teeth than anyone else; neither of which is necessarily a good thing: it is possible to overbrush your teeth, causing gums to recede or creating holes in tooth enamel, and this whole business of bleaching them white as snow them is bad for them. As for bathing too much, or using too many products; well, it may or may not hurt us, but it’s bad for the environment, something I acknowledge to my pain because I LOVE very hot, frequent baths. But I am determined to cut back--take short showers instead of long baths, for instance, and bathe only once a day instead of twice, as I really prefer to do.
In fact, after reading this book, I resolved that early in the summer, after the academic year ended and I’d no longer have to interact with people daily but before it got so hot I’d sweat a lot, I’d go a week without bathing at all, just to see if I could and what it felt like, though of course I still planned to brush my teeth and wash my hands after using the toilet or scooping out the cat box. I thought this was a very daring experiment until a friend sent me a link to this article by a woman who went six weeks without washing at all--including her hands or her teeth--with some very interesting results. She felt dirty, her kids refused to cuddle with her and she didn’t want to see people, but the quality of her skin improved and her irritable bowel syndrome cleared up, both of which she attributed to the fact that she was no longer putting all these gross chemical compounds on her skin to maintain or improve it. The one real physical ailment she suffered as a result of the experiment was a cavity from not brushing or flossing.
Anyway. This is, as I already mentioned, a quick overview of Ashenburg’s book. I hope I have piqued your interest, because it really is a good treatment of a fascinating and important topic.
Posted by Holly at 12:48 PM | Comments (8)
October 5, 2007
Our Bodies, Our Smells
I remember reading this very annoying essay by this woman about walking through a cheese shop and noticing “the pungent, strangely and almost bodily smells of the cheeses.” Come on: the smells of cheeses are neither strangely nor almost bodily: cheese after all is made from a bodily substance, so it’s perfectly appropriate that its smell be quite thoroughly bodily. Moreover, cheese is what happens when you take a substance and introduce agents--bacteria, yeast, mold--that transform its chemical composition, while you simultaneously try to extract a good deal of the moisture--which is also what happens to food in the intestines. I’m not saying the processes or outcomes are completely similar, or that cheese smells like shit, but I am saying there are several reasons not to be surprised by a lingering whiff of living, eating, breathing bodies and the substances they produce when you inhale in a cheese shop.
Which leads me to another point: it seems to me that although--or because--smell is one of the most primal of our senses, conveying as it does simple information necessary to survival (if something smells sick or dead, maybe you shouldn’t eat or drink it) and able to affect our basic physiology in ways the other senses can’t (an unidentifiable bad smell affects us viscerally in ways an unidentifiable unpleasant noise does not), we don’t like to acknowledge the work our noses do, automatically, whether we ask them to or not. We don’t like to acknowledge that we occasionally smell stuff that stinks. And we heap shame on people who admit that they use their noses intentionally, as a source of information, rather than as an occasional and accidental source of pleasure or disgust.
I have been thinking about this ever since Rebecca acknowledged noticing that her left thumb smelled like fish sticks. She took some heat for this--people asked her, “Why did you smell your left thumb?” But if she’d said, “I just noticed that my left thumb smelled like jasmine oil,” would anyone care? Would anyone ask, “Why on earth did you smell your left thumb?” But noticing--and admitting that you noticed--that your left thumb smelled like fish sticks--well, that’s just beyond the pale.
So Rebecca came back with a spot-on response:
Oh please, don't pretend you never smell your fingers. It's not like I was changing diapers or something. While typing a blog post I was touching my lips, as I am wont to do when sitting and thinking, and I smelled fish sticks. So I smelled my left thumb, the thumbnail of which was pinching my top lip, and therefore right under my nose. It no longer smells like fish sticks, FYI.
I admit I have smelled my fingers, sometimes incidentally, as when I lay my forefinger above my lip and under my nose, which sounds strange when you write it out, but you see people do it from time to time--it’s a thinking gesture. Or sometimes my nose itches, and I scratch it, and notice that some smell, pleasant or otherwise, lingers on my fingers. Or sometimes, after I’ve been chopping onions or mincing garlic, I’ll smell my hands quite intentionally after I wash them, to see if the odor has been removed.
Not too long ago I happened to notice that my fingers smelled like a mildewy dish rag. I found this strange because I had not recently handled a mildewy dish rag. But I dealt with the problem in what seemed the most appropriate way: I washed my hands at the nearest sink, which happened to be in my kitchen. Then I dried my hands thoroughly on the tea towel by the sink.... and noticed that my hands STILL smelled like a mildewy dish rag. So then I smelled the tea towel, and realized two things: 1) it was time to get a fresh tea towel and 2) I should probably use warm water and maybe even a little bleach the next time I washed a load of white things (having cut back dramatically on using both in my laundry because of their environmental impact).
