Rules and Definitions

Put your seatbelt on, Gladys:

I'm a girl*. I'm a white girl. I'm a middle-class white girl. I'm a little, middle-class white girl. I'm supposed to be skinny, damn it. I'm supposed to be wee. Not big. Small. I'm supposed to be a skinny, little, middle-class white girl. Don't ask me why; I don't know why. I just know that I am supposed to be little all the way around. Not you; it doesn't matter if you're a little, middle-class white girl too. You don't count here. You're fine. You're golden, baby: a stone cold fox, the cat's meow. This is about me and my stupid "curves." (Which is a STUPID euphemism, by the way. They aren't "curves." They're hips and boobs and my butt and my thighs. "Curves" are not anatomical; they are architectural. Or something.) This is about me, and I'm supposed to be a skinny little middle-class white girl, and them's the rules. I don't know WHERE I came up with the rules. I don't particularly remember anyone ELSE teaching them to me coughexceptmaybemyballetteachercough. Color me an autodidact.

This post brought to you by my boobs.

Status: Out of ConFreakingTrol.

*Technically I'm a "woman," being nearly 27 and all, but "girl" scans better, doesn't it?

**Yeah, that's a huge mountain of laundry in the background. Big whoop, you got somethin' to say about it? Aw, go soak your head.

Theatre Thursdays - The NOT Christmas Edition!

Welcome back to Theatre Thursdays! This post has NOTHING to do with Christmas! And it's a long one (warning you now). We're on to Shakespeare once again. We're also on to more than just a monologue again. We have one monologue, one snippet of dialogue, and some spot-on contextual commentary. I just couldn't help myself.

Today's play is Measure for Measure, which belongs to the group of comedies sometimes called "the problem plays." Exactly which plays constitute the "problem" group and precisely what time frame that period encompasses are two things very much up for debate, but Measure for Measure seems to be a point of agreement for all sides of this academic tug-of-war. It is NOTHING if not problematic for nearly every main character.

Poor, poor Isabella. Gal just wants to become a nun and have done with the secular world. Not only is Isabella saddled with a horndog older brother who's landed himself a death sentence for knocking up his fiancee (because that is the law in Vienna, where we are), but she's also prettier than a daisy. That's what Angelo thinks, at least. Angelo is standing in for the Duke of Vienna while the Duke is away. Angelo, being an upstanding citizen, offers to pardon Isabella's brother... if she'll give him her virginity. She protests and declines and says "no," but he just gets nastier and more threatening, because he is a politician and a perv. Not only is Angelo sleazy enough to propose essentially raping her, he points out that, should she try to tell on him, no one would take her word over his. Here, she weighs her options in a wrenching soliloquy coming heavy on the heels of a ruthless scene:

ISABELLA
To whom should I complain? Did I tell this,
Who would believe me? O perilous mouths,
That bear in them one and the self-same tongue,
Either of condemnation or approof;
Bidding the law make court'sy to their will:
Hooking both right and wrong to the appetite,
To follow as it draws! I'll to my brother:
Though he hath fallen by prompture of the blood,
Yet hath he in him such a mind of honour.
That, had he twenty heads to tender down
On twenty bloody blocks, he'ld yield them up,
Before his sister should her body stoop
To such abhorr'd pollution.
Then, Isabel, live chaste, and, brother, die:
More than our brother is our chastity.
I'll tell him yet of Angelo's request,
And fit his mind to death, for his soul's rest.

So that's Isabella's train of thought: very... utilitarian. ("More than our brother is our chastity?" Really? Wow, that's some commitment to virtue.) Claudio's not so keen on this strategy, surprisingly...

While Isabella and Claudio whine at each other ("Why won't you just sleep with him?" "You're so mean!" "No, YOU'RE mean!"), the Duke of Vienna (who actually didn't go out of town at all, but decided to skulk around dressed up as a friar, for some reason) enters and hears all about the perfidy of Angelo. Having known Angelo for years, the Duke knows that Angelo jilted a woman named Mariana once upon a time. The Duke-in-cognito arranges for Isabella to pull a Helena*: Tell Angelo to expect her in bed, then smuggle in Mariana wearing a veil, of course, because no one would find it weird if you showed up in bed with a full veil. Of course not. I guess some people are just kinky like that.

