2 Revelations

1) I don't like Jaffa Cakes despite how much they are adored on blogger. Hooray! It is a bit sad that I sought them out after hearing so many woeful stories about them though... I'm a sucker for sabotage I guess.

2) Buying clothes where you buy your groceries doesn't make sense, and as such you should just expect similar customer service.

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So I got a job. Yay! In retail... which means I have to spent my first week's paycheck before I've even started working on going out and getting "smart" black clothes. Here's where H&M would have come in except I have no sense of direction and walked a strange way that led to nowhere interesting. Navigated back and decided to pop in at the little M&S.

I thought I knew a little bit about British sizes but it all got very confusing very fast.
"Excuse me... what number is the equivalent of a small here?" (I keep seeing 12, 14, 18... which seems HUGE but that's all they have so I decide I must not understand the sizes)
"It depends on how small you want to go." (WTF does that even mean)
"Ummmmmmmmm...."
"Blah blah blah 6 is the smallest we have here blah blah"
"OK so a 6?"
"NO NO That's like really skinny."

OK fuck you. Obviously you're telling me I can't get into a size 6, which I know is not as small as it goes (I'm aware of the magic UK size 4).

"Erm, right. So I should get like an 8?"
"Size 6 is tiny. Like runway small. Catwalk."

Now that I'm embarrassed about how fat this woman must think I am, holding onto loads of depressing black clothes in sizes 8 & 10 because I figure I must fit into that since I'm a whale but everything else looks too big, AND everyone's just heard about how I have no idea what size I'm supposed to be buying IN A F-ING GROCERY STORE.... I slink over to the check out and try not to let my things touch the dirty food conveyor belt this girl obviously wants me to put them on.

Get home. They all fit. Knew it.

Obsessed now with finding this size 6 so I can see if I'll rip out the seams by looking at it.

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Now I'm stuck with stupid clothes that don't fit me right. Not that anything ever has fit me right since I've come to the conclusion that if you want to look good you need plastic surgery and a good tailor.

I don't remember what I was ranting about. It's not important. One of you lovely ladies need to point me in the direction of some real shops. None of this grab a jumper and a sammie on the way out business.

Gah. I'm frustrated.

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In other news, shoes are officially your only friends. I have never ever had a bad experience trying on shoes (except those weird wide ones that I'm POSITIVE somehow make feet look fat). This proves that shoe shopping is the only joy left in my world and explains why I have more pairs than outfits to match them up with.

That said, I am longing for some new boots. Because no one can tell me how damn thin I have to be to try on a boot. And if my feet are big, well fuck, it usually means I'm taller. So there.

Go buy some shoes for me. I'm out of money ;)

Waxing Philosophical

Sorry I've been absent. Things have been swirling around in my small brain and I can't multi-task apparently.

Read this. Specifically the Doc Hammer interview. It's not just because I would trade in my best friend for several hours of "me" time with him.... yes, I understand my ideals of dreamy are not the norm.

But something about how brilliant he is in an arrogant but truthful manner that shows you how transparent everything really is, and how fucking sad the state of things are. He always makes me want to try harder and be better. Which is pathetic, I understand.

I'm not ready to talk about that which I am tip-toeing around and being completely roundabout uh about. I still have lots of self-contemplation (hopefully on Museum Mile) to do, and a better physical tolerance to the car exhaust and cigarette smoke that permeates here.

Blah, it might also help to know I'm totally off my meds. hah. That probably erased any trace of legitimacy I might have previously had in the aforementioned paragraphs. But other than shitty withdrawals, I think I'm lucid so just trust me.

I hope you all are doing well. Go watch some cartoons. Good cartoons.

P.S. Read Shrinking Kitty's latest post. It's equally brilliant except it makes me hate Doc Hammer a little bit for being a man and painting women with lovely proportions... Ah, equilibrium.

Echoes

Wasted.