I know that Rebecca and I are not the only two people in the world who occasionally smell their fingers, because in some article I even found a way to remove stubborn food smells from fingers. (That’s right: if your fingers never smell funky, you probably aren’t very involved in food preparation, because making food exposes your hands to all kinds of stinkiness.) Here it is: scoop some warm coffee grounds out of the filter and rub them all over your hands. Do this outside, because it’s very messy. It actually feels great: the graininess of the coffee grounds makes this a great exfoliant, and the oil in the beans makes your hands smooth and soft. As for whether doing this actually removes the smell of garlic or just covers it up with a faint coffee aroma, well, I don’t know that it matters, because at least after you do it, your hands smell good--provided you like the smell of coffee.
Posted by Holly at 10:04 AM | Comments (7)
September 21, 2007
Aluminum Foil Whaaat?
For about ten years now, I've been complaining to chiropractors, massage therapists and acupuncturists about some weirdness in my left hip. It's not a pain, exactly, and it's not a joint problem; it's... like some weird congestion. Every new practitioner I've seen swears s/he can fix it, but no one ever has. The procedure that did the most good was, believe it or not, the colon cleanse I wrote about in August. (Which, by the way, my site meter reveals is currently one of my most popular entries--a lot of people really like to google the phrase "nasty shit.")
But there's still some weirdness in my hip, maybe from a lifetime of standing wrong.... I don't know. I just know that sometimes my hip feels wrong and the wrongness radiates down my leg and my knee feels wrong and my ankle feels wrong.
So today I saw my acupuncturist, and her way of treating the hip weirdness was one I have never before encountered: she put half a dozen tiny needles on the left side of my ass, then got a sheet of aluminum foil and taped it to my butt--supposedly the foil intensifies the energetic whatever it is the needles do.
Now, I love acupuncture--if you click on the link above, you'll get to read about a fabulous treatment from two years ago. But the foil-taped-to-the-butt thing.... Even I am skeptical about that. I haven't noticed any marked improvement in my hip, but we'll see if anything changes in the coming week.
Posted by Holly at 4:44 PM | Comments (3)
September 8, 2007
A Little Curl
I haven't had bangs in well over a decade, but somehow or other, I recently acquired a few stray hairs that are significantly shorter than their neighbors. I would never have noticed them except that they're right at the hairline off my forehead. I don't know if they were weakened last time I got it colored, and so broke; or if the stylist somehow cut them off during my last trim. But they're there.
And they form a little ringlet that sometimes escapes when I pull my hair back, and sometimes I think it looks really cute and sometimes I find it really annoying.
Posted by Holly at 9:57 AM | Comments (1)
August 1, 2007
Some Pretty Nasty Shit
Warning: read no further if you have if don’t want to be grossed out, because frankly, my title should be taken literally. This entry includes a link to a site with thoroughly disgusting photos, as well as references to bodily functions many people prefer not to discuss.
In other words, don’t get to the end of this entry and leave me a comment about how I gave you too much information, because I’m telling you right now, if you don’t really want to know what I’ve been doing for the past five days, don’t read on.
So here it is:
I’ve been cleansing my colon.
Yep. A few weeks ago in an entry about lucid dreaming, I mentioned that one trick in the new age bag of steps to enlightenment is colon cleansing--the idea is that toxicity in the bowels impedes both physical and spiritual health. Not too long ago my acupuncturist recommended some outfit called Blessed Herbs--said they sold a mean colon cleansing kit. I had nothing better to do during the final weekend in July than drink a load of apple juice and trot to the bathroom, so I figured, why the hell not?
The specifics of this cleanse involve, as I say, apple juice. And packets of some toxin absorbing powder you mix with said apple juice five times a day. And some powerful digestion-stimulating herbs packaged in handy capsules so you can swallow some right before bedtime. And six to eight glasses of water. And, ideally, nothing else. Which is a basically a juice fast, and you do it for five days.
Before I go any further, let me say that I HATE FASTING. I HATE IT. I have ALWAYS hated it. Even when I was anorexic I hated it. I did it, but I hated it.
I especially hated it as a Mormon. Don’t know if you knew this, but all Mormons in decent health are supposed to fast for 24 hours the first Sunday of every month. Now, fasting can be good for you in moderation, provided you drink enough water while you’re doing it to keep your organs lubricated and healthy. But the thing about fasting as a Mormon is this: you go without water for 24 hours too. And that’s just bad for you. It’s not only onerous and boring, it’s flat unhealthy.
But even fasting as a regular Mormon wasn’t as bad as fasting as a missionary. Because as a missionary, you had to ride around on a bike and sweat and get dehydrated, and you still weren’t supposed to drink anything--or if you REALLY needed some liquid, you have a very little bit of water, just enough to wet your mouth.
Plus it made Sundays really long not to be able to go home from Church and cook dinner. The only good thing about fast Sunday as a missionary was that when we finally did get to cook dinner and eat, we usually just stayed in for the rest of the night, instead of going back out to work for three more hours like we were supposed to--we called that P-Day eve, because the next day was our Preparation or P-day, the one day a week we go to do things like listen to music or write letters.
Anyway. Back to the fact that I hate fasting. It’s painful and boring. I personally don’t have much energy when I fast--something about not consuming food just does that to me. But I do recognize that at times, being bored and uncomfortable is worth it.
