Monthly Archives: August 2011

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Begging Your Pardon

When I started this blog I set out to write 500 words every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. I haven’t written every one of those days and it hasn’t always been 500 words but I still stuck with that philosophy. September is going to be different.

I still plan on posting on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday but I am pouring most of my energy into my book. I am going to bust my little writing ass and try to get my first draft done in September. I know five hundred words doesn’t sound like a lot but it take me time and concentration to come up with things to write.  I would rather put that energy into writing my book. I feel like the sooner I can get that first draft done the less chance of me pulling a Selina and starting something but not finishing it.

So here is the deal-o people. I promise to post every Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, but they might not be more than a picture or a video and some words. I will attempt to make them funny videos and words though. I will probably have some random days of big posts but who knows.

So, I am going to be a lazy when it comes to my blog. I will try to keep being entertaining. It is only temporary.  I need food now so I can go and write more bookness. I leave you with this thought:

Oh fuck it, I will do it myself /pick up sword

 

 
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Lolz A Letter to Dear Prudence,

Okay I know it is Sunday, not a normal blog day, but I found myself writing a letter to the advice columnist Prudie (Emily Yoffe) because of some advice she gave. I know it will never see the light of day through her column but I am posting it here because I like it. My site. I like it. I post it.

Dear Prudie,

First, your columns are one of my favorite things on the net. I love your frank advice that is actually applicable to real life. I just read an article, that the internet ate and I can’t find again, where you give advice to a man who met a woman online and found out she was overweight. His concern was that he felt he couldn’t be attracted to her and wondered if he should break it off.  I like your advice about waiting and just enjoying her company and seeing if something grew from it. I am unclear whether you were advising him to talk to her weight as an issue though. I am hoping you weren’t.

I’m a big girl. We live in a world where it is okay to sneer and judge and be down right cruel to people who aren’t thin.  I don’t get this treatment often because I am confident and I actually do love myself. (Also, I’m six foot tall and I am pretty sure people think being a jerk to me might end with them being harmed.) I’m insecure about my body, but so is every single person on this planet. I know that I don’t get as much initial sexual interest because of my size. I am okay with that. I am also okay with acknowledgements from partners that I am fat. I am not okay with criticism about it though.

Here is the truth: she knows she is fat. She knows he knows she is fat. If he makes a comment to her about it right now, it will torpedo her. He should just enjoy her company and try to find things about her that he does find physically attractive and focus on those features. In the name of all that is holy, I hope he wouldn’t say something along lines of “I don’t like that you are fat but I am with you anyway.” If the woman has any self worth she will say to him “I don’t like that you are a complete asshole, I am not going to stay with you.”

The reality is that everyone has things that people have to over look about their partner in order to be happy with them. The idea of the perfect person is crap. If he finds that he cannot get over her weight, then there are other issues. I’m fat. I also have a great butt and rack on top of being smart, funny, loving, kind, loyal, talented, and incredibly humble. I know some people won’t be able to get over their own prejudices to see anything beyond the fat. That is their issue, not mine. This girl deserves a man that will love her fully and try to make her feel incredible. Everyone deserves a partner who loves them and makes them feel desirable. We just need to move away from the idea that desire is purely physical and understand the mental aspects. People also need to understand that all people who are overweight know their size is unhealthy along with their habits. It also needs to be understood that most over eaters eat because of emotional issues. (Everyone is emotionally damaged goods, mine just shows up better than other peoples.) Harsh criticism IS NOT helpful.

Also, pro tip: If you want your mate to lose weight but you don’t want to be an ass, make it a drive to be healthier together.  “Hey, Babe, I think we need to eat better and exercise more together. Why don’t we come up with a plan together to do that?” Not “Hey, lard ass, lay off the chips and twinkies and run some.” If you are not willing to change your diet and increase exercise too to make a healthier life for your family than you should not complain about your mate.

