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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91076962387850622032017-03-25T10:16:00.178-04:00A Natural UnfoldingThere's always been TV, Beavis. There's just more channels now.Gabyhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9107696238785062203.post-77192713984114375312016-08-06T01:15:00.000-04:002016-09-02T16:12:30.499-04:00Scaredy Cat, or Brelpuff and Me

We had been living together for a few months when my husband insisted on adopting cats. I knew this day would come, though I had been putting off the issue. I married a crazy cat lady in the form of a young man. Fusion, as my husband likes to be called on the internet, had been cat sitting since his teens. He regularly watched cat videos on Youtube, and knew all the Japanese names of his favorite felines.
I was a bit hesitant because I have never lived with pets, besides the dog that barked in my face when I was four and made me cry. The best I could do in the days before I knew Fusion was to allow my landlady's three cats to come in and out of my room. (One named Papageno liked to remove the chicken cutlets from my sandwiches and eat them. He had to be fed in the closet so he could not steal food from the other two cats.) I got comfortable enough that I was willing to live with a few of these creatures, knowing that my cat whisperer beau would be able to take care of them.
Soon Fusion brought a cat back from the adoption shelter near our apartment. Her name was Jackie. She was a dilute calico with gray, brown, and reddish patches of fur, beautifully plump, with searching eyes. We offset her fur with a sparkling purple collar and bow tie. She was comfortable with Fusion and me from the start, happy to be pet, especially on the top of her head, and she enjoyed staring out the window, or as we called it, "watching TV." She would sit on the bed and allow me and my husband to use her body as a foot rest. She quickly became part of our household.
But we were expecting another cat. I was so comfortable with one that I was hesitant to add another. Why not just leave things this way? But the deed was already done. The reason we didn't have the cat yet was because this cat was so skiddish that no one at the adoption shelter could catch him.
Two weeks later, Puff arrived. He was a long and slender Egyptian Mau, black and brown. His skiddishness was at first replaced by fear-induced paralysis. His heart raced in his scrawny chest as Fusion put on his skull and bones collar and plaid bow tie. After that, it became impossible to touch him.
Perhaps I was premature in re-naming him Brelpuff after one of my favorite musicians, Belgian singer and songwriter Jacques Brel. Brel has always been known not only for his great music and lyrics, but also for his sense of adventure, for buying his own Polynesian island and flying a plane around it. I have one of the latest biographies of Brel and it is named for one of his songs: "the adventure starts at dawn." I have long admired the courage of the small buck-toothed Belgian and relished my opportunity to name a pet after him.
And yet even looking in Brelpuff's direction seemed to make him nervous. He would stare back at me with intent eyes. If I even leaned toward him, he would dart the other way. He is difficult to find in the apartment because he finds secret spaces to hide in and he is there for hours. A family friend, who ran the adoption shelter when these cats were there, spent a long weekend feeding our cats, and he did not see this cat more than once. The cat has a patch of hair on his back that is thinner than the rest of his coat. We think he bites his hair out due to fear.
It has been over three years since Brelpuff has been living with us. Little has changed. He still runs away if I lean in too far and won't eat if I move toward him. He still has that thin patch of hair. He is still scared of everything and everyone. The difference is that he is more open to being pet, at least by Fusion. He squirms in some mysterious combination of fear and delight as my husband rubs his back and bottom.