This was one such time. Fasting got easier the longer I did it, partly because I wisely cleared my refrigerator of actual food before I started, partly because I kept reading the website and the instructions obsessively and learned that I could consume things like vegetable broth and miso if I really wanted to, partly because my stomach shrank (boy did it shrink) and partly because, well, the process was producing satisfactory results.
Now I’ve done colon cleanses before. But I’ve never seen results like those I got with this system. I won’t bother to describe them, because if you really want to know what they were like, simply go to a page aptly titled It’s Gross and It’s Mine! and see what happened.
There was a point when I wondered how I could have six bowel movements a day (hey! I told you not to read on if you weren’t prepared to encounter grossness!) when I wasn’t consuming any solid food, but according to the experts what I was expelling wasn’t anything I’d eaten recently: it was “mucoid plaque.” I got out an anatomy book and read up on the colon: turns out one of the main things the colon does is produce lots and lots of mucus, and it doesn’t always go anywhere. And when it just sits in your colon for over four decades, it becomes caked with very old feces and all sorts of nastiness.
By the end I had to wonder how there was room for my food to pass through when there was all that other stuff in there. Which is pretty much the point: clearing all that out so there’s room for your food, so nutrients are absorbed more easily, etc etc.
Overall I am quite happy with the results. I lost several pounds and my stomach is MUCH flatter. I feel like my complexion looks healthier--I might be making that up. But it’s really nice to know that all that stuff is just GONE.
In other words, I actually recommend this, and I might even do it again.
Now, one question you might be having is why doing that would prevent me from blogging. It didn’t, really; I just didn’t feel like it. I felt lethargic and vulnerable and all I really wanted to do was monitor my body and its various functions. But now that’s all done and I’m back to clogging up my gut rather than clearing it out. But who knows. Perhaps some new lightness and clarity will be reflected in my writing.
Posted by Holly at 6:41 PM | Comments (6)
July 2, 2007
In Case You Have or Are Interested in Breasts
Over the weekend I read A History of the Breast by Marilyn Yalom, which should be required reading for anyone with breasts or an interest in them, which I realize doesn't cover everyone but covers a lot of people. The book was fascinating, and full of memorable illustrations and photos, including a set depicting a "Bosom Ballet." It told me many things I'd never considered which were obvious once they were pointed out to me, like the significance of the name for the kind of animal we are: mammalia, coined by 18th-century Swedish physician Carolus Linnaeus, comes from the Latin term mammae (milk-secreting organs) and literally means "of the breast." So as a group, warm-blooded animals with a four-chambered heart are named for an attribute only half of them share: the ability to produce milk for suckling their young.
It also answered a question I'd been wondering about lately: Why is that galaxy up in the sky most of us can't see any more because our night skies are so marred by light pollution, called "the Milky Way"? Why is it considered milky? Why not "the Sparkly Belt"? Why not a lot of things?
Well. Turns out we have Greek mythology to thank for the name. Yalom states,
It was believed that mortals could become immortal if they were suckled at the breast of the queen of goddesses. So, when Zeus wanted his son Hercules--whose mother was the mortal Alcmena--to have immortality, he had him placed quietly at Hera's breast while she was sleeping. But Hercules sucks so vigorously that she was awakened and realized he was not her own child. Indignant, she drew the breast away with such force that the milk spurted into the heavens and created the Milky Way.
I also learned that large breasts have not always been considered the "crown jewels of femininity," as Yalom puts it; turns out that in the renaissance, breasts were best if they were "small, white, round like apples, hard, firm, and wide apart." Thought you'd want to know.
And I learned quite a few things that fairly upset me, one being the origin of the phrase "tits on a tray." I had always heard the phrase used to describe very upright, obvious breasts, intentionally supported and showcased to be, well, in your face. (It wasn't necessarily the most female-friendly way of talking about female bodies, but I could live with it.) But it turns out that Saint Agatha, an early Christian martyr whose death included having her breasts mutilated and removed by Roman soldiers, is often depicted in religious iconography as carrying her tits on a tray. There are two paintings of her included in the book; one shows her with her arms tied over her head to a tree limb; she's smiling and nubile as this soldier fits a giant set of clippers around her breast. The depiction of extreme and brutal violence on a woman who sports a "come hither" smile makes the painting pornographic, if you ask me, in ways the "Bosom Ballet" could never be. The other painting shows Agatha, well, carrying her tits on a tray. She's fully clothed and appears healthy, and the tits on the tray are free of blood or gore--they look like tidy little currant-adorned puddings or something, which she's preparing to serve the viewer. Anyway, needless to say, if someone uses that phrase in my hearing in the future, I'll ask them please not to do it again, because whatever it might mean now, its origins are too violent and misogynist.
Yalom discusses the fact that for most of history, discussions of the breast has been conducted by and for men, just as depictions of breasts have been generally been created by and for men. This is one reason she approves of the Bosom Ballet, which I have to say I also found hilarious; it's created by a lesbian, Annie Sprinkle, and if I understand Yalom's analysis correctly, the point is not to titillate, but to "[debunk] the traditional ‘ivory-orb' vision of breasts" by showing real breasts and the way they sag, bounce, respond to pressure, etc.
