The GirlAlive Blog

Fringey

So, by the last few posts you can probably tell I’m not thrilled with living in Scotland at the moment.  The 5 things keeping me here right now are my husband and my 4 guinea pigs.

I decided I needed at least something short-term to keep me here.  So I bought tickets for a few shows in the Fringe Festival in August.  I’m going to see some guy named Owen that I’ve never heard of and Lucy Porter and Rich Hall.  All in one night.  The plan is to get burned out on the festival before it even officially starts.   I’m looking forward to it because I’ve never seen a comedy show before, and now I’m gonna see 3 in one day.

And there are always the guinea pigs.

Alana 

Serenity

I went to the charity showing of Serenity this morning.  The movie was just as good as I remembered from the other two times I saw it in the theater.  I bought a bunch of raffle tickets, and I won a book that isn’t out yet, so I just got a voucher for now.  It was good.  But then the typical rude obnoxious people here had to start a conversation right in front of me, making fun of fat Americans.  The longer I live here, the more I am convinced that the people here are mostly soulless and evil.  Even gawky ugly nerds at a sci-fi movie think that they have a right to be rude to strangers.

Needless to say, I didn’t go to the after-movie hang-out at the bar.  

I keep asking my husband if we can move to Canada.  Halifax looks nice.  I’m getting sicker and sicker of the people here.  Even the adults here act like obnoxious junior high students, and I hate even contemplating how horrible the children are.  70% of the people in this country claim to be Christians, but so far I have not experienced a single instance of Christian kindness, or even basic humanity from most of them.  

I’m tired of being here.  Being a fat American in the UK is roughly equivalent to being a Jew in Germany in 1940, or being a black person in Mississippi in the 1950’s.  The way I’m treated by complete strangers saddens and enrages me.  It’s probably for the best that guns are illegal here.

Alana 

West Coast Cool

I figured out the main cultural difference between here and "home" that bothers me.  The people here completely lack cool.  This is not unique to Scotland.  It is a problem in Duluth, where I grew up.  It is a problem in Iowa, where my closest cousins grew up.  The only place I’ve lived that had plenty of cool was Seattle.

What do I mean by cool?  I don’t mean leather jackets and sunglasses.  It’s all about attitude.  Imagine that someone over six feet tall with a curly purple mohawk just walked into the room.  How do you react, and how to the people around you react?  Here, people would flat-out stare at him with an expression that brings to mind Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel.  In the Midwestern US, people might not stare, but they would definitely whisper to each other about him.  In Seattle, he wouldn’t get a second look.  People in Seattle are too cool to be phased by mere size and hair.

If you are cool, you are not surprised by anything.  No clothing, no hair, and no human body can surprise you enough to warrant even a second look, much less a point or stare,  because you have seen it all before.  Nothing bothers you.  When your co-worker shaves her head, you just say, "Good morning" as if nothing has changed.  You are not bothered by cross-dressers, punks, goths or even the occasional furry.  You’ve seen everything.

Why is cool important?  As much as cool is actually a form of arrogance, it is a useful arrogance.  It is arrogance that accepts everyone, and never makes anyone feel excluded.  Whether you look like Brad Pitt or Drew Carey, you are treated the same by people who are cool.  The world as a whole could use more cool.

Alana

Can’t Stop the Serenity

I’m so excited!  Next week I’m going to see my favoritest movie ever on the big screen again!  As a charity event, Joss Whedon is having Serenity shown on screens all over the world on or near June 23rd, in honor of Joss Whedon’s birthday.  Serenity is a great movie and I was sad that I only got to see it once in the theater when it was originally released. 

You should all go to http://www.cantstoptheserenity.com/ and see if there is a showing near you.  There are still a lot of tickets available in a lot of cities.  And if you go to the Edinburgh one, maybe I’ll see you there. 

Alana 

sinus infection

Okay, so I’ve had sinus congestion on and off since I was a kid.  I have also had my share of migraines and the usual pains and illness.  Right now I have a sinus infection.  I am very much against sinus infections.

Last week I had a toothache, but my teeth didn’t actually hurt.  It doesn’t make sense, but my whole mouth hurt, and it was all caused by my sinuses, not my teeth.  And it wouldn’t go away.  Over the weekend is was getting worse and worse.  I had an appointment with my doctor for Monday to refill some prescriptions, and that was the only thing that kept me from going to the hospital because the pain was so bad.  It felt like my head was being eaten away from the inside by angry rabid weasels.

Today I got myself some antibiotics.  I’m still in horrible pain, but I can at least have some hope that it won’t last forever.

Alana 

Fat Pride

I’m fat.  People who know me are aware of this.  I thought it was time for me to say a little bit about what it is to be a fat woman.