But what is remarkable about this cat is that he seems to have no memory. As far as I can tell, he does not retain information, or learn anything. My husband and I have spent three years proving to him that we do not want to hurt him. He watches Jackie, who regularly licks him clean, sit for long petting periods. He eats our food and treats each day. But every moment is new. Each time I get up from the toilet or move from the hall to the bathroom he bolts away from me as if I were coming to attack him. Each time I lean in his direction, however gently, his head darts backwards. He lives in a permanent state of responding to perceived, and nonexistent threat. This strikes me as a strangely futile way to live.
My husband rejoices in Brelpuff. "Look how much more comfortable he is!" Fusion tells me. I don't see it. I see an idiot. I see a cat who can't learn, can't be at ease, and can't cuddle me. I see a cat who can't even leave his coat unharmed. I don't know what kind of trauma he experienced before ending up at the adoption shelter where Fusion found him, but what does he think will happen to him in my messy little uptown apartment? Aren't animals supposed to respond to their conditions, to the kindness (and feedings) of their owners? I had a neighbor who seemed to hate me because he and my husband fought about the loudness of his music. He told me that he considers Fusion to be a "pain in the ass." Even so, I just couldn't hate the guy. He seemed nice. I would always say hello to him, and he would pointedly look the other way and sigh. I was undeterred. Over the weeks, months, years, I kept saying hi to him. Now he replies enthusiastically with a care-free "hey baby!" My response to him changed his response to me. This is exactly what does not happen with my cat.
I've been taught to seek improvement. My mother has a post-it note by her desk that reads, "every day in every way I am getting better and better." Her basement studio, where she teaches music, has posters on the wall with beautiful nature scenes and quotations about change and growth. She has biographies of famous musicians on her shelves and loans out their CDs to her students. I've made it through high school, college, and some graduate school. I've passed a comprehensive exam, a qualifying exam, and an oral exam. I got a new degree recently. Even if it is slow and challenging, there is supposed to be motion, forward and upward. Life, I once learned, is supposed to be like walking up the steps to the Met; the journey is a pilgrimage, and the sacred destination -- art, culture, an idea of excellence -- is the summit. The bottom is worthwhile only because the top exists.
And yet my cat exists, acting only on his drives of fear and hunger. Can I love this being who resists progress, who responds largely to his most primitive instincts? Can he be this way and still be lovable? Can he be this way and still love me? For the more I live with this cat, the more I realize that I am living with myself. Whatever goals I have for myself, I am still an instinctual being. I call Chinese takeout or go to the local bodega when I'm hungry. I startle whenever I hear the doorbell. My response to most of life is a Dorothy Parker quote: "what fresh hell is this?"
I struggle to love the Brelpuff inside myself. I resent my instincts and loathe my imperfections. Sometimes I think that I deserve to die if I make a big enough mistake. But I would never want to hurt Brelpuff. As frustrating as it can be to live with him, and to encounter myself in him, it is my instinct, too, to care about his tender sentience. I push the food bowl over to him to make sure he eats something. I sit there and watch him eat so he doesn't startle and run away before he's had his meal. He has become kind to our new kittens and he lets Jackie take care of him. His body is soft. His eyes are big and deep. My husband and I smile in his direction and call him "the boy." There is something in him that cannot be denied. He has his own flavor of existing.
Sometimes I want to give up on existing. If I have a bad day and my schedule is not too crowded afterwards, I give myself some time away from life. I lounge on the bed. I stretch. I yawn. I get food. I lick my wounds. I get clean. I feel my body -- heavy, wet, pleasant -- in the bath tub. Then the bathroom door opens a crack. Brelpuff slithers in. He juts his head out and opens his eyes wide when he hears a sound. He raises his front legs so that they touch the top of the tub. He peers into the water near my feet. I wonder what he is interested in. I try to stay still, but eventually I move my legs. He races out of the room.
It is just another day.

Gabyhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9107696238785062203.post-52193608052114520432014-12-04T03:29:00.000-05:002014-12-04T03:29:08.321-05:00Dr. Phil's Diet Bullshit ExtravaganzaI have decided to do this as a "live blog" of sorts. I will blog about Dr. Ridiculous as I go through the episode. Since it's on youtube, I will be able to pause the episode to elaborate on certain moments, so in that sense it's not exactly a live blog, but basically I'm writing as I go. This is because weight loss shows are too painful for me to watch more than once without my non-fascist fat positive interventions. If I had my academic shoes on, I would probably watch it at least once all the way through before going back to key moments. I would also organize my critique coherently. Fuck that.

Dr. Phil's weight loss episode starts with some strange imagery. As women's submissions are shown, where the women ask Dr. Phil for weight loss help, there are spotlights next to the women and then fireworks in the background. Where do they come up with these things? Weight loss is so great we need lights and fireworks to prove it? It's clear that these connections, between weight loss and celebrating in the spotlight, are as arbitrary as they could possibly be.

And part of what is so unfortunate here is that all the women look great. I have to tread lightly here. Ultimately, how the women look doesn't matter. Everybody's appearance deserves to be appreciated and everybody deserves to be approached as more than the sum of their external physical traits and fashion choices. It wouldn't matter if these women looked like really spooky aliens. Spooky aliens are awesome and don't need Dr. Jerkwad to insult them and guilt them into changing their appearance. This is the, "oh, you look good because you're not so fat" argument as if being "so fat" were a physical and moral problem. No. I don't accept the "you're not that fat" bull. Fat is awesome as I know from my own experience with it.

However, I think it's worth pointing out that to me these women all look really good. Their stomachs are nice. Their faces are pleasant, their shirts pretty. They do not resemble spooky aliens as cool as that would be. They look like other women. Their stomachs are bigger than some and smaller than others. Why would that make them look ugly or be in need of help? This is what fat activism and fat acceptance can do for us. Because I'm passionate about celebrating diversity in body size, because I practice appreciating the goodness of my own body, and because I try to expose myself to fat positive blogs, books, and tumblrs, I've been able to open my eyes somewhat. I can now see with little effort that fat doesn't equal ugly and these women look great just as they are. I see zero problems. That's how I've been bucking the tide with the help of some amazing fat activists and friends out there. I'm not saying this to brag. I still struggle at times. Sometimes I catch myself having attitudes about fellow fatties that I don't like. And when that happens I reflect on the fact that like everyone in our culture I have internalized fatphobia. But I can identify it, not believe in it, and choose to appreciate that person's body, or, if that is too hard in the moment, I can at least hold the attention to value how all bodies manifest in the world. I can catch my assumptions and I can choose a different path. Over time this changes how I see. And I am fortunate to be young in the midst of this movement and to have people who have come before me who have changed how they see.

So because I can see fat as beautiful and morally neutral instead of ugly and morally terrible, I can pick up on the sadness here. There is no reason for these women to be opining to the evil doctor, but they are so caught up in fatphobia themselves that they can't help it. They really think this guy can and should help them change something. They judge their own appearance and then put it out there as something that needs to be fixed like a broken car. They're not broken cars. They're living beings and they count, too. I wish they knew that.

Then Dr. Phil asks the crowd (and the home viewer), "are you like them?" to which the studio audience replies with a resounding "yes!" I assume they were prompted. Apparently we are all supposed to identify with these supposedly pathological women and want to change our bodies. It doesn't even matter what we look like. Dr. Yuck is basically saying that we should all change. Weight loss ideology acts as if "fat" women need to become "thin" and then they can "stop" dieting and be "fine," as if weight loss were a finite project you could put in your planner. Lose 50 pounds forever. Check! But the system is devised for women in particular but for men as well to always feel inadequate about what they weigh, never to stop attempting change, simply to see themselves as unsatisfactory no matter what. Diet culture pretends to say one thing -- weigh x number of pounds and you'll be good enough -- but really says something else, something even worse. To reiterate, diet culture really communicates that you are never thin or beautiful enough, that you never look adequate, that you always need what Dr. Douche calls "a changing day in your life." Diet culture pretends that it gives you the secret to happiness in order to keep you perpetually unhappy. It is like a mirage in the desert. It seems to promise you that there is a beautiful place to get to, but that place is never there because it was an illusion from the beginning.

Dr. Difficult points out that the audience in total has tried and failed 2,000 diets. This could be because diets don't work. But apparently this one is different. Hmmm...

Then a video package introduces two chatty Southern schoolteachers, Candy and Lyndsey, who gain and lose weight together. They are the Abbott and Costello of self-loathing. One says, "I can tell you my problem in three words: I am fat." These apparently terrible words flash on the screen as the soundtrack gives a resounding bang for each word. Guess what, readers. I can tell you one of many joyous aspects of my life. I am fat. There! I said it! Not seeing the problem. The problem I do see, however, is that these women act so delighted to put themselves down. They are shown going out to eat together. (Of course! Because only women with weight problems do that!) "You could go ahead and put that bread right on my ass," says Candy. Bread is tasty. Large asses are lovely. It's a shame she speaks so disparagingly about two of my favorite things in the world. Incidentally, and I'm not completely sure this is true, I've learned from modeling shows that male models put pieces of bread against their penises to get a nice shape for underwear modeling. In this case, having bread relatively close to your ass, against your genitals, is considered flattering. But you don't see men at the table getting lunch and saying, "I hope this will go on my penis so I look great in my next underwear commercial." If only.