Yalom's feminist and women-centric agenda is announced in the table of contents, which includes the following chapters:
1. The Sacred Breast: Goddesses, Priestesses, Biblical Women, Saints, and Madonnas
2. The Erotic Breast: "Orbs of Heavenly Frame"
3. The Domestic Breast: A Dutch Interlude
4. The Political Breast: Bosoms for the Nation
5. The Psychological Breast: Minding the Body
6. The Commercialized Breast: From Corsets to Cyber-Sex
7. The Medical Breast: Life-Giver and Life-Destroyer
8. The Liberated Breast: Politics, Poetry, and Pictures
9. The Breast in Crisis
Yalom manages to set forth a coherent, logical chain of meaning and history that includes attention to everything from shifting attitudes towards breast feeding, depictions and exploitation of breasts during wartime (including the differences among the French icon of Liberte, also known as Marianne, the English icon Britannia, and the American symbol Columbia, as well as the practice of painting bare-breasted women on airplanes), and the evolution of breast cancer treatment, to innovations in garments designed to cover or support breasts. I was very interested and quite impressed. I'd even called it a page-turner.
Posted by Holly at 10:15 AM | Comments (4)
January 20, 2007
The BBC Loves the C-Word Too
Anyone who's read this blog for any length of time knows that I'm a fan of the c-word as an actual term for female genitalia. Now I learn that the BBC is planning a documentary on why the word has become more popular, entitled, appropriatel enough, "I Love the C-Word." Plenty of people are outraged, but I'm quite pleased--unless, of course, the focus is all on why the word is such an effective insult. I just hope they have some sort of on-line broadcast so I can actually watch the program, since I don't live in England.
Posted by Holly at 10:27 AM | Comments (5)
August 24, 2006
Just As God Made Me
Posted by Holly at 9:59 AM | Comments (23)
August 23, 2006
Just As God Made Her
Yesterday I went to Best Buy and bought Season II of Veronica Mars, just as I said I would, and watched about as much as I could stand before my eyeballs started to itch. One thing I'm fascinated by is what a big deal Kristen Bell's small tits are this season.
Not a lot was made of the topic the first season, though one of my very favorite exchanges referenced the subject: Veronica has discovered that someone has let the air out of one of her tires. New guy and love interest "boy toy Troy" (as he is referred to by Logan Echolls) squats beside her as she struggles with lug nuts and asks, "Flat?"
"Just as god made me," she replies.
And the conversation goes on from there.
But in Season II, there are plenty of references to how "not busty" Veronica is. First she's humiliated on some local access TV show because she used (without results, apparently) some breast enlargement cream. Then there are references to how she doesn't need any plastic surgery "except the obvious,"as one creepy dude puts it, the obvious being breast implants. Then some "big-tittied bitch" (a phrase I borrow from Sandra Bernhard, fyi, in case it offends you) tells her she should get a tattoo on her chest "so people will have something to look at there."
And that's only in the first two disks, with four more to go.
Oh. There's also a dream sequence (the dreamer is male) where Bell is wearing some massively padded push-bra underneath some fishnet affair of a top. I don't think I would have noticed how artificially enhanced her boobs were in that scene if I hadn't been reminded over and over that if I saw her "just as god made her," she wouldn't have needed underwire for support.
One of the projects I'm supposedly working on is a book about "embodiment," aspects of which include (for me) life-threatening illness, menstruation, anorexia, getting a tattoo, going gray while I've still got really long hair I refuse to cut (everyone so often someone tells me you're not allowed to have long hair if it's gray), and being flat chested. I'm not so flat chested that if you saw me naked you'd mistake me for a guy, but I am flat enough that even when I'm 80, I will never have to worry about my tits sagging.
At some point (a fairly late point in my life, as a matter of fact), it finally sunk in for me that there a lot of songs by men about how great big asses are ("Fat-Bottomed Girls," "Baby Got Back," "Big Ol' Butt," "Big Bottom" [admittedly, a joke song from from Spinal Tap] to name only a few), but not that many songs about the joys of big tits. (If you know of one, please share the title. Also if you know of an "I Love Big Asses" song I've neglected to mention, please let me know.) Perhaps that's because breasts are so important that they don't need any additional musical praise. Or perhaps it's because... well, actually, as I tried to consider why there might be more odes to asses than to tits I came up with some reasons that distressed me, and I don't really want to go there.
But I do have more to say on this topic, so check back later.
Posted by Holly at 3:52 AM | Comments (5)
March 19, 2006
Blood and Guts in Mutual*
I know, I know: I said I was going to quit hanging out at blogs written by devout Mormon feminists, because they annoy me so. And I haven't gone back on my word, because I haven't been hanging out, exactly: I've just visited a time or two. You see, Jana posted something really interesting about Mormons and menarche, and she began this interesting post with a quote from me. When she emailed me about it, I couldn't resist checking it out; and when I saw that it was, like many things Jana posts, insightful and provocative, I couldn't resist commenting. And then I couldn't resist going back later and seeing what other women had to say, and those comments were interesting too; so I commented again.
