pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- FAKE MEAT, ANYONE? 316. That�s a wonderful title of a VerbMyNoun entry. I like it so much I think I�ll snort it with my decaf and Morningstar Farms breakfast strips. It�s 7 AM and, since I slept on my living-room sofa for the second night in a row, I rose with the sun. My former undergrad advisor/now good friend and mentor Shakespeare�who will tell you that I couldn�t even speak loudly enough to be heard when she first met me in 1982 (a reality that few people who know me now would believe)�and her partner Shelby are upstairs sleeping. Shakespeare is here for her routine breast cancer follow-up tests. We spent the morning at the gothic medical center, then had lunch with my writer pal Zulu, who also dropped by after work for a visit. Went for a nice walk in the gardens, too. Other than that, Shelby has been watching television while Shakespeare and I catch up. And, speaking of TV, I am pretty certain we heard the same news about the same Oklahoma coach who is moving to Indiana at least 15 times and watched the same stupid �bucking chicken� and Coke Zero and IBM �Are you special?� commercials that many times too. My quiet little house was suddenly assaulted by all this noise (!), just like the chaos at my mother�s house, where the TV�s constant noise could deafen you. One characteristic of a paranoid schizophrenic disorder is an inability to screen out competing sensory signals, so I have to wonder if a blaring TV just makes my mother�s world even more chaotic and inexplicable. Our TV watching was punctuated by calls from my little sister, who was on leave in El Paso and wanted to know if I would pay for a hotel room for her. "Why did you go to El Paso without any money?" I asked. Well, I thought I had some but my ATM card won't work. "Why can't you stay on base?" I asked. Well, I can, but I'd have to get up at 4 AM. No way in hell was I giving this sister my credit card number�been there, know what she'll do with it�so I finally said "Fine. Find a cheap hotel and tell the hotel clerk to call me." This was maybe 9 PM. Then she called about 10 PM and said You have a fax machine at your house, right? No! They'll only take a signed fax. "Well then find another hotel." Then she called back at 11 and said a taxi driver suggested that she stay at the hotel on base and ask for a credit. So she got an advance on her next paycheck�a familiar pattern I was hoping the armed services wouldn't allow, since they're supposed to be teaching her discipline and all that. Since Shakespeare and Shelby and I didn�t have a total eclipse of the sun to watch yesterday, we watched four college basketball powerhouses battle it out for a spot in the final four. It doesn�t get any better than back-to-back UNC v. Tenn and Duke v. UConn match-ups, and I am so so so so so hoping that the championship game will be Duke v. UNC, since those schools represent the biggest rivalry in college basketball AND they're from the ACC. Meanwhile, Solomon Pomenya, a fifty-two-year-old Ghanian doctor who was able to witness the total eclipse of the sun yesterday, said, I believe it's a wonderful work of God, despite all what the scientists say. This tells me that God is a true engineer. I love that we humans respond to beauty and mystery by searching for higher meaning�that we find inspiration in the natural world and its wonders. But, for me, this inspiration seeps out as poetry or music or art, some attempt to express in a tangible way what my senses and mind and soul absorb. So, when I read a statement such as Dr. Pomenya�s, I try to substitute �creative spark� for �God.� I know this isn�t equivalent though, since so many people use organized religion as a weapon to justify social control and torture and hatred and murder. This, in turn, inspires songs such as J-Live�s �Satisfied� and Bad Brains�s �Leaving Babylon.� And I have to believe that W will inspire as many reactionary songs as Reagan cough cough did. � I�ve had a little time to absorb pottergrrrl�s zinger now and have listened to a few friends� reactions to the letter too. Shelby and Shakespeare and Kay and Zulu all said who does that self-righteous Fat Nazi think she IS? If she has decided that you are unattractive just because you don�t wear a size 10, then you don't need her in your life. And does the bitch actually think you're supposed to report to her? They also agree that this is a mean-spirited diatribe masking itself as being helpful/Mommy knows best epistle. ...and yet the grrrl loves to be held down... Kay says Pottergrrrl was uncommonly insensitive to my psyche and to the fact that stress and a broken heart and depression and hopelessness and loneliness have all contributed to my weight issues in the past year and that anyone with any sensitivity whatsoever�but especially someone who is purported to love me�would understand the complexity of the situation and be consoling and loving and understanding and supportive rather than supercilious and judgmental and just plain mean in a way that will certainly make me feel even worse about myself. Filmgrrl says Pottergrrrl is Tree all over again. Shakespeare says either Pottergrrrl is involved with Tree again and needs a reason to be angry with me so that she can justify her actions or she does not follow the same cause-and-effect path that most of us do�perhaps because she only attended Seventh Day Adventist schools. She says �there is something very deep going on here� and that Pottergrrrl is in serious denial about something, that this is emblematic of something bigger. Maybe she thinks such rigidity will protect her, that she won�t get sick and I won�t get sick if she controls every morsel of food that passes through us and makes me run 5 miles with her every morning. Or maybe she�s just one of those people who should never visit Italy because she couldn�t even enjoy an overindulgent meal (whereas I am a voluptuary who believes that overindulgences are sometimes very good for your soul...) ... Only she didn�t seem like that, made extravagant meals for people, for me, cooked her goddamn Brussels sprout in half-and-half, for gawd's sake.... But then Tree got sick. It�s true that her mother controls every bite her father chews and controls Pottergrrrl and tries to control the movements of everyone around her (including me, when I am in her presence, but I never fell for it), so perhaps Pottergrrrl considers it normal for a lover to adhere to her standards and not follow her own path�and I guess, in her marriages, he just ate what she cooked. And she seems so indignant about the fact that I failed to live up to her standards after she �gave me time� to lose ten pounds.