With many regards,

Selina aka Beautiful Fat Girl

 

 

 

 

Okay so, here is the funny. I read the article wrong.  I found it to link to Kathleen and reread it. Turns out her advice was golden and I am just insane. This lead to a second letter:

Dear Prudie,

I just wrote you a long letter and I stand by everything I said in theory. It turns out I need to learn to read things more thoroughly before I write impassioned letters. Yep, your advice was sterling, as it is 99.999% of the time. Sorry I made you read that long ass diatribe for nothing.

With many apologizes,

Selina, Still a Beautiful Fat Girl

 
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New Things I Know

I have had a streak of learning new and interesting things recently:

I used to be able to skip nights of sleep with out much recourse. Holy shit, I can not anymore. Monday night I could not sleep and I was going to see Tina Tuesday morning. at 5:30 I was surfing Facebook and saw her. I decided to just go and see her. I took a two hour nap at her house later. That is all the sleep I got until after midnight. I was fine Tuesday and had a great time. Wednesday hit me like a freaking train. Thursday is not being much more kind. I just want to lay in bed and drink water.  I need to write a letter to my twenty year old self and send it back in time. Number 1, moisturize and appreciate your skin and number 2, enjoy those nights of missing sleep with little effect. They get gone baby.

There is a secret language to bed making. How your bed sheets are folded down at the top tells you whether if the sheets have been slept on and remade,  if they are freshly washed, or if no one has slept in them but they haven’t been washed in awhile. I don’t remember exactly how you tell, but I know that there is something that you do to indicate it.

There is a magazine called Garden and Gun. No really, there is. I was going to take a picture for you but my camera ate them.  It says something about being the magazine for the new South. I wish now I would have read it because I think it might have been interesting. Still don’t believe me? Click here.

All humans start out looking like sea monkeys.

Photography is fascinating. I love when Tina explains stuff about her camera and how to take pictures to me. Also, one of the many reason I will always love her parents is because they have encouraged her. Fred made a great business move and an even better Dad move when he gave her that camera and took her under his wing. She, Kathleen, and I are going to be famous together. It will be brilliant.

My thirties are going to be better than other peoples twenties. I just won’t be able to skip nights of sleep like the young ones can.

I am really happy. I feel like I am doing what I am supposed to be doing. I know myself better than ever and I like myself more than ever.  Things are not perfect but they are still good.

I need to give up the flip flops and get some real shoes that are easy to slip on and work with both skirts and jeans.  I beat the pair I have been wearing into submission. If I walk too much in them my feet and legs die. Well, they don’t die, they are far too angry to be dead.

I like telling people that I am a writer and now I say it without feeling like such a hack.

Myriad Gardens have blue emergency poles that remind me of the TARDIS and I am in love with them.

I think that is all the new things I know.

 
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To My Best Friend on Her None-of-Your-Damn-Business-ith Birthday

(Writer’s note: Tina has a blog about being a mommy and on her blog she wrote a letter to both of her children for their birthdays. It gave me this idea. I am not making fun of her or mocking her, it is more like paying homage. Yes, I did say homage in my head with a bad fake pretentious British accent and now you will too.  Oh, and this blog will probably be sappy and weird. If you don’t like it go watch TV.)

I know today is not your birthday. Today is the day we are celebrating your birthday and it is also Tuesday, so close enough.   I remember the first day we met. It was my very first day of college classes ever and I had decided to talk to everyone and not be shy and you were in my Art Survey Class with Ryanne. I remember you were the strange woman wearing an Arlo Guthrie t-shirt, a bandana as a headband, and a broom stick skirt. I don’t know how I remember any of this. I just do.

We liked each other okay at first and we grew to be friends. I always admired you and tried to learn from you so I could figure out what kind of woman I wanted to be. All these years later it is still true. I still admire you, I still learn from you, and you still help me know what kind of woman I want to be when I grow up.

You are the most considerate, kindhearted person I know.  Your friendship has saved me more than once (my mom says so too.) I have been blessed to be a part of your life and to watch you how you handle everything. You are the epitome of “many whelps, HANDLE IT.” You are open with me and show me wonderful and terrifying glimpses into being a wife and a mother that make me see how truly wonderful life can be. You have shown me strength in pain and moving on from terrible things. You have also let me wallow and whine when I needed it and told me to put on my big girl panties and deal with it when I needed that too.