And then I thought, "Wow, maybe I over-reacted; maybe these devout Mormon feminist bloggers aren't so bad." So I followed some links and looked at some blogs and I can admit that I sort of over-reacted, but I can also see that I sort of didn't. I found sites that really upset me, but instead of freaking out, I took a deep breath, clicked on something else, and simply resolved never to go back to the sites that bother me.
But I encourage you to check out Jana's post and leave a comment on what you think we can and should do to make menarche a positive (if private and personal) milestone for young women.
*Mutual is one of the old names for the Mormon youth organization. I'm not sure what it's called now.
Posted by Holly at 9:57 PM | Comments (1)
February 10, 2006
Outer and Upper Vagina
As evidence for my argument that we need to use words like vulva and cunt instead of vagina when we mean vulva or cunt instead of vagina, I offer this example.
The other day I found a flyer for NuvaRing contraceptive in my campus ladies' room. It features a photo of a woman walking along a sidewalk, a photo of a woman taking a surfboard onto the beach in the company of a guy who also has a surfboard, and a photo of a woman holding a menu as she sits in an outdoor café with a female companion. (Maybe it's just me, but these have never been activities for which I required contraceptives.)
The flyer also lists some frequently asked questions and their answers. My favorite:
"Will I feel NuvaRing?"
The response:
"Most women don't because, while the nerve endings of the outer vagina are very sensitive, the ones in the upper vagina are not."
Outer vagina? The vagina is an internal passageway. Outer vagina? That makes about as much sense as "outer esophagus" or "outer vas deferens" or "outer urethra"--unless, of course, you think "vagina" is the term that, like a nice pink thong from Victoria's Secret, covers ALL the relevant bits of female genitalia.
Apparently, a lot of people do. For although I found no reference to the "outer vagina" in any of the anatomy or medical books I own (it's so much easier to be a hypochondriac with your very own copy of The Merck Manual--the real one, not the dumbed-down version for lay people), I found plenty about it when I googled the term, as in "Honestly, if you look at Playboy, those women, on the outer vagina area, the vulva is very aesthetically appealing, the vulva is rounded."
The thing is, a lot of the time we can get along fine with imprecise language, but at some point, we're still going to need more precise terminology. I admit that we need a precise term for "the outer vagina area." But we've already got several, vulva being one, cunt being another, both being easier, more precise and more concise than "outer vagina."
By the way, at Saviour Onassis's suggestion, I recently watched Whoopi Goldberg's HBO special Back to Broadway (available on Netflix), and now I'm recommending it to you. Whoopi devotes about half an hour to discussing the evolution of menstrual sanitary products (I'm old enough to remember seeing my sister use those awful belts, but thank god the adhesive maxi-pads you just stuck to your underwear were invented before I fell off the roof) and menopause. Her account of the latter has really given me something to look forward to.... But aside from the frankness, one thing I appreciated was that she generally used an appropriate term for the space women have "down there": she uses the term pudenda. It's not my favorite term, but at least it's accurate.
Posted by Holly at 9:59 AM | Comments (3)
January 7, 2006
In Praise of the C Word
In the January 1, 2006 Sunday NY Times Magazine, there is a piece by Daphne Merkin as part of "The Way We Live Now" column that begins, "These are cruel times for vaginas." The piece goes on to describe various procedures that can be done to "improve" the appearance of external female genitalia, ranging from the "so-called Brazilian waxes" to labiaplasty, which "fixes" labia that are too big or too small or otherwise "defective."
I rather like the tone of the article: Merkin makes it clear that she finds the whole business hogwash, though I think the best section is devoted to the silliness of "hymen-reattachment surgery,"
once a desperate stratagem undertaken by young women from Muslim, Asian and Latin American cultures that demonized the loss of virginity before marriage, [which] is now being hawked as a way to enjoy a second honeymoon. If it's unclear whom this procedure is meant for--aging women hoping to catch a flagging penis with the semblance of undeflowered innocence?--it's even more ontologically ungraspable how stitching a hymen back together vitiates the psychological experience of having already lost your virginity.
Nonetheless, I was bothered by the fact that in her opening sentence, Merkin uses the term "vagina" when she should have used the term "vulva" or "pudendum."
Don't believe me? Consider these definitions:
vulva: The external genital organs of the female, including the labia majora, labia minora, and vestibule of the vagina. [Latin, womb, covering.]pudendum: the human external genital organs, especially of a woman. Often used in the plural. [Latin, neuter gerundive of pudere, to make or be ashamed.] (The fact that the term is literally rooted in shame is the main reason I will avoid using it.)
vagina: The passage leading from the opening of the vulva to the cervix of the uterus in female mammals. [Latin, vagina, sheath.]
I know, I know: some of you are pointing out that we've covered this territory before: there's a section on it in Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues: Ensler includes a letter from Jane Hirschman, honorary chair of the Vulva Club, membership in which cannot be extended to Ensler (much to the dismay of those already in the club), because membership is "predicated on the understanding and correct usage of the word vulva and being able to communicate that to as many people as possible, especially women." Ensler includes the letter without responding directly to it, and although she names the next monologue "The Vulva Club," once that piece is done, she goes right back to using the word vagina to mean both vagina and vulva.