First of all, about half of you reading this naturally assume that because I’m fat, I must be stupid and lazy.  You believe that weight gain is the result only of eating junk food and never exercising.  So I must be too stupid to know what foods are good for me, and I’m lazy and never exercise.  Fat people are fat because they’ve never seen a salad and they eat all the time.  All of that is a complete load of sh!t.

When I was a kid, I was skinny.  I was a gymnast.  I played soccer.  Half my time was spent riding my bike around the neighborhood and the other half was spent roller skating in my basement.  I have an older brother who is and always has been skinny.  Throughout childhood, we ate basically the same foods.  If anything, I was more active than he was.  Around age 12 I got fat and he stayed skinny.

I’m not going to claim that my lifestyle when I was 12 was perfect.  I hated gym class because I was clumsy and constantly bullied.  The other reason I started to hate exercise is that I started to feel the effects of hypermobility syndrome around age 12.  I have a genetic collagen defect which makes my joints too loose.  So I am prone to back and joint pain and I dislocate joints a lot.  If I turned just wrong running the bases in baseball, my knee would dislocate.  I developed arthritis in both knees from repeated dislocation at the age of 13.  I was in pain all the time, but no one would believe me.  I was labeled a hypochondriac.

At age 14 I started developing symptoms of Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, and I didn’t tell anyone.  My mom has it, and I figured, "Why mention it?  There’s nothing that can be done anyway."  So I didn’t recieve any treatment for it until I was 19.  And I couldn’t take the medication they prescribed for more than about 2 years before it started making me sick.

Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome causes weight gain because it is associated with insulin resistance.  And the more weight you gain, the worse the insulin resistance becomes.  So I could eat the same food as a skinny person, and I would still put on weight.  

So I was getting fatter and my joints were in pain, so the doctors always told me that my joints would get better if I just lost weight.  And how am I supposed to do that when I’m in too much pain to exercise?  No doctor would ever address that problem.  They just assumed I was not really in pain and that I was just making excuses to not exercise.

I eventually developed a severe mental illness, rooted in the fact that no one would believe that I was in pain.  I was diagnosed as bipolar and put on medication that is known to make PCOS worse, and known to cause weight gain.  I eventually told my psychiatrist where to stick his anticonvulsives and went on antidepressants.  Eventually, I pretty much stopped cutting myself and managed to pass for sane.

Now I’m 30 years old and I’ve given up on losing weight.  I can’t even walk for exercise because the joints in my feet dislocate when I walk.  I don’t eat a lot.  I’m on Metformin to treat PCOS.  Despite the fact that it has given me chronic diarrhea, I’m still putting on weight.  I could try a fad diet, but any strict diet is likely to trigger food obsession and bulemia.  I am looking for ways to get more exercise, but it continues to be painful and difficult.

Now, a lot of you are saying, "Don’t give up!  There’s surgery, etc."  I’m not interested.  Being fat is not a sin.  Fat people are not the monsters the media portrays them to be.  Fat people may or may not be unhealthy.  You can’t tell by looking at them.  Fat people are not stupider or lazier than anyone else.  Most fat people feel better when they lose weight, not because they’re healthier, but because they finally stop getting harassed and tormented about their weight.

Look at it this way: if someone told you that they were depressed because they faced terrible descrimination because they were a Muslim, would you tell them, "Maybe you should change religions"?  No.  You’d probably find the idea abhorrent.  Or if a black person faces descrimination, do you tell them to try bleaching their skin?  Yet you would tell a fat person who is suicidal because they are the target of hate and discrimination that they should just lose some weight.

The problem does not lie with me and the extra pounds I am carrying.  The problem lies with the people who would stereotype me and discriminate against me.  The media and scientists of the 19th century used to say that black people were naturally lazy, stupid and inferior to whites.  They were wrong.  Now the same people who will acknowledge that racism and racial profiling is wrong want to take rights away from fat people because they claim that fat people are stupid, lazy and inferior to skinny people.  

"What about how unhealthy it is to be fat?"  Most of the assumption of unhealthiness is based on bad science.  Even if it wasn’t, why do you have a right to dictate healthiness?  Go bother some smokers or alcoholics or drug addicts.  Those things kill far more people than my obesity ever will.  No one has ever died from secondhand obesity.  

Before you condemn me for being fat, ask yourself why you hate fat people.  Why does my size offend you so much?  What right do you have to hate me just based on the way I look?

Alana

(Let’s watch the ignorant and hate-filled comments flood in…) 

(EDIT: 9 Oct 2007- Comments disabled because this post is becoming a spam magnet.)