The women order food, how dare they, and what they order is listed on the screen in red. God forbid! The women get zucchini, mozzarella, and calamari. *gasp* Now I would understand the shaming if it were around chocolate or steak, but those are not conventionally "harmful" dishes. You can talk about not having too much cheese and the perils of calamari being fried, but if a person of a different size ordered those things would you bat an eye? Then the women really sin by agreeing with the waiter who encourages them to get the house special ranch dressing. The fact that he suggested it doesn't seem to matter. One of the women says, "we never turn down ranch dressing!" putting the emphasis on her self-loathing and her normalizing of it, not allowing any consideration of the role of restaurants in diet culture, the capitalist cycle of overselling the food that is supposedly shameful to eat, driving up cravings and profits. This is not to call restaurants evil. I enjoy them a lot. I just think that it is worth being aware of their role in a larger profit-driven system. This show, and diet culture more broadly, pretends that if the women simply "ate virtuously" there would be no problems with things as they currently are. This blaming, including self-blaming, of the (often female) fat person prevents everyone from being able to see larger systemic flaws and from working toward changing that system. As a shockingly perfect example of this, my youtube video of Dr. Dummy was interrupted by a multiple choice question that asked me, "which restaurant would you prefer eating at?" and listed Chili's Applebee's, Olive Garden, and Outback Steakhouse. You see, there is no question that these things are linked. It is not the women's fault. There is not even a problem with their bodies for them to be at fault over.

One of the women says that her boobs are the size of basketballs and her ass is the size of Montana. Again, I don't see a problem with this. The issue is how strong her self-loathing is, how she makes it a sport. She seems to revel in it. It's like she's going hunting and she's the prey getting shot over and over again. It is amazing how mean women are encouraged to be toward themselves (and toward other women) and then they're supposed to laugh as if they're having a great time. It is really the strangest thing when you think about it. Both women are doing the classic self-shaming fatty move of wearing large, baggy shirts. I grew up learning to do this and there are people I know deeply immersed in diet culture who continue to do this. The idea is that stomach fat supposedly looks terrible. Its lovely, sensual roundness should supposedly be banished rather than appropriately adored. Therefore, the story goes, shirts need to camouflage fat instead of showing it off it proudly. Candy and Lyndsey's shirts are pretty colors, both women look nice, but as someone who has been through this racket (as in any woman 8 years of age or older, sadly), I know that the shame is pouring off of them. For some reason thin women are encouraged to wear tight clothes, perhaps to show off the curves and flesh that they don't have. Then women who are fortunate enough to have luscious breasts and beautiful fat rolls are encouraged to dress "tastefully" like nicely colored paper bags.

Dr. Doofus stresses that the women hide behind humor and the women are quick to agree. Well guess what. I disagree. I think the insidiousness of diet culture is behind their humor. Humor is the acceptable way to self-flagellate and self-shaming is the only way in which women are allowed to be fat. There is a reason Dr. Douchecanoe and his staff of evil minions has led the show with these women. Their self-hatred is entertaining. They normalize their self-loathing and our culture's disregard for the humanity of fat people by making it look pretty. It is everyone else -- the diet companies, advertisers, restaurants, gyms, the supposed saviors, the uncompromising fitness gurus who pretend to preach self-love and tell you to lose half your body mass -- it is they who hide behind the humor of these women. The women do not hide behind humor; they are clearly suffering. They are suffering for an ableist, classist, racist, misogynist patriarchy that returns their favor with more blame. This is what obedience gets you, apparently. And Dr. Phil does immediately return the favor. After we hear about how these women have suffered at the hands of a fat-hating culture -- one of them was anorexic, the other was taunted mercilessly by sorority sisters -- Dr. Doom tells them that they have internalized the mean messages that they were told and are now torturing themselves. "They were makin' fun of you and you started makin' fun of you and you never quit" he says. He says that they have "a bad internal dialogue" and "cheat everyone in their life [sic]."