Shakespeare also pointed out that the only way anyone could justify sending such a letter is if the writer is a professional health coach speaking to a morbidly obese (not overweight) person who will not comply with a program, someone hired to do make you do the work. And they all said �if you ever speak to that scrawny bitch again, I�m going to personally commit you� and �please tell me that you�re not going to forgive her and take her back, writergrrrl.� But my friend Musicgrrl had a different reaction. She said �Why her desperation for you? She must really love you and fear for your health.� This made me step back a little and remember that, of the seven brothers in her father�s family, only her father (the youngest) is still living. All the others died young from complications from diabetes, which her father is experiencing now. So huh. The rigid vegan diet that her mother put him on probably did keep the disease at bay while his brothers' disease advanced (at some cost to his ego and manhood though, no doubt, as anyone watching their interactions can attest). Hmmm. The fact that he has gone downhill in the past year�hell, in the eight month�s I�ve known him�may be coloring Pottergrrrl�s reaction too. Filmgrrl pointed out that Pottergrrrl spent a lot of time writing her letter too, that she probably agonized over every word, trying to capture exactly what she wanted to say across. Other reactions? Well, my pal Shakespeare followed up by buying me a bag of (low fat) potato chips and Zulu followed up by offering to take me to Biscuitville for a celebratory order of Breakfast in a Bowl (i.e., grits with bacon and cheese and butter and scrambled eggs). I laughed but, the thing is, I know that Pottergrrrl is right in some ways. My friends do love me and do make excuses for me and some are also voluptuaries like me and the ones who aren�t recognize that it�s possible to be too structured for your own good, that this is also unhealthy and can make your longer life miserable. My friends tell me I�m beautiful, but they also know that I am overweight and that I do need to make some permanent life-style changes and stop making excuses for my destructive habits. Pottergrrrl�s tough-love letter points this out too. And yeah I like looking at Pottergrrrl�s fit body a whole lot more than I like looking at my fat ass. I love her curves and skin and can�t help but see flab when I look at my once-fit self. I Still, it galls me that she found me unattractive all these months, yet told me how beautiful I was to her, how sexy I was to her. And now I just feel stupid for believing her, for basking in her words and feeling attractive when she was actually just looking at me and seeing fat. I feel used, betrayed. And what I want to know is, if she really finds me so gawddamn unappealing and fat, then why did she let me buy that black slinky dress for Lad�s wedding and why did she tell me how sexy I looked in it? And now I remember her commenting on my sister Penelope�s thick ankles at the wedding: �She should only wear pants.� Doesn�t Pottergrrrl know that Penelope and I already look in the mirror and chastise ourselves for being overweight, that our whole gawddamn culture does this to us too? I am also able to say to myself now that she is simply trying to tell me her truth�as much as it hurts. She looks at me and doesn�t see a beautiful person. She sees fat. And yeah, maybe there's some love or at least affection behind all her self-righteousness, but this is just another example of the fact that she thinks her telling me to �shape up� is appropriate and that she thinks it is appropriate for her to now send such a letter because, after all, she "gave me a chance." She is also a literalist who was raised in a cult and has so little clue about how to conform to our culture. And she was raised vegan so, in some ways, it doesn't really surprise me that she tried to tell her truth without regard for how much her truth might hurt me. And it wouldn't surprise me if she has no clue whatsoever that what she wrote reads as inappropriate and mean and insensitive to most people. That being said, just who the FUCK does she think she is? 7:57 a.m. - 2006-4-2 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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