I think it's good that we can talk openly about the vagina, but I wish we could talk openly about the vulva too. I think how awkward it would be if, when we wanted to talk about an arm, we never used that word--even though it was available to us--opting instead to use the word hand, which was supposed to mean both that thing at the end of your arm with fingers on it, and the arm itself, in contexts that didn't always make it clear which body part you were actually referring to.
Sadly, in pop culture, the generally accepted and acceptable term meant to invoke all of female genitalia is vagina. Vulva, apparently, is too fastidious and precise; cunt and pussy are too crude. (More about those terms later.) But that raises the question: WHY is vagina the more familiar, accepted term?
In 2001, at Sunstone, I participated in a Mormon version of The Vagina Monologues, though it had to be retitled: it went by the name "Sacred Spaces: Mormon Women's Faith and Sexuality," though I thought it should have been called "The Vagina Testimony Meeting." I began my piece by stating that
I am happy to participate in the project of claiming the sexuality of Mormon women as sacred spaces. But I'd like to ask: what does space mean? Are we talking geometry, as in "the infinite extension of the three-dimensional field of every day life"? Are we referring to "sufficient freedom from external pressure to develop or explore one's needs, interests, and individuality," as in, "I need my space"? Or are we talking about "a blank or empty area"? I'd like to cast my vote for the freedom to explore our needs, interests and individuality, but I have a feeling that first we'll have to carve out a blank or empty area in which to claim "sufficient freedom from external pressure"--in particular, pressure from the dogma that sex outside of heterosexual marriage is evil--in order to make that exploration.
I go on to ask
Should I think of my vagina as a space? I know that in the male world, a vagina, mine included, is defined primarily as a space, an empty area. But unless you're giving birth, spaciousness is not a vaginal virtue--tightness is what makes for a good vagina, and exercises are prescribed to tighten a loose vagina up.The vagina, spacious, tight or otherwise, is not the only organ of female sexuality. Why, aside from the fact that it is a receptacle for a penis, is the vagina so often the focus of discussions of female sexuality? The vagina is a deep subject but I would like to broaden this discussion, add a few contours. I would like to say the word pussy. I would like to say the word cunt. These words, unmentionable in many circumstances, refer not to the vagina but to the vulva, which includes the major and minor labia, the clitoris, and the "vestibule" of the vagina. I need these words to help me answer another question: What is the female equivalent of phallic? It can't be vaginal, which sounds as clinically medical as penile or testicular. It better not be hysteric, which, derived from the Greek word for womb, has too many negative connotations. Phallic refers not just to genitalia but the symbolic power of masculinity. What is the female equivalent, what word refers not only to genitalia but the symbolic power of femaleness? And what is that power? If such a word already exists, I don't think I've heard it, and so I propose a word: vulvic. I want to invoke the power to unsettle present in the word cunt. I want a word involving not just a sacred space but a sacred presence.
So that's right: I'm one of the few people--if not the only person--to say cunt at Sunstone, in front of an audience that included 75-year-old Mormon men. An audible gasp of astonishment rose when I said the word, and a few people strode from the room in outrage, but I kept right on going. I'm used to pissing off Mormons.
I admit that like Kate at Cruella-Blog, I am and have long been a fan of the C word. (Scroll down for Kate's defense of the word. As for why I include a euphemizing asterisk in the spelling of it, it's just so my blog doesn't come up when people are googling the term for porn sites. Note: I finally decided that writing "c*nt" was silly, and I came back and just wrote the word properly, as it deserves to be written: CUNT.) I like how strong it is: one clipped syllable, with plenty of firm consonants. I much prefer it to the term pussy, even though I quite like cats. I don't like that pussy is diminutive or animalistic, and I HATE that it's used by men as a term of derision for a weak, cowardly man: it really bothers me when straight men, who claim to take pleasure in women's bodies, invoke women's bodies as a way to insult other men. Admittedly, calling someone a cunt is about the worst insult you can hurl at him/her (compare it to calling someone a dick) in part because of the term's generalized ability to unsettle people, but to me, that's one indication of the word's inherent strength, one more reason it deserves my usage and respect.
I praise not only the word itself, but what it represents, and I also praise women who love their cunts as they are.
A follow-up to this is posted here.
Posted by Holly at 5:24 PM | Comments (8)
November 9, 2005
Acting Tall
Someone recently expressed surprise when told how tall I am. “Really? Five foot six? That’s all? You seem taller. Must be the way you carry yourself.”
This is something I have heard many times in my life. The fact of the matter is, I just act tall. I always have. It’s not just a question of standing up straight, although I try to maintain good posture; nor does it have much to do with trying to appear tall: yeah, I own plenty of high heels (although I wear them less and less the older I get, because I’m less and less willing to be uncomfortable), but the point of heels is to look girly and dressed-up, and being taller is just a side effect. No, acting tall is often a natural consequence of feeling like you can occupy as much space as you need. I need a lot of space, and I take it.