"It is crucial to notice the language we use when we talk about bodies. We speak as if there was one collective perfect body, a singular entity that we're all after. The trouble is, I think we are after that one body. We grew up with the impression that underneath all this normal flesh, buried deep in the excessive recesses of our healthy bodies, there was a Perfect Body just waiting to break out. It would look like everyone else's perfect body. A clone of all the shapeless, androgynous models, the hairless, silicone-implanted porn stars. Somehow we, in defiance of nature, would have toothpick thighs and burgeoning bosoms, buns of steel and dainty firm delts. As Andy Warhol wrote, 'The more you look at the exact same thing... the better and emptier you feel.'" (47)

"I ignored my parents, full of delusional certainty that one day soon I would walk back into the house, tall as a magazine model, cool and collected, a new woman, you've come a long way, baby, and then they would see. Then they'd know they'd had me all wrong, I would sweep into their perfect white living room and sit down on the couch, crossing my (magically long) legs and give them a bored stare. Then they'd be impressed.
Fat chance.
"I fell for the great American dream, female version, hook, line, and sinker. I, as many young women do, honest-to-god believed that once I Just Lost A Few Pounds, somehow I would suddenly be a New You, I would have Ken-doll men chasing my thin legs down with bouquets of flowers on the street, I would become rich and famous and glamorous and lose my freckles and become blond and five foot ten. I would wear cool quasi-intellectual glasses and a man's oxford shirt in a sunny New flat... As soon as I left my hometown and lost a few pounds." (91-92)

"You begin to rely on the feeling of hunger, your body's raucous rebellion at the small tortures of your own hands. When you eventually begin to get well, health will feel wrong, it will make you dizzy, it will confuse you, you will get sick again because sick is what you know." (111)

"You become fearless in a very twisted way. Reckless, careless, a cartoon character spinning its legs in glee as it falls from a cliff, splats flat, bounces back up. You sneeze, and your nose, cocaine torn, spatters blood. This pleases you, just as the small knives of pain please you when you run, the stabbing pain of each step, just as the worried, muted words of friends please you, just as your own voice pleases you when you say to them, I just can't stop. You've made a decision: You will not stop. The pain is necessary, especially the pain of hunger. It reassures you that you are strong, can withstand anything, that you are not a slave to your body, you don't have to give in to its whining.
"In truth, you like the pain. You like it because you deserve it, and the fact that you're putting yourself through pain means you are doing what you, by all rights, ought to do. You're doing something right. It's hard to describe how these two things can take place in the same mind: the arrogant, self-absorbed pride in yourself for your incredible feat, and the belief that you are so evil as to deserve starvation and any other form of self-mutilation. They coexist because you've split yourself in two. One part is the part you're trying to kill--the weak self, the body. One part is the part you're trying to become--the powerful self, the mind. This is not psychosis, this splitting. It is the history of Western culture made manifest. Your ability to withstand pain is your claim to fame. It is ascetic, holy. It is self-control. It is masochism, and masochism is pleasurable to many, but we don't like to think about that. We don't like to think that a person could have a twisted autoerotic life going on, be both a top and a bottom, and experience both at once: the pleasure of beating the hell out of a body shackled at the wrists, and the pleasure of being the body and knowing we deserve each blow." (123-124).

"My life revolved around meals. Never believe an eating-disordered person who says she hates food. It's a lie. Denied food, your body and brain will begin to obsess about it. It's the survival instinct, a constant reminder to eat, one that you try harder and harder to ignore, although you never can. Instead of eating, you simply think about food all the time. You dream about it, you stare at it, but you do not eat it... Food is the sun and the moon and the stars, the center of gravity, the love of your life." (151)

"I have a remarkable ability to delete all better judgment from my brain when I get my head set on something. Everything is done at all costs. I have no sense of moderation, no sense of caution. I have no sense, pretty much. People with eating disorders tend to be very diametrical thinkers--everything is the end of the world, everything rides on this one thing, and everyone tells you you're very dramatic, very intense, and they see it as an affectation, but it's actually just how you think. It really seems to you that the sky will fall if you are not personally holding it up. On the one hand, this is sheer arrogance; on the other hand, this is a very real fear. And it isn't that you ignore the potential repercussions of your actions. You don't think there are any.
Because you are not even there." (237)

"I am alive for very menial reasons:
1. Being sick gets singularly boring after a while.
2. I was really annoyed when told I was going to die and rather petulantly went, Well fuck you then I won't.
3. In a rare appearance by my rational self, I realized it was completely stupid and chicken-shittish of me to just check of life because it ruffled my feathers.
4. It struck me that it was entirely unoriginal to be starving to death. Everyone was doing it. It was, as a friend would later put it, totally passe. Totally 1980s. I decided to do something slightly less Vogue.
5. I got curious: If I could get that sick, then (I figured) I could bloody well get unsick." (277)