What with one thing and another, Angelo falls for it and sleeps with Mariana. The Duke "returns from out of town" sans religious costume. Isabella, believing her brother's execution has gone forward despite the agreement with Angelo, pleads with the Duke to listen to what a rat-bastard Angelo really is. He tells her to tell it to Angelo, because he appears to enjoy really effed up mind games:

ISABELLA
O worthy duke,
You bid me seek redemption of the devil:
Hear me yourself; for that which I must speak
Must either punish me, not being believed,
Or wring redress from you. Hear me, O hear me, here!

ANGELO
My lord, her wits, I fear me, are not firm:
She hath been a suitor to me for her brother
Cut off by course of justice,--

ISABELLA
By course of justice!

ANGELO
And she will speak most bitterly and strange.

ISABELLA
Most strange, but yet most truly, will I speak:
That Angelo's forsworn; is it not strange?
That Angelo's a murderer; is 't not strange?
That Angelo is an adulterous thief,
An hypocrite, a virgin-violator;
Is it not strange and strange?

DUKE VINCENTIO
Nay, it is ten times strange.

ISABELLA
It is not truer he is Angelo
Than this is all as true as it is strange:
Nay, it is ten times true; for truth is truth
To the end of reckoning.

DUKE VINCENTIO
Away with her! Poor soul,
She speaks this in the infirmity of sense.

ISABELLA
O prince, I conjure thee, as thou believest
There is another comfort than this world,
That thou neglect me not, with that opinion
That I am touch'd with madness! Make not impossible
That which but seems unlike: 'tis not impossible
But one, the wicked'st caitiff on the ground,
May seem as shy, as grave, as just, as absolute
As Angelo; even so may Angelo,
In all his dressings, characts, titles, forms,
Be an arch-villain; believe it, royal prince:
If he be less, he's nothing; but he's more,
Had I more name for badness.

And do you know what the Duke does then? Do you know what he does? He has Isabella taken away under guard because he is not done with his effed up mind game yet! WTF?!

Anyway, in the end, the Duke admits to Isabella that he was the friar who hatched the Mariana plan with her. Dukey also compels Claudio (who is not dead) to marry his knocked up fiancee; forces Angelo to marry Mariana; and confesses to Isabella that he has fallen in love with her, offering her his hand in marriage. Unfortunately for Isabella, this isn't really so much a "suggestion": He's the Duke. He gets what he wants. Think Prince Humperdink. All the... uh... happy couples leave the stage together.

And that, children, is why Measure for Measure ranks as the most undeniably Problem of the "problem plays." In the classical sense, it is a comedy: everyone ends up married and no one - not even the bad guy! - ends up missing a skull. However, at least two of the three marriages (the possible exception is Claudio's) are being forced upon at least half of the new spouses.

I'd definitely call that a "problem" for someone.

*That would be Helena from All's Well That Ends Well, who tricks her husband into sleeping with her instead of a younger woman and is only able to secure her marriage by getting knocked up on that single, miraculous night. Happy ending!!!

A Room Of One's Own

Yup. Virginia Woolf. I went there, baby.


Living in a two-room Manhattan apartment is tough sometimes. Here's a good example.


My husband is buddies with a teenage kid who lives downstairs (yes, really). Sometimes the kid comes up to play video games and whatnot, and occasionally the kid brings friends. The kid's nice and all, but sometimes the kid's visit coincides with dinner time. That happens because my husband, though he has many talents and strengths, cannot think ahead for shit. His sense of cause and effect doesn't always present itself in a fully developed manner. Sometimes it's hilarious, sometimes it's infuriating. Mostly it ends up being somewhere in between.


But I hate it when it fucks with my dinner.


That's a somewhat normative reaction. I mean, who really likes to be 10 minutes away from food, really hungry, then, BAM! COMPANY!? "Why didn't you consider our general evening schedule before asking this person over? That's not polite to your spouse/living partner" is a reasonable question to have in that circumstance. It's normal to dislike that kind of situation. But you know who *really* dislikes that? People with eating disorders or related issues. We haaaaaate it. Our food is our ritual is our space is our time is our self is our identity. Fuck with our food and we will fuck. you. up. (Yes, I'm spelling it out today, as you may have noticed.)


You know the most really, truly horrible freakout I remember having? It was over some braised lamb. My dad made it in the summer of my first major recovery from anorexia and it freaked. me. out. It was a whole big scene, but suffice to say, it ended with me weeping at the table and choking down most of my meager portion of very healthily braised lamb. The point being, OH MY GOD, I have my FOOD PLAN for the day or minute or meal or week, and do not FUCK with it, because it is what helps me deal with EVERYTHING ELSE.


