Fatshadow

83 weeks

Wed, 18 Jan 2006 05:49:57 GMT

I got an e-mail that said my friend keryx had noticed that I hadn't updated my LJ for 83 weeks.
Heh.
It's true.
I got an LJ so that I could comment on other people's and not be anonymous. There was a time when I thought it might be better to write the more emotional stuff about my life here. I don't take it well when people jump in my shit on my blog. It's one thing to disagree with a political position, or about art or a movie, or whatever. It's another thing to practice psychoanalysis in a comment box, especially when posting with a fake or no name. Even when what is said is true it doesn't feel ...uh...good. It's happened to me a few times. I wish I had weathered it better. I haven't. I don't write as openly.
Writing was always a way to process. Talking and writing. I think it can be said that I am not processing. I have more or less ground to a halt.
Maybe writing in the LJ would be a way to write out the process. I'm not sure. I've been depressed for a long time now. I'm just not sure writing about it on the WWW is a good thing for me to do.
I appreciate the nudge from April. She is so great at constellating community.
I'm not sure if I'll write more. Every post I make on the blog seems to take more effort than I have. I keep thinking that I should shut it all down.
But I don't want to.
Lord Buckley once said," If you get to it and you can't do it, there you jolly well are aren't you?."
Pretty much.

I have no one to blame but myself.

Thu, 20 May 2004 03:16:25 GMT

Blessed are the peace makers.
Oh fuck it.

I dunno.

Tue, 11 May 2004 04:07:36 GMT

I have these two extremes in my personality.
At least.
Having been raised in a house with my grandparents I can be hyper-vigilant about other people’s needs. If Grandma’s going down the steps I better be in front of her so she can lean on me. Don’t wait till they ask. And I have the only child center of the universe thing. On good days they balance each other out. On bad days they keep me chasing my own tail.
It took me half the day to download the deferment paper. It’s half filled out now. Maybe by tomorrow I can complete it. It’s only two pages.
I become frustrated by own petulance.
I did my due diligence on Craig’s list and Monster. Monster came up with a job running a funeral home. I can do that. I guess. Run a funeral home.
I found three different writing contests. All of which have an entry fee. The one that pays the least and takes the longest to notify is the one for which I can imagine a piece of writing. I went to the site for another and read about the folks who have won in the past. It was completely overwhelming.
People. Like. Get. Fellowships. And grants. And.
I dunno.
I dunno.

OK.

Mon, 10 May 2004 03:01:00 GMT

The apartment smells a little too much like lemon Pledge for my taste but things are shiny. I made a pork chop and leeks and rice for dinner.
And poured a glass of wine.
And ate at the table instead of in front of the computer.
And lit a candle.
I did not download the deferment papers. Yesterday I was in too bad a mood and today I’m in too good a mood. I’ll do it tomorrow. It’s a Scarlet O’Hara thing.
While I was cleaning I found the list of e-mails addresses for local agents. The one I’ve been trying not to find. But I have it on the desk and I know I need to send some query letters.
But.
For now.
I’m just gonna sit back into the glow.

What to do till the messiah comes.

Sun, 09 May 2004 23:26:05 GMT

Knowing the restorative power of cleaning I have been dusting and vacuuming in the bedroom. It does make me feel better. I’m going to do some in the living room but I stopped to make a cup of coffee. It’s so strong that my eyes have begun to vibrate in their sockets.
I wanted to do the meme from April. Bold is what I’ve read. Although some of them so long ago. If there’s a quiz I’ll fail. Some of which I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t read and gave some thought to reading before I did this. But that would be just silly. Right? Italics are supposed to be what I want to read but I can’t seem to control the tag. So I guess I want to read them all. (Never mind. I just spent ten minutes fixing it all.)
I gotta go back to cleaning. It’s hard to read the screen when my eyes are about to roll back in my head.