The flipside of taking up so much space is that I try to give everyone else as much space as they need, too. And I am a terrible judge of other people’s height. I can usually tell whether someone is shorter or taller than I am, but as far as guessing exactly how tall someone is, I tend to assume most people are about the same height I am, give or take a couple of inches. One of the administrative assistants in our office asked me to help her make a skirt; in trying to figure out how much fabric she’d need, I asked her height and was shocked to learn she was only 4'10". Of course I knew she was shorter than I am, but I figured she was, say, 5'3" or 5'4". Another friend recently mentioned the he was 6'1"; I would have guessed he was 5'9". After I’m told this, I can stand back, survey the person, and notice that there is indeed a large discrepancy in our heights--but it always feels like an optical illusion, like I should distrust this visual evidence, that it’s really another one of those puzzles where two lines exactly the same length are somehow distorted so that one merely appears longer than the other.
The thing is, when you talk to people, you make eye contact, and unless I strain my neck maintaining that contact, I figure the person is about at the same level I’m at. You could say that this means I’m oblivious to details and don’t scrutinize others carefully, or you could say I have a strong egalitarian impulse. I’m going to go with the latter interpretation, because that’s what a person who acts tall would say.
Posted by Holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (2)
October 28, 2005
Taunt the Gremlins and They'll Taunt You Back Part II
Read Part One
"Omigod," I said when she told me this. "Omigod."
"Are you going to stay on campus and wait for them?" she asked.
"I don't have any choice," I said. "I don't have my car keys to drive home, or my house keys to get in my house even if I got a ride from someone else. I don't have my wallet or my coat or my umbrella--if it weren't raining so hard, I'd just go look for the cop. But everything is in my office."
"Do you have a cell phone number where I can call you in case I get through to someone?"
"I don't have ANYTHING," I said, "except the clothes I'm wearing, which includes a skirt with a couple of great big blood stains on it. The whole reason I left my office was so I could go to the restroom and deal with the fact that I had bled all over the back of my skirt. Which is why I wasn't thinking clearly enough to grab my keys, because I pretty much never do things like this."
Which is true. In the past 20 years I've locked myself out of my house a grand total of once. In my entire life I've locked my keys in my car a grand total of once. It's precisely this kind of thing I'm trying to avoid by "just checking" everything, and I usually do pretty well. So I'm blaming this on the gremlins. I wrote those provocative entries last week about how to outsmart them, and they found a way to outsmart me, waited until I was distracted, then moved my keys out of my line of vision so I'd leave my office without them. Keyless, I wandered the halls in my bloody skirt for 40 minutes, gratefully attempting any solution my colleagues offered, though the main thing they did is talk about how weird it was that no one was available to open my office for me, since they'd locked themselves out of their offices at 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning or 10 p.m. on a Saturday night and had no problem getting someone over in five minutes or less with a key to unlock their doors and give their lives back to them.
Finally someone from maintenance arrived and let me into my office; there, huddled in an undignified lump in the middle of my desk, were my keys. I stuffed them into my pocket, then called campus security again. The receptionist and I had become good friends; I'd called her half a dozen times to see if the cop had begun answering his pager. "This is the woman who was locked out of her office," I said, "and I just wanted to let you know someone from maintenance unlocked my door, and I also wanted to say THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU for spending forty minutes on the phone tracking down someone to help me."
Then I called my Buffy colleague--whom I'll call Spike--to tell him I'd be late; then I went home and changed out of my bloody clothes. For those of you who don't know, blood stains are notoriously hard to remove from clothing; it helps a lot if you can rinse the stain while it's still damp, but these had (of course) dried in the meantime. The main thing you must NEVER do to a blood stain is wash it in hot water; hot water cooks the proteins and sets the stain, so that you'll never get it out. I am happy to say that after a good long soak in cold water, the stains disappeared.
Dressed in black pants so that if I bled on them, it at least wouldn't show, I went to pick up Spike. We had originally planned to go to a nice, quiet coffee shop so we could concentrate, and eat healthy sandwiches and drink herbal tea so we could stay focused and alert. "Would you mind terribly if we went someplace that serves alcohol?" I asked. "The past hour or two has been totally shitty and I am not in the mood for healthy and wholesome; I want a reuben overstuff with corned beef and sauerkraut, a greasy side of fries, and a pint or two of Guinness." Mercifully, it was not a hard sell.
Because Spike and I are brilliant people and Buffy is an incredible show, we came up with some great things to talk about in our panel this weekend, even in an Irish pub with celtic-flavored rock and roll wafting from the speakers. And I was glad I'd done something to redeem the day instead of staying home and sulking, which is what I came close to doing--I almost canceled. But I think I have learned my lesson, which is this: If you are going to lead a life of vigilant "just checking" in an attempt to outsmart the gremlins, DON'T TELL THEM, BECAUSE THEY CONSIDER IT TAUNTING. And if you taunt them, they'll taunt you back.
Posted by Holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (3)
October 27, 2005
Taunt the Gremlins and They'll Taunt You Back Part I
I finished a long day of teaching Tuesday at 5:15 p.m. I was tired and hungry but I still had work to do: I had to prepare to meet a colleague at 6:30 to discuss a panel on work and sex in Buffy the Vampire Slayer we're putting together for a Halloween horror conference. I sighed hard, sat down, and rolled my chair forward to my computer, rolling over and catching the hem of my skirt in the process. I disentangled myself, stood up to smooth my skirt, and noticed that my fingers came away from the back of it damp and tinged with red.