This still comes up from time to time, only, now it comes up when I'm, you know, annoyed that two teenage boys are at my two-room home and my dinner just got here and, dammit, I don't want to eat in front of them because it may be silly, but I'm self-conscious about eating in from of people to whom I'm not close (I don't know if that will ever go away). Am I explaining this well? I don't think I am. Well, suffice to say, now that I'm a moderate way along Recovery Road, I notice the food OMGWTF stuff pop up when it's really about something other than food. Which I suspect it mostly always was. Or so the psychologists tell me.


But you know what? Now I can realize what it's about; take the laptop into the bedroom; and "verbalize" a little later without having a meltdown over chicken parm and two teenagers.


Progress?

Book Meme

A fellow Sookie Stackhouse addict has this book meme on her blog, and I figured it would be good for a Friday. She tells me it was floating around some U.K. blogs, which you might infer (but not necessarily) from comparing it with the similar, American 100 Books meme. I find this one is a bit more up my alley. Enjoy!

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Underline those you intend to read.
3) Italicise the books you LOVE.

Edit: I'll do you one better: If I *know* I read the book in, say, elementary school but can't remember a jot of it? I won't bold it. Because I'm intellectually honest like that. I'm such a good person.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (I won't bold since I haven't read all of it.)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (Heartbreaking and awesome. In the literal sense.)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Like you couldn't already tell.)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (Am I the only person on Earth who hates this book with the burning passion of 1,000 suns?)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (I've read part, but can't in all good conscience bold it. However, that doesn't stop me from joking around about 42 like I know what the hell I'm talking about.)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (This is one I have read but don't remember... and mean one day to reread.)
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (Redundant much?)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (I tried. I couldn't get through it.)
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins (Never even heard of this.)
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (All of them, baby.)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy (Thomas Hardy could have my head on a silver platter if he wanted it.)
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons (No, but I *have* read Cold Sassy Tree.)
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (The people who greenlit the NBC TV movie of this in the '90's? Should be shot in the knees.)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I read this, but don't remember it.)
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (This is the sound of me weeping sloppily.)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (See above note on "Of Mice and Men.")
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding (wtf? Why is this on the list, but no Hemingway?) <-- Amy's note. I concur.
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie (Why isn't "The Satanic Verses" on here?)
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (You would have to threaten me with torture to get me to read this again.)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (I've read this recently enough to bold it, but I'm not going to, because I COULDN'T UNDERSTAND A DAMN WORD. I think you need to read this in a class, or something.)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (Oh my God, of *course* I've read this. Of *course.*)
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome (That title sounds vaguely plainly pornographic.
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (This is redundant.)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


I really, thoroughly second Amy's question of WHY there is no Hemingway on this list? WTF? A Movable Feast? A Farewell to Arms? The Sun Also Rises? Anyone? Anyone?? Good grief.

Have a great weekend! Read lots!

Theatre Thursdays

Welcome back to Theatre Thursdays. This week we chalk another one up to Feminism in the 20th Century.

I was in this play in college. I played Clovis, the mentally disturbed wife. I was hilariously anorexic at the time (it was riotous!) so I definitely pulled off the sick look. What I didn't pull off, and why I think that no one under, say, 25 should be allowed to act? Emotional intelligence. First of all, being anorexic or bulimic for any length of time (clinical diagnosis only begins after 3 months of sustained symptoms) is the equivalent of shooting Novocaine into your emotional center. Second of all, to play a wife and mother? I don't think you necessarily have to be a wife or a mother, but you sure as hell have to understand the world more thoroughly than a pampered 21-year-old does.

Don't get me wrong: This is a play that intends to be something more original that what it is, inspired by a groundbreaking work of poetry (Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich), and about characters based on Impressionists including Édouard Manet. But the ideas are there, and I wish I had appreciated them at the time. It's about women with men, and women with women, and husbands and wives, and complacency and frustration and devotion. It's about girls with their fathers, and boys with the women who raise them. It's a play on how differences between us and our beloveds make and break our lives.



DOLORES. When I was young, I went with any man who wanted me and I stayed with them until they didn't want me anymore. I kept thinking that if I had someone, someone of my very own, it would be more than happiness. It would be like discovering the reason for my existence, the very reason for being the person I am.
Then I came here. Because of a woman. The first place I'd ever come not because of a man. I'd worked at the hospital eight years when your mother was carried in bald and screaming. When I met her, she asked me who I was, and I said, all I know of myself, where I come from, who I am, is that my name is Dolores, which means sorrow. (SHE laughs.) Well, it is funny because I've always thought of myself as a rather contented person. Clovis said, I like your name. So I came here.