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch-22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut Jr., Kurt - Harrison Bergeron
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son

Fri, 07 May 2004 21:16:19 GMT

I got an email about my student loans being over due. I applied for a deferment. Apparently the time on it is up and I didn’t notice because when they send me letters I toss them in a pile and never get the courage to open them. So. I’ll download more deferment papers and fill them out and there you have it. More debt than I can pay off, even with a job. What was I thinking?
From my family I got the work hard, be good and your reward will be a house and a car and a husband and couple of kids and all the while I wasn’t suppose to notice that my mother was living with her parents because her own husband, house and car reward hadn’t exactly worked out. Did that mean she hadn’t worked hard enough, or been good enough? And thank god she was living there because her parents couldn’t afford their house without her support. And still they told the story about work and education and all the rewards that gave life meaning.
But I’d been paying attention.
So I got on a Greyhound and went off in search of boys with long hair and acid revelation and music and books and art. I found some of all that. And more. And at some point I heard the follow your bliss narrative and didn’t notice the similarity with what I’d been taught at home. So I took chances and risks and believed in a transcendence that would fill in the material structure and raised it to a level of fulfillment. Fulfillment having all the same descriptors of the work hard narrative.
Last year I kept saying I was going to arrive at fifty, having spent the last five years getting my BA and my MFA, being deeper in debt and less employable than I’ve ever been. It seemed like it should be a pinnacle but it felt like a cliff. A year later it has been more like a desert. A long flat surface with no land marks by which to navigate.
Last week one of my credit cards called because that payment was late. It was in the mail.
Maybe I internalized the distortion between the do this and it will all work out narrative and the lived life of my family. Although things did work out for Mom. At a cost to me. But none the less. Maybe I’m just not doing enough. I need to send out more resumes and more query letters and more of some kind of message in some kind of bottle.
I mean. Ya know. I’ll just keep trying. Sometimes I sit and look at everything I own and I wonder how much money I can get if I sell it all. Not enough to make a dent, I imagine. But what the fuck. I’ll sell it all and move to some small town, change my name and get a job as a fry cook.
OK.
I know.
That won’t work.
But that’s always been my backup plan.
I know fat people are supposed to comfort themselves with food. When I feel like this I can’t eat at all. All I want is bourbon and cigarettes and every Billie Holiday in my collection. How can sell the Billie Holiday?
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
But I’m not drinking. And I’m not smoking. I’m doing laundry and listening to Rumsfeld prevaricate through that perennially sneering mouth, which is the worst possible thing I can be listening to and yet I can’t turn it off.
I can’t stand not being able to pay my bills. I can’t stand owing money. I feel so much shame. And no amount of intellectualization of why things are the way they are pulls it from my skin. It covers me. No oxygen can get through.
I used to write this kind of thing on Fatshadow.com. What the fuck am I doing with a .com? I should be a .org, or a .net, or a .whatthefuck. Com is not my area. Clearly. But I feel too ragged and too tense. And yet writing has become my way of holding it together. And I need to get it out of my head.
I have support. I have friends. It will all be OK. Sooner. Or later. One way, or another. I may day dream about filling my pockets with rocks and walking down the street to the bay. But I can’t leave until I’ve cleaned up this mess.
Deb took me to lunch at a place in the Mission yesterday. It has an open kitchen and I could see the cooks. One of them was a guy I’d trained. He came out and we chatted in Spanglish. He asked what I was doing and I said I’d finished school. He laughed. I don’t really know why he laughed. Given the problems of my verb tense he my not have known what I meant. Emmay Effay Ah might not be quite right. And may have less meaning than it seems to have on my resume. But I know what I felt when he laughed. What was I thinking school would mean? People like he and I don’t go to school. We work on our feet with our hands. We make less than we should for more than we can do so that fancy boys in downtown chic can play restaurateur. As I left he and two other cooks waved goodbye and smiled. What were they thinking? Did he tell the that I was a good boss and a hard worker and that I’d done my best to make sure he didn’t lose his job when he showed up with a hangover? Or were they wondering when I’d get a fucking job?
I have to go get the laundry out of the dryer.
And keep pushing this ball up the hill.

It’s Tuesday.