You support me and make me believe that I can be something great. You show me how beautiful I am when I need it the most. You put up with my whiny emo temperament like a champ. You are so damn smart. You are brave and you are a little scary when you are mad.

I am so lucky to have friendship like yours in a world that holds any close relationships outside of marriage and blood as suspect and unnecessary.  You brought me into your family and gave me another place to belong. (Which is a big deal to a girl who spent the first 17 years of her life never feeling like she had anywhere to belong.) You helped fill my life with love and family and organic banana baby cookies. I will never be able to say thank you enough.

Thank you for everything and for being you

I love you

 
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Getting What You Asked For

So today I checked my spam box (my self worth directly correlates to the amount of comments I get on my site, spam included) and I found that a a guy spamming for penis enlarging pills felt that my blog was pretty good but it needed more images. I take terrible photos no matter how good the camera so I normally don’t bother but when the penis enlargement guy asks for pictures, by god, you give him pictures. I dug out the twenty dollar piece of crap camera I bought months ago and put batteries in it and took pictures. I only took pictures of stuff in my room because I was too lazy to take pictures anywhere else.

I get the feeling no one will ever request photos again.

zomg a book shelf

I have two book shelves. This is the least crappy one

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is where ALL of the MAGIC happens. One day when I am famous this desk will be worth MILLIONS

This is my beat up scary bookshelf tha is full of shit and about to collapse any second

Another bookshelf

Just because I love redundancy

 

Table beside my bed

Did I mention my camera was terrible?

 
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I AM a Girl ThankYouVeryMuch

Last night I got accused of something I have never been accused of in my life: I was told I am too femme (feminine).

It was pretty shocking for me. I have been told I am too masculine by a few people (mostly by insecure men) but never that I was too feminine. The comment came from a woman who had said she hated women because she couldn’t relate to anything they talked about and they seemed silly and inconsequential. At first I was a bit hurt and it made me feel insecure about whether or not I had become some sort of air headed do-do that only thought about lip gloss and hair products. I posted on Facebook and my friend Sara made me feel better. I left the comment alone for awhile and went back to writing.

Later Kathleen and I talked about it. Kathleen is incredibly insightful and has exposed herself to some of the best of the most intelligent material on the interwebz. While the rest of us are looking at funny pictures of cats and naked people, Kathleen is reading about things going on in the world. She had shown me the video below a few days ago, so we had a previous base of conversation started. Watch the video. It is brilliant but feel free to fast forward through the spoken word poem at the end. It isn’t bad, for spoken word poetry.

Kathleen went to sleep and I put it out of my mind as I wrote some more. When I finally decided to sleep I laid in my bed and thought about the comment more. I wrote a fiery blog in my head but then I fell asleep. I have been thinking about it more all day. I think I have decided what I think about it all.

I understand the comment and I understand why the woman felt that way. I used to feel the same way.

When I was younger I believed that things that were womanly or girly were weak. I used to think that if you cared about how your hair looked or if you admitted to liking makeup you were somehow inferior. I was smart and strong and therefore had to be masculine and reject my emotional and feminine side. I work to be aggressive and to be competitive. I also saw my physical self as ungraceful and unfeminine because I am not just tall but I am also broad shouldered and I am strong like ox. (Yes, I know I would be less stocky if I lost weight, thanks for pointing that out jerkface, but I would still be broad shouldered and big framed.) In my mind I decided if I wasn’t like the other girls around me then I must be masculine. My strong opinions, personality, and my disinterest in slavishly molding myself into some sort of sexy barbie made me feel even less like a proper girl. My humor even made me feel less comfortable in my girl skin. I decided that since I was funny and I had no desire to build my self esteem based on whether or not I had a boyfriend I couldn’t be a proper girl. I shot all the way in the other direction.