*These two monologues essentially open the play, and are interspersed with a scene between Dolores (Clovis' nurse), Clovis, and Clovis' nine-year-old son Mylo.


(LIGHTS fade on Dolores and Mylo and come up slowly, illuminating CLOVIS in the graveyard. CLOVIS kneels at the altar she has built around one of the grave markers. [Her creation is something similar to altar boxes or to Joseph Cornell's shadow boxes and assemblages.] CLOVIS faces a small headstone. Glued to the surface of the headstone are shards of colored broken glass. The altar piece is filled with shiny things that catch and refract light. Colored glass jars, a string of glass beads, a ladies' hand mirror, half-filled bottles of perfume, silver earrings, shiny stones, a ruby ring, a piece of Venetian carnival glass, glittering pieces, reflective surfaces. This place is Clovis' sanctuary.
SHE holds out the shiny stone. SHE fixes the bottles working on her sanctuary. SHE talks to someone she senses is there. We glimpse a vision of a LITTLE GIRL. A mirage. A flutter of a skirt, a wisp of hair, a whisper.)

CLOVIS. I like this place at dawn. I breathe easier out here away from the house.
The party is tonight. I hope I'll be fine. Victor says it's time. A year and a half. I should be able to manage a dinner.
I keep having this dream where I'm eleven and my father and I run through a field up a hill. We're out of breath and laughing. It's a beautiful sunny day and we're surrounded by light. I lean back my head, close my eyes, and smell the most extraordinary fragrance. Cinnamon. My father says to me, you can take this moment with you for the rest of your life.
That day with my father I felt I could run and laugh forever and would always be surrounded by the most extraordinary smell. (CLOVIS looks around her sanctuary.) This is now my field of cinnamon.

Dream of a Common Language, Act 1, scene 1
by Heather McDonald

Okay, see?? (redux redux)

You want to know why I don't leave my apartment on a regular basis?

Because? Every time I do? I run into some friend I haven't seen in three years. And I don't have on a swab of makeup. And my hair is frizzy and dirty. And I'm wearing a six-year-old Weezer shirt and my jeans that are five years old and two sizes too big. And I'm covered with cat hair. And I've been neglecting my eyebrows. And I probably have stuff in my teeth. And my my more resilient mustache and chin hairs* are staging a facial coup. And I probably smell.

THAT is why I don't leave my apartment. Because that is what HAPPENS in Manhattan.

GOD.


* Shut up. Don't pretend you don't have them. You know you do.

It Occurs To Me...

... That I haven't actually left my apartment since... Friday? Thursday?

I think Friday.

But I can't be sure.

Well, at least I won't get bird flu or whatever's floating around out there in this weird-ass late fall weather.

(I'm categorizing this "post" - if you can call it that - "NYC" because, honestly, if you live here? This happens. All the time. Manhattan apartments are like black holes.)

Oh My God, You Guys.

I have not laughed this effing hard in a long effing time.

http://fuckyoupenguin.blogspot.com

Theatre Thursdays

Welcome back to Theatre Thursdays. Today we're delving into postmodern theatre. Fun!

Heiner Müller is often considered one of the most groundbreaker 20th century playwrights, but I won't pretend to know a jot about him other than his seminal work: Hamletmachine. The book of the play, depending on translation and text size, is only about 6 pages long. Usually the play itself is about 2 1/2 hours long. Yes, that's correct: 2 1/2 hours. Müller was East German and he wrote this baby in 1977 or so, at the height (or depth) of East German oppression, politics, angst, etc. The characters are Hamlet and Ophelia, with a chorus including Gertrude, Claudius, etc. and so forth, though how many actors, who speaks which lines, etc., are all arguably up to the director. (I'm sure Müller would disagree with that statement, though.) The original German text contains, where in all caps, the ORIGINAL original lines in English. (Do you see what I mean? Even if you're seeing Hamletmachine in, say, Berlin or Paris, the lines in ALL CAPS are said in English, for they are from the canon of the Western dramatic world, Hamlet.)

I do wish you'd read the whole thing, because yanking out Ophelia's monologues loses something in translation... not to mention the entirety of what little narrative there is. Herewith, Ophelia's monologues, from Carl Weber's translation, my personal favorite:


2: The Europe of the Women

Enormous room. Ophelia. Her heart is a clock.