Tue, 04 May 2004 16:44:22 GMT

Mondays begin with a shrill ringing in my ear. If I listen I can hear the voices of gloom and doom in an atonal shriek. What are you gonna do? What are you gonna do?
Monster sends me the morning e-mail of nothing useful.
I got a call from an old friend yesterday. Someone who was part of my undoing a few years ago. She did try to keep things from hurting me too badly but she became overwhelmed by the tsunami force that washed me out, into a sea of alienation and loss.
Enough time has passed. I don’t feel it the same way. I still feel a lump in my throat. A tension in my shoulders. But I’ve been working on letting it all go and I’m doing OK.
Talking to her and talking to another friend took up most of the day. The list of things I did not do is long. But I didn’t fold up. And I’m not in a terrible mood. I’m listening to the news and I’ve eaten scrambled eggs and had my tea. When DN is over I’ll take a shower and do some yoga and make a Mother’s day card and maybe I’ll do the laundry. The sun is shining. Sometimes you just gotta keep on keepin on.

There is a taste covering
my tongue.
The taste of the way he used to smell.
The smell when he got so close.
I’m not sure how he got that close
left such a memory in my mouth
with so little actual contact.

I broke a glass.

Sat, 01 May 2004 22:55:59 GMT

It was stupid. I had it sitting on the rim of the tub. It had liquid soap in it. Sometimes when the bottle is almost empty I drain the rest into a pottery bowl. This time I used a glass. Why? Oh. Who knows?
And so, after I’d finished getting the last of the soap out of the glass and with my hands still slippery I tried to put it in the sink and …
It broke in the sink so all the glass was contained and easy to clean up. I put it in a plastic bag and then in a second plastic bag. Thinking back I should have taken it down to the recycling bin.
I was reading Mike Golby who I often enjoy but who can be so hyperbolic that I find myself stumbling away from the screen. I usually agree with what he’s saying. His Cathloic boy sexism gives me a headache but I’ve been reading him for awhile and he sure can write. And. I dunno. I’m not always sure why I read him. But I like him.
He’s pissed about the pictures of Iraqi prisoners. As I am I. As he has every right to be. And he mentions River who is also pissed. And who also has every right to be. Maybe more. Definatly more. And who I had also read a few minutes before I read him.
People in the world are so angry with Americans. And why shouldn’t they be? I’m not feeling too good about us right now. I can’t imagine why we aren’t in the streets screaming every day. We used to be. The first hundred years or more of this country was one long riot.
I walked into the kitchen where I am theorhetically cleaning. Although, clearly not since the computer isn’t in the kitchen and I can’t type and scub at the same time. I was gathering together small bags of trash and a piece of glass poked through and cut my arm. Not badly. Just a small round hole that seemed to pour blood. I sucked on it and finally, when it wouldn’t stop pouring, put a bandaide on it.
I’m still tired from last night. I called Mom to check on Ken and he’s OK. But not really. And she sounds scared and tired and uncertain. Makes it hard to be too mad at her for her political thunk headeadness.
Maybe I better get back to the scrubbing.

Bad faith. But maybe not too bad.

Thu, 29 Apr 2004 18:22:35 GMT

Something happened in the last few days that I can’t write about. It has to do with people on line and there would some bad faith involved and so I must bite down on a fairly huge amount of difficult emotion. At one point I began a post for the LJ thinking that the LJ is more private and I could lock the post and I feel this need to get it out of my system and and and and. But.
Part of my whole deal on my blog is to write it out there. All there yucky stuff. The jealousy, greed, avarice, the feelings of competition, the weakness and worry and fear and anger and loss and and and.
I’m not even sure why.
I think it’s good to tell the truth. And not even tell it slant. Tell it straight up.
Because we all live there. And we oughta meet up there once in while. And grieve together. And gnash our teeth and ring our hands and wail together. And be unseemly and unattractive. And survive. Together.
I will have an opportunity to talk it out with one of the people involved some time in May. And that is the better way to go.
No one died. No one was arrested. A cause that I have a lot of passion for has just gotten a boost. It’s all good.
And this is me. Biting down. Privately. In public.

Plus it’s really hot.

Tue, 27 Apr 2004 00:43:57 GMT

I spent what seemed like eight hours (but was really only twenty minutes) sending a resume via Monster to a job I don’t even want. And then I had to have a break down. It’s just ridiculous. Really. I get so worked up. I understand the eighty trillion reasons why but I’m sick of it. It’s late now and I haven’t done the other thing I was going to do today, which was to put together a letter of inquiry to send to a small local publishing house. Although, there are a few more hours in the day. Maybe I can get it together now that I've confessed my petulance in public.
First I have the break down and then I have a break down about the break down and I can’t stop.