"Eating disorders, on any level, are a crutch. They are also an addiction and an illness, but there is no question at all that they are quite simply a way of avoiding the banal, daily, itchy pain of life. Eating disorders provide a little private drama, they feed into the desire for constant excitement, everything becomes life-or-death, everything is terribly grand and crashing, very Sturm and Drang. And they are distracting. You don't have to think about any of the nasty minutiae of the real world, you don't get caught up in that awful boring thing called regular life, with its bills and its breakups and its dishes and laundry and groceries and arguments over whose turn it is to change the litter box and bedtimes and bad sex and all that, because you are having a real drama, not a sitcom but a GRAND EPIC, all by yourself, and why would you bother with those foolish mortals when you could spend hours and hours with a mirror, when you are having the most interesting sado-masochistic affair with your own image?" (280-281)

WTF

What the fuck is wrong with me? It's all so clear now.

Thank you Lulu. You didn't do it intentionally--or perhaps you did... you sly thing--but you have definitely have made me come to realize the error in my ways.

I have been lusting after the momentary, futile highs and cravings of British treats. Did I forget I'm in the middle of a shopping wonderland? And more importantly, that I'm actually one of the sizes for which designers fashion stupid things like "Jeggings" in mind?

(side note, I secretly want designer jeggings and I don't judge you if you do too)

For every "pey-h" every "quid" every "tenner" I've spent on pre-packaged mush, I have missed out on the opportunity to rub those precious golden coins and pretty papered notes together for a new pair of boots. This year's winter coat.

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Not even food can satisfy me the way a clothing store can. Truly, I liken it to the feeling of chasing after a new boy. Except more fulfilling.

The anxiety, jitters, butterflies. They are all there as you ride the escalator, passing displays and wondering where you might wear that sharp little dress. Everything will be better once those gloves are in your hands, and nothing feels as nice as carrying your spoils out of the store in pretty bags. The more the better. The heavier, the bigger, the bulkier, the sweeter.

It's addictive.

Why did I ever give it up and switch to food? Oh, that's right. Food allures you into thinking you need it, it's good for you. It's economical because well, you have to eat something right? Spending money on clothes is wasteful; food is essential, they tell you. But, why would you ever spend $10 on a bad meal to-go when you could have a nice bangle from a vintage shop?

Food is fleeting but fashion is forever.

Don't Look At Me.

I am the grossest person alive.

Managed to stay away thus far, but yesterday I walked into NO LESS than 4 different grocery and food stores. As long as I have been awake, I think I have been stuffing some kind of cake or candy or drink or sandwich into my sodding mouth.

This is not the worst part.

My dress ripped last night. I don't know if it's because I'm fat or because it's vintage, but I was wiggling it off my hips and the waist just tore. I have to sew it up and take it off again to see which it was. Do you ever replay events or conversations over and over again in your head? That's what I'm doing. Obsessing about this skirt. This stupid fat fatty fat me and my skirt that screamed as its threads were pulling apart that I was not deserving to wear such a slimming and obviously fashionable garment.

Maybe I'll eat so much that I can't look at food again after I'm finished.

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It's horrible because Thursday I was admiring my spine and today I'm sure that my frame has all but disappeared.

Today I'm going to sit here in the dark with my food and our shared shame.

"I Can Not Help The Way I Feel"

I walked into the Wellcome Collection today. It reminded me how to tell a piece of art from a piece of bullshit.

Art isn't about form. Function. Color. Contrast. Complexity. Meaning. Devotion.

For me, art is that sinking feeling you get when you look at something truly astonishing, beautiful, horrific, or upsetting. It moves you in a way that you can recall that same emotion when you think back to the memory of the piece. Art is instinctual.

Today I saw a piece that stuck with me. I'm disgusted and sad and yet, I want to see it again. But not look at it.

This very well may be triggering, so I'm linking the sculpture.