OPHELIA (CHORUS / HAMLET):

I am Ophelia. The one the river didn't keep. The woman dangling from the rope. The woman with her arteries cut open. The woman with the overdose. SHOW ON HER LIPS. The woman with her head in the gas stove. Yesterday I stopped killing myself. I'm alone with my breasts my thighs my womb. I smash the tools of my captivity, the chair the table the bed. I destroy the battlefield that was my home. I fling open the doors so the wind gets in and the scream of the world. I smash the window. With my bleeding hands I tear the photos of the men I loved and who used me on the bed on the table on the chair on the ground. I set fire to my prison. I throw my clothes into the fire. I wrench the clock that was my heart out of my breast. I walk into the street clothed in my blood.


5: Fiercely Enduring/Millenniums/In Fearful Armour

The deep sea. Ophelia in a wheelchair. Fish, debris, dead bodies, and limbs drift by.

OPHELIA:

While two men in white smocks wrap gauze around her and the wheelchair, from bottom to top.

This is Electra speaking. In the heart of darkness. Under the sun of torture. To the capitals of the world. In the name of the victims. I eject all the sperm I have received. I turn the milk of my breasts into lethal poison. I take back the world I gave birth to. I choke between my thighs the world I gave birth to. I bury it in my womb. Down with the happiness of submission. Long live hate and contempt, rebellion and death. When she walks through your bedrooms carrying butcher knives you'll know the truth.

The men exit. Ophelia remains on stage, motionless in her white wrappings.

Hamletmachine
Acts 2 and 5

Just Like That Episode Of Full House Where DJ Skips Meals

Over Thanksgiving week in Atlanta, I took a few spare minutes to be very sad for myself as I used to be. It was a good exercise, and not as self-indulgent as it sounds (not quite, anyway). My mom swears up and down that she is finally going to "do something" to my old bedroom, so I was tasked with setting aside whatever I didn't want chucked out or sent the way of the Goodwill. I didn't find much: a coin collection from my paternal grandparents' many travels and international homes; a Renaissance fair dress that cost me the entirety of my second-to-tenth-grades savings; an old book of Scandinavian fairy tales; plays; an astrology chart set; some old spell books (yes, you read that right: spell books).

During this excavation I came across high school pictures, which turned out to be a punch in the gut. What I couldn't get over was how fat I felt at that time. Here I was, looking at these images of my 14- to 18-year-old self, probably 105-115 lbs. and 5'1"-5'3", and I remember feeling fat when each of those pictures was taken. I thought I needed to lose weight for essentially my entire high school experience. Ridiculous. How sad to have wasted so much mental and emotional energy stressing over something that wasn't even true, and that I equated erroneously with "fixing" myself. Sad, sad, sad.

My eating disorder grew from a conviction that something was wrong with me. Plenty of girls (too many) go on diets and/or obsess about every new curve or dimple. Not all of those girls go on to develop disordered eating habits, let alone full-blown anorexia or bulimia (or both). Whatever invisible and silent divide there is between girls like I was (and am, to a certain extent) and girls who go on to say, "Eff you, buddy," to their sicker impulses: that's the Rubik's Cube of adolescent (and increasingly adult) psychology. And I'm sorry (I'm not), but I don't believe that divide has anything to do with "will power" or "choice" - regardless of which side a person inhabits. The puzzle is one of those "nature vs. nurture" or "nature, nurture et al." jumbles that shrinks may never suss out.

So while that whole mess remains a mystery, and since I've already expended so much time and energy in unraveling said mystery, I will go ahead and concentrate on enjoying what I have now. On not berating myself. On mentally giving the finger to everyone who won't STFU about diet, weight, blah blah blah. On immersing myself in reality and owning my weight and shape and health and curves the way they are now, or whenever. *cue maudlin sitcom music* And on forgiving myself allllllll the years of abuse I put myself through, both mentally and physically. *end maudlin sitcom music*

Aren't you glad that all of life's problems can be solved in a half hour or a blog post? Yeah, me too.

Just Keep Swimming

If it seems that my posts have been paltry lately, or few and far between, it's because they have been. I find I don't have much to say at the moment, and can't really justify posting for the sake of posting, hence Theatre Thursdays and bitching ad infinitum about the inanity of modern American grammar as practiced in the general population.

Part of the reason I haven't been writing much is that I started Cynical Nymph as an eating disorder recovery journal (interspersed with verbal diarrhea that my former therapists would tell me is all related to the e.d. anyway), and I've actually been doing remarkably well for the past three months, symptom-wise. So, I often feel there's not much to say on that front.