Choice

Sat, 24 Apr 2004 18:38:26 GMT

I was writing a post last night and began to write about the LJ and then it occurred to me that it might subvert the possibility of the LJ.
When I was writing the book I spent a lot of time thinking about why I was writing things. Did they serve my purpose? What was my purpose? And during three years of writing my purpose shifted and waffled and I worked to hone it into something specific. I’m not sure if it worked. I like the book. I’m just not sure I ever got specific.
But, you know, I talk that way. Sometimes I start talking and even I don’t know where I’m going because there are always details that seem to connect. The people who know me usually allow this seemingly random babble in hopes that there will be a final pulling together. I think I get there more often than not. And the person will say something like, "Gee I never thought about the possible connections between that man sitting in the garbage can and Paris in 68."
Ah. Well. I can only hope it’s fun for them.
I am also, I hope, a good listener.
This morning I wrote about my abortion because tomorrow is the March for Women’s Lives. I wanted to be part of it. And the thing I have to contribute always seems to be about telling a story.
Usually my story.
Which may be solipsism.
Or confession.
Or just the message in a bottle hope for connection.
Or wanna-be punditry.
I was surprised that writing the post was emotional for me. I’m not sure why I was surprised. But it seems so very long ago. When I do talk about it I tend to have a detached philosophical attitude. In many ways it didn’t feel like a choice. It felt like cleaning up a mess that I had made. But there have been times when my careless, fumbling rebel with out a sense of anything, way of being would have resulted in a child. And maybe having that kid, at that time, would have been great. But I grew up without a father. And telling my child that their father was a ship who passed in the night was just not tenable.
But it was a choice. It was one choice in a series of choices. And I’m deeply aware of how important that choice was.
My purpose was to put my own story on the line. To offer it up as an example of why we need to protect Row. As I wrote I almost felt like it wasn’t a good enough offering. And that’s not a plea for reassurance. I think all those feelings are a necessary part of my offering. I just wasn’t aware that I had some of them.

What should I be doing?

Fri, 23 Apr 2004 22:53:14 GMT

Looking for a job.
Sending out resumes.
Sending letters to agents telling them why my book is really very good and people might like to read it and they should do everything in their power to get me published.
What am I doing?
Reading and marveling at how many of the people I read on line have Live Journals and wondering if I should write here more, which puts me right where I was a year ago when I first created the LJ.
Except. This year has been so fraught. Oh I guess the last fifty years have been a bit fraught but this one has had more death and illness and money problems and on and on and on.
And then there were the comments from someone named Beth, who turned out to be a fellow. Yes. I did say fellow. He popped up about a year ago and was very supportive of my writing and my search for a publisher. He has a blog, which I didn’t find compelling but went to from time to time in the spirit of ... oh, I don’t know. Community?
Ugh.
The first time he posted as Beth it was a comment to a post I’d written about swimming. There was a snide quality. As if I didn’t know that swimming was a good thing, despite the fact that I was writing about swimming as a good thing. I ignored it. The next time was a response to something I wrote about Martha Stewart and I didn’t even remember the first comment. Then Beth (eye roll) began to comment more frequently, always with that snide quality. And that began the messy little batch of comments earlier this month.
My comment system has a way to track every comment from a given IP. Something I didn’t realize until another blogger mentioned it. I tracked the IP address from Beth and found that there were four different names coming from that IP, all of which had the snide thing going except for the really kind, supportive comments in the beginning.
Of all the things I’ve experienced while writing on line this was the most disconcerting. I’ve received my share of rude comments. Mean comments. It’s part of the deal, in a way. You say something out loud and someone may say something back. But changing names? It gave me the creeps.
I did a few things to let the person know that I knew what was going on. I don’t want to belabor the whole thing. But it just gave me the creeps in a way I haven’t felt about writing on line.
I don’t have a lot of secrets. I have things I don’t talk about on line but I would if I had a reason.
I think.
There are people who write on line who I don’t read because I don’t think much of them. I can’t imagine reading someone, waiting for a chance to say something shitty. I can imagine having syntax problems and being misunderstood and liking a lot of what a person says but not liking it all. But if I say something, I use my name.
It feels good to write about it. I didn’t want to write it out on the blog because it felt sort of tawdry. In a very small and loopy way. Maybe there are things I could write about here. It does feel sheltered. Somewhat.