I developed society’s disdain for all things soft and female. Think about it. Think about the things we say when someone is being irrational or over emotional:

Don’t be such a girl

Ugh you are being such (word for female gentalia)

Don’t be so butt hurt (because you got penetrated up the rear and being penetrated makes you weak like a woman.)

Okay I will stop with that one.

As I grew older, I started slowly becoming more comfortable in my own skin. I saw these incredibly strong kick ass women around me who were still very feminine. I realized I really don’t enjoy forcing myself to be aggressive and trying to bludgeon people over the head with my superiority. I am soft but that softness has made me a lot stronger than I ever was when I was an armored tank. I love my softness because it shapes some of my very favorite things about myself.

It is my softness that allows me to empathize with people I love when they are in pain. I can take care of people much better with an open heart than trying to force myself into pure logic. Life isn’t logical and neither is pain. It is my softness that gives me so much joy in my nieces and nephews and wanting to pick them up and smother their faces in kisses. My femininity is the part of me that gives me the courage to walk through the world trying my best to be kind and open and to care about people I don’t know even though it is painful and scary and not always appreciated and sometimes it is so hard and heavy.  My femininity is the part of me that will go into a bloody battle with anything or anyone that threatens the people I love.

I have found that my femininity doesn’t make me weak, it makes me far far stronger than I was when I denied it.

Plus, I am now okay with my obsession with eyeliner and getting my hair done.

 
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So Then I Said…

So sometimes when I try to think of something interesting, creative, and/or profound to say my brain halts. Alternately, sometimes when I have been focusing really hard on something for a long time my brain halts. Sometimes someone really not interesting is talking to me or someone whom is normally interesting but I am sick, tired, and/or nearly brain dead is talking to me, my bran halts. Now it doesn’t go lack or stop all together but it goes back to a repetitious thought, image, or scene that I think of as my brain’s screensaver. My brain’s screen saver changes from time to time and I have no real choice in what it is. Right now it is the voice of the professor from “Futurama” saying “Good news everyone, I (something relevant to the situation at hand).”

I nearly started today’s blog with “Good news everyone, it is Tuesday and I have to write a blog.” I felt that would be a bit random so I decided to explain why it would have started like that. In the process of explaining my brain’s screensaver I think I might have accidentally shown you guys a corner of my psyche I probably should have kept to myself.  It isn’t like you guys didn’t know that I am strange but sometimes I like to pretend that you don’t know just how strange I truly am.  My brain’s other screensaver right now is Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.” Who am I kidding, most of you cats who read this have known me for years and have had conversations with me when I was exceedingly sleepy/drunk/hyper/or sick and therefore was unable to maintain my shiny veneer of being at least remotely human. My true friends are people who have seen me after I haven’t slept in 48 hours and I have ingested ungodly amounts of sugar and caffeine just to keep mobile and love me anyway.  Or those who have heard my many plots to take over the world and still hang out with me.  Sometimes when I am bored, for sport, I come up with ways to take over the world. It is just for those times when I am sick of having imaginary conversations with the people around me.

I got back to writing last night after two weeks of either being sick or in a strange short funk.  Honestly, I didn’t want to hang out with my characters for a few days. I think about people talking about characters being like writer’s children and every mommy I know has days where they want nothing to do with their kids. So, I consider those two days that I did not want to write my characters as like sending your kids to grandma’s house for the weekend. Last night it was really nice to get back in there again and like them all again. Maybe I shouldn’t fight the urge to duct tape their mouths and shove them in a closet.  I am learning this writing process thing as I go along. It’s an adventure!

 
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[Random Intriguing Word Here]

I have spent since Thursday morning living in sick word.  It is a fascinating land. Okay, I lie. Mostly I have been sleeping and reading. I have read four books. (They were small young adult fantasy, so really 2 books.)I will get out of bed to eat or to look at the interwebz for a bit but not much else. Today I ran to the store to pick up a few things because there was nothing I wanted here. It wore me out and part of me really wants a nap. The other part of me is annoyed and feels like a total wuss.