Note to self: It only took about 27 years, but I finally learned to spell "diarrhea" without having to think about it. I'm so proud.

Of course, there's still plenty to say. I'm at a point where it feels natural not to think about doing unnatural things (though I do keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, as it very well might). However, that hardly means that I am all confidence and body appreciation and self-worship over here. I'm doing my damnedest to re-train myself and my thoughts, as I spent 4 weeks in the early autumn practicing with others like myself. (Anyone in the NYC area looking for a great, unconventional e.d. support group, email me. Seriously.)

The holidays are tough. Part of this difficulty is self-fulfilling prophecy: anyone who knows about addictions even tangentially knows to be wary of relapse during the holiday season, so nerves are already on edge going in. Some of the grating-fingernails-on-a-chalkboard characteristic of the holidays is also (I think) due to the fact that they're a memorable time of year. With an eating disorder, you can remember (trust me) exactly what you looked like, felt like, fit into, didn't fit into, ate, drank, and accomplished for the previous holidays of your illness, whatever its length. I, for instance, am trying really, really hard - wading through sludge up to your waist hard - to remind myself that not only am I not anorexic* anymore, I'm also not 18 or 21 anymore, so why on Earth should I be shaped like an 18- or 21-year-old? It bears repeating (and repeating, and repeating) to myself that, "Who cares if I don't fit into blah, or have a waist measurement of blah, or have a different, larger curve to my blah blah?" My head feels like a broken record a lot of the time with the, "I am behaving naturally and healthily," and the, "my body is how it wants to be," and the, "I look great. I'm the chubbiest woman in my husband's family. I look great. I look like a cow. I look great." Very often I feel like a hamster on a wheel. But, you know, without burning the calories. Or maybe like Dory in Finding Nemo. "Just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimming swimming swimming!" Ooh, now I want to watch Finding Nemo. What a kickass movie.

Happy Holidays. Be good to yourself. Just keep swimming. ^_^

*Not sure how to classify myself in terms of bulimia. Having been without symptoms for 3 months, I do believe that I can't be clinically classified at this point in time as having bulimia nervosa. So, ha ha ha, I'm cured! Someone tell BlueCross BlueShield! Oh, wait...

Theatre Thursdays

Welcome back to Theatre Thursdays. I was hoping to make it a few more weeks without using Shakespeare, but who are we kidding? He refuses to be shirked for too long, and three weeks is too long.

Ah, the Percy family. Gotta love 'em. They ended up on utterly the wrong side of history, yet they have the appeal of winners because they're so... zesty. Specifically, you gotta love Lady Percy, who really knows how to play what Tranny Head might call the green beans card. Her asshat husband has been ignoring her for two weeks straight while he gets up to some rebellious antics with her brother (not a euphemism). So not only is this gal not getting laid, which is basically her only power play in Renaissance England, she's also being kept out of all the fun civil war plans just because she has ovaries.

"Nuh-uh," is her take on that, "I'm a Mortimer [another feisty ancient family on the wrong side of the Wars of the Roses], and I won't take your shite. You are gonna tell me what's up, or else." So here, she butters him up but good by using the only weapon she has: green beans... and by surreptitiously calling him a little girly man for having bad dreams.

Oh, and later in the scene she threatens to break his dick off. This betty is pure pep.


LADY PERCY: O my good lord, why are you thus alone?
For what offense have I this fortnight been
A banished woman from my Harry's bed?
Tell me, sweet lord, what is't that takes from thee
Thy stomach, pleasure, and thy golden sleep?
Why dost thou bend thine eyes upon the earth,
And start so often when thou sit'st alone?
Why hast thou lost the fresh blood in thy cheeks
And given my treasures and my rights of thee
To thick-eyed musing and cursed melancholy?
In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watched,
And heard thee murmur tales of iron wars,
Speak terms of manage to thy bounding steed,
Cry 'Courage! to the field!' And thou hast talked
Of sallies and retires, of trenches, tents,
Of palisadoes, frontiers, parapets,
Of basilisks, of cannon, culverin,
Of prisoners' ransom, and of soldiers slain,
And all the currents of a heady fight.
Thy spirit within thee hath been so at war,
And thus hath so bestirred thee in thy sleep,
That beads of sweat have stood upon thy brow
Like bubbles in a late-disturbèd stream,
And in thy face strange motions have appeared,
Such as we see when men restrain their breath
On some great sudden hest. O, what portents are these?
Some heavy business hath my lord in hand,
And I must know it, else he loves me not.

Henry IV, part 1
Act II, scene iv