Wed, 19 Mar 2003 17:06:14 GMT

I wish for peace.

Tue, 11 Mar 2003 08:04:08 GMT

I was sitting on the bus and it occurred to me that I did the same thing here that I do in all my journals. I wrote about writing in it.
Heh.
I’m having trouble getting dandelion diva onto my friends list. I don’t know why.

So I was talking in therapy about my preference for a fat body VS love as the arbiter of beauty. And it is true that I’ve always felt like fat as a preference is, or at least can be, the flip side of a coin.
It just seems to me that we’re so inundated with images of beauty and sexuality. And they are so ... uh ... narrow. So we’re all in a bad dream. And then we meet someone and there is this energy. This pulse. I know that there were men who were attracted to me who just could not deal with my body. I have compassion for them in terms of the bad dream that we’re in but I’m pissed that they didn’t confront those things in themselves.
But they went on and had relationships with average sized women and I suffered the loss.
The place where I always get confused is the place where I have the compassion and the anger. Because both are true at the same time. I can get really sad behind this stuff.
But. There is one thing that I’m not confused about. I’m not willing to be with anyone who doesn’t love my body.

Tue, 11 Mar 2003 00:14:06 GMT

I don’t know if I can do two journals. But the Live Journal thing is so engaging. Jeez. I already have friends. How cool is that? And right now I’m sick of school stuff and there isn’t enough time to work on other writing before I leave for therapy. And I keep thinking about the journal and the way writing shape shifts to fill in a form. This does feel intimate.
I may think about this stuff too much. I blame school. I spent the morning reading two long pieces of academic writing about teaching writing. Both concluded that one on one attention was good for people when they are in classes about writing. Gee. Da ya think?
Then I had to write my critiques of two people’s writing in my workshop. I never like doing that. I just think writing is a natural expression. And too much thinking about it makes it tense. And not enough thinking about it makes it unreadable. I don’t think everyone should write. I don’t think everyone wants to write. But some people are driven to write. And I love to read. I like reading about all the “I did this then and that” tales of life.
Now I have to switch to pre-therapy mode. I don’t feel the need. Sometimes I am surprised when I get there and I think I’m fine and I start talking and …BOOM. But right now I’m just happy that I’m not sick. And I did some of my school stuff. So I’m kinda caught up.
So I gotta go talk personal process with my radical, Marxist, lesbian, therapist. Who I adore. And the other folks in my group. Maybe more later.

All of me.

Mon, 10 Mar 2003 06:37:27 GMT

Earlier today I was talking to a friend. A very fat positive friend. I was telling her that I know that there are men who prefer fat women but I wondered if a man who might not have been attracted to a fat woman ever before in their life might be attracted to a fat woman after getting to know her and falling in love. I think that’s what I always wanted to hope. But shit. What a lot of pressure to put on your self. It’s like my personality has to be soooooo great that someone becomes attracted to a body type that they’ve never been attracted to. I’m pretty cool. But I shouldn’t have to be.
I mean bodies change. They change after childbirth. They change because of accidents and illness. They change because of age. As I get older, older people look sexier and sexier. But is that true for everyone?
It’s really hard to let go of a romantic notion. And I’m not sure I want to. But I do want to be loved for the whole of who I am. Body and soul. I don’t want to have to be soooooo cool. I just want to be a woman. In love.

Mon, 10 Mar 2003 03:37:52 GMT

I thought since I have the Live Journal thing hooked up I’d … ya know … play. Coz, really…why shouldn’t I spend the day playing with my web pages and not doing my homework?
I’m wondering if what I write would be different. I pretty much tell it all on my page already. Hmmm.
Really. I’m just wanting to play with the mood things.

OOOOOO so blue.

How do you drive this?

Mon, 10 Mar 2003 03:10:52 GMT

What if I kept a journal here too?