"In this work lies an interest in a representational possibility of the emotional landscape of the body becoming manifest in its surface. Visually, the way in which the flesh grows, erupts and engulfs the body can be seen as a metaphor of the way in which we become incapacitated by the emotional landscape in which we live and over which we have little control. Of course, the body also appears to be suffering from some kind of malignancy, as in cancer, but, for me, the image of the figure, coupled with the title, leads one into an open contemplation of the plight of the individual." -- John Isaacs, 2003 (wax, polystyrene, steel, expanding foam and oil paint)

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I read the description over and over again. And then I wrote it into my planner. All the while avoiding glancing at the massive, faceless menace to my right.

And then I realized why it was important. What this meant to me.

Replace the words "flesh grows, erupts and engulfs the body" with something like "limbs weaken, protrude and collapses the skin..."

This wasn't about being obese. This is about us. It's talking to all of us who can't have a normal conversation about chocolate because something else in our life is so out of balance we have turned inward, away from the chaos of the world, and toward the comfort of food and controlling it.

The title of the piece: "I Can Not Help The Way I Feel."

It's almost every anoretic, bulimic, EDNOS, compulsive eater's biggest daily battle. It's not my fault that I'm sick but I will still feel guilty about it.

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I'm going to try stop being hard on myself for craving British sandwiches so much this weekend and focus on getting some coursework done. I can't help if that doesn't go as planned... but I have to accept whatever happens, embrace it, and move on.

I hope each of my readers can re-direct his or her desire for comfort and control toward something productive, even if it's just an attempt. We are more than what we feel, and we are more than an artist's wax rendition at a curio museum in Bloomsbury.

Mucha

I'm a big believer in Art Nouveau. Everything's pastel with clean lines and nice thick black outlines.

But as much as I love him, Alphonse Mucha gets under my skin.

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Don't get me wrong, who doesn't love a stupid psychedelic Mucha poster in their fresher dorms or perhaps Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder.

But have you noticed those women? Come on. It's like every painting is a personification of "HELLO I'M FERTILE IN ALL THE RIGHT PLACES." Then people have the gall to tell me that Mucha painted real women and demonstrates a truer form. Uh fuck that. Where's the little pudge and cellulite? Everything's curvy and smooth and luxurious.


Then there's me again. At my high weight, I become somewhat of a pear.... with strange things occurring to my arms as if to say "Hello! Someone tried to give me wings but gave me fat flippers instead!" I want to ask Mucha why I don't have a buxom bosom to round out a curvasous ass. Thanks Alphonse, I'm pretty sure you just pasted 5 different women together to make one print.

Early photoshop ladies and gentlemen.

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I guess I'm talking about this because I don't feel pretty. Again. I don't feel fat. I know I'm not fat. I mean, of course things could be tucked and slimmed and lasered away, but I'm under no impression that I look the way I did 45 pounds ago.

And if I know I'm not fat, why do I still care what I weigh? Why have I obsessed over converting kJ into calories when thoughtless brands don't list it? I walk around and feel like a shell of myself. It's not a terrible thing, just something different, I suppose. My clothes don't fit, my hair won't stop falling out, my skin is more bipolar than I am... but I glance at myself in shop windows and can truthfully say:

"There's no way I can get my thighs to touch even if I tried."

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Maybe I'm not even afraid of getting fat. I didn't look horrible 10, 20, 30 pounds ago. But there were little flaws, tiny details about myself that I noticed when no one else did. I had to pick at the metaphorical scabs until they were gone... knowing full well my wounds would scar and I would still be unhappy.

I don't have a stomach anymore... but I don't have anything else either. And I can pad and prod to make myself appear more shapely, but in the end, haven't I been saying this whole thing was for myself? I can see the facade. What's left from all I've chipped away and broken off.

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Generally, things get scapegoated on rather broad and untouchable people or objects to divert from the raw truth of the matter. I can stare at every painting or magazine cover shoot and wish for fragmented pieces of various girls to put together to make myself a new whole. Blame society for causing my insecurities. Chastise men for their unrealistic expectations.

But other people can see the same things I do, and--at the end of the day--peacefully walk away from it all. I can't let go of the obsession with myself.

Why can one look at art, commissioned decades or centuries past, and only see a reflection of her flawed self? What is it about beauty that is so offensive?