"Shit," I said aloud, though what was on my fingers wasn't shit; it was something else. I dragged my skirt forward and craned my neck back to inspect the damage and sure enough, smack-dab center on the back of my skirt, was a great big soggy blood stain.
I sat down for a moment, my face red as the back of my skirt, while I thought about the fact that the class I'd just finished contained a dozen freshmen boys and one freshman girl; if there was a group to whom I didn't care to announce my fertility, it was that one. "Let it go, Holly," I said, reminding myself that I'd been seated for most of the class, reading them instructions for a writing exercise, and that they never seemed to pay that much attention to me anyway.
Of course I keep appropriate supplies in my desk for just such emergencies, so I found what I needed and headed to the ladies' room. I addressed the problem, discovered that I'd acquired a second big stain in the moments I'd been seated at my desk, carefully swept up part of my skirt so the stains didn't show, and, carrying the extra fabric in my hand like a train I wanted to keep off the floor, took a deep breath and headed back to my office.
At this point I should mention that this was one of my favorite skirts, an ankle-length three-tiered skirt I had made myself. The background of the fabric is pale blue; the predominant pattern consists of blue and green paisleys coupled like yin/yang symbols; the whole thing is scattered with a small print of blue, green and rust-red roses. The skirt also has nice deep pockets concealed in the side seams. One reason I like making my own clothes is so I can put pockets in them--I hate the fact that women's clothing almost never has pockets. I don't like carrying a purse, and I don't like worrying about losing my keys. I like to put them in my pocket and leave them there, knowing they're safe.
Back at my office, I reached into a pocket for my keys, then reached into the other pocket. No keys. I tried the door, hoping either I or the gremlins had unlocked it; no such luck.
"Shit," I said again, and this time it was shit I was in--not deep shit, maybe, but shit nonetheless. A master key was kept in the main office as a remedy for precisely such situations, but as 5 p.m. had come and gone, the staff in the main office had gone as well. I went to find a colleague who was still in his/her office and could call campus security for me.
I tried Sweet Baby Jesus first, but ever-popular professor that he is, a string of students stood outside his door, and judging by the expressions on their faces, they were starting to get annoyed at the student who was sitting in his office and talking for so damn long. It wasn't a scene I wanted to interrupt, so I kept looking. Mercifully I soon found someone else willing to let me use his phone.
And that should have been the end of it; I should have called campus security and someone with a master key should have been dispatched to unlock my door. Unfortunately one of the campus cops had not come in to work that day and the other was not answering his pager--the poor receptionist absolutely could not reach him. Nor could she reach anyone in maintenance--the entire office seemed to be shut down, or maybe they were all out attending to leaky ceilings or overflowing culverts, since all day we'd had torrential rain left over from one tropical storm or another.
To be continued.
Posted by Holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (0)
August 19, 2005
Out with the Guys
Last night was one of those nights I go hang out with the guys and talk about writing. Sweet Baby Jesus was there (the tattoo on his arm looks so fabulous! I promise I will get around to writing about that soon), as was Tom, as well as a guy I'll call Lemonhead, because he told me that's his nickname, and another guy I'll call the Monk, because he said he is one. The weather was pleasant, so we sat on the patio of a bar where the drink special was "anything Stoli for two bucks," and I had no problem sucking down four cranberry stolis and one stoli & tonic.
We are all writers, so we workshop our stuff. SBJ and Lemonhead had some really great poems up, the Monk gave us a very poetic short story, and I submitted an essay about menstrual problems I had as a fifteen-year-old anorexic recovering from a bizarre and traumatic illness. The piece is actually kind of funny and I like it as well as anything I've written in a while, but I was still worried the guys might be freaked out by the subject matter. I shouldn't have worried. They gave me really smart suggestions for improving the piece, and didn't seem a bit weirded out that they now know all kinds of details about my menstrual cycle. They also claimed to be grateful for a little clarification about what happens in a gynecologist's office.
It was a fun evening, and we even talked about yesterday's blog entry, and my ambivalence about being "one of the guys." They protested that I could hardly be considered that, and pointed out that I don't look anything like a guy. I admit, on these evenings, I make sure I look better than I do when I go to the grocery store, when I'm content to throw on some old skirt and top and put my hair in a pony tail. No, I dress up: partly because I like dressing up, partly because I want to reinforce my own sense of my femaleness. I wear a dress I like, lots of jewelry, do something with my hair. Last night I was able to wear a dress I haven't been able to fit into for the past three years: this strange malaise I've been in since I got home from Sunstone has made it really hard for me to eat, and I've lost ten pounds in two weeks. The dress must have looked OK, because I noticed that I turned a few heads. That's always nice.
Anyway, I feel better about spending so much of my time with men. And if I'm going to be one of the guys, I'm pretty lucky that this is the group of guys I get to be one of.
Posted by Holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (0)