I really do not want to spend an entire post bitching about being sick.  So, I am going to write about something else briefly then  call it good.

Jaunty cape This amused me. I like being amused. I also found a picture of a baby long red haired  wienie dog in chain mail. It also amused me but I am not posting it here.

Mostly I am amused by the use of the word wenches. Well, that and the fact that they are HUGE wenches.  I could take this picture to so many bad places but I won’t because I just won’t. Maybe I shouldn’t write blogs while I am sick.

I mean it could be fascinating but then again it could be forever scarring.

“Nice jaunty antenna you have there or are you just happy to see me.”

No really, I’m done.

 
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Dreams

I had a dream last night that I found a review of my website in a book. It called my blog innovative, honest, funny, and a worthy read. I know there are no books that review blogs but it was a dream, several other things happened in it that weren’t real. In my dream, I was so elated.  I tried to explain to someone last night why blogging is more than pure narcissism and that it actually means something.  I know some people will never understand why this site means to me and why I am so willing to give up so much privacy to the mass world of the interwebz.

I spent so much of my early life trying to hide so much of myself. I was so closed off. I felt like I was too different to be anything of any worth. I was just too much and at the same time distinctly not enough. I always put too much pressure on myself to be something different or better than what I was. (I still do this.) I tried changing myself to fit everyone else and failed miserably. I couldn’t even fake being like other people, so I developed a coping mechanism in which I would find the part of my personality that was the most acceptable in that social situation and only show that side. I was completely myself with very few people because I felt I had to be careful what everyone saw of me. High school was a bitch and sometimes I feel like I actually started in college.

In college, I started to relax this but it took a long time. I faked it a lot at first. I decided before the first day of class I was going to talk to everyone and start over from who I was in high school and become who I wanted to be. Ironically, I met one of my best friends on that first day of college in front of our Art Survey class, we just didn’t know we were going to be best friends until a few years later. By the the last time I left college I think I was pretty good at being me. I still freak out about not doing enough or being good enough but I think that is just a core part of who I am.

I still had the tendency to be very controlling about how I showed myself. I know this part of the grown up world. I know everyone worries about appearance and presentation. I hate it. Sometimes I can manipulate parts of my personality to fit what the situation needs but I really hate it. I hate the feeling that I am going to stumble and my real personality is going to burst through. I am no good at containing what I naturally am, as a matter of fact, it makes me miserable. People tell me that not being careful about what I show or write will make my life more difficult. Trust me I know. I spent many years of my life trying to be more normal, more quiet, less reading and more sports, more make-up and high heels and less flip-flops and stupid skirts. I tried. I can’t do it. This is what  I am and trying to be anything different leads to failure.

This does relate to the the beginning, I promise. Why this blog is so important to me is because it is so very part of me. This is my place to get over those last bits of not good enough or too freaking weird. This is my place to test myself against my fear of vulnerability. This is were I learned that I am strange but I am so a like so many people. This is the one place I get to write straight out.

I have been sluggish on my book. I wrote the first twenty-five pages like I had demons in  my fingers. Lately, I have been using every excuse in the book not to write or when I do write it is forced and uncomfortable.  I think it is because I have been writing with my brain so much lately. I have been writing my blog with my brain and the book is all about the brain. I think I needed to write straight out. I needed to write something that wasn’t so controlled by my brain. I need to write on occasion without thinking about the purpose or the structure or the readability. I think I get like a balloon full of pudding. I get so strained from thinking and trying to produce and be and say and do the right thing that I feel like if I hit a corner too hard I am going to pop.

This place means so much to me and my friends who read this mean more to me because they provide me with a place to be everything I am unrestrained and uncensored. Rarely when I write here do I feel not enough or that I need to be different. Here I feel the most like I am the me that my closest friends see. I think every once in awhile the balloon needs to pop. Sometimes my heart needs to take over so I can get back to reveling in the joy of pure creativity and writing with my brain.

My life is a constant struggle for balance, like everyone one else, but I even have to do that different.

 
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