Now, I agree that they have internalized negative messages about themselves from people who were unfair to them. But what this means is that they deserve supportive, not-Dr-Phil therapists who help them see through that meanness and embrace themselves as they are. The point is to combat the messages, not to lose weight. In a context that supports weight loss, however, Dr. Philistine's point is yet another way of blaming the women. The "doctor" is basically saying that the women in question have made themselves fat by believing people who said mean things to them. As if they have that much control over their internal dialogue, as if they don't respond to the ways in which they have been mistreated by learning those thought patterns, just like everyone else. Because of their "bad internal dialogue" -- notice how their internal world is being judged even though he never disagrees with any of their self-shaming statements -- they are being mean to the people around them, they are "cheating" innocent, probably thin people. And thin people need to be treated well until they become fat! Then they should be chewed up and spit out on national television, or so it would seem.

I would also like to point out that Dr. Philthy treats these two women, Candy and Lyndsey, as if they were the same person. Candy had an eating disorder but he says to both of them that they started making fun of themselves and never quit. Blaming a woman's eating disorder on the mean things she says to herself (partially unconsciously, mostly uncontrollably, and approved of by society) is a deeply offensive trivialization of anorexia. I do not know a lot about anorexia, but I know that people who struggle in this way deserve a much more reasonable and compassionate treatment than Dr. Phil is giving them here. But apparently if they read his new 20/20 book they can turn it all around. Thank goodness!

The next story is much more upsetting. A woman named Kate is so ashamed of her weight that she is endlessly postponing her wedding and feels that she does not deserve her husband's love. Let me briefly remind you that I was a proud wide bride this summer. At no point before or during my wedding did I feel any guilt or even discomfort about my weight. I chose, and partially created, an unconventional outfit I loved and felt great in. More importantly, I married the love of my life. Fat love is possible, people! So Kate is trapped in a prison that the bridal industry does a lot to build.

Dr. Phil addresses Kate's suffering at the hands of diet culture and the bridal industry by asking her, while she's crying, "how did you get this way?" I sure that Phil learned during his doctoral program that pathologizing people is really therapeutic. He even hands her a tissue to dry her tears. He announces her height, weight, and BMI, telling her that she is in the morbidly obese category. The fact that she gives him approval to do this before he says it does not make it any less appalling in its objectification of her. All you need to do is watch Martha Rosler's "Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained" to have a sense of this. Dr. Doofus then says exactly what was implied in the previous segment: he tells Kate, "if you had this negative internal dialogue, you generate the results you believe you deserve, and you know that to be true." You see, it's all her fault! And blaming her for everything she doesn't like in her life really helps her! If we blame fat people enough they'll lose weight! Life is so simple when the bald mustache man is guiding you through it.

"People are not overweight because of eating" Dr. Unethical explains, "people are overweight because they abuse food." How dare they! We fatties apparently mistreat ourselves, our spouses, our children by weighing more than some arbitrary standard, and to top it all off, we're even cruel to the very food we put in our bodies! He adds, "you gotta get your mind right and we gotta heal your feelings." This statement implies that people who are within a certain weight bracket have "right" minds, whatever that means, and healed feelings. All thin people are sane, smart and completely healed from any trauma that they have ever been through. That is why our society is such a happy, healthy place. That is why policemen who are not stigmatized for their weight are so kind and intelligent at work that they shoot innocent people, put them in choke holds, and sit on them until they die at the hospital. Right minds and healing feelings at work.

You see, I agree with Kate and Dr. Annoying that we bring distorted mental patterns and unresolved feelings to food and we eat more or less than our bodies need because of that. But those mental patterns and those painful feelings need to be approached with the support of a compassionate and qualified therapist. Somehow we have this naive collective belief that if we change our appearance and have less body mass our inner life will follow suit. There is no reason that would be true. From this perspective, diet culture is about a collective denial of pain. Instead of finding effective ways to work with our pain, to come to terms with our lives and our histories, we distract ourselves with weight loss projects. We can distract ourselves with food, too, or with the internet (my amazing blogging is exempt from all faults, though), or emails or sex or even graduate work, trust me, but the only way to deal with these things is to bring compassion, skill, tenderness, and more compassion to those tough places, to work on these things over time and try, as hard as it may be, to be patient with the delicate healing process. The way to approach our wounding is to approach our wounding, not to create even more pain by stigmatizing people of certain body sizes.

Dr. Witless finishes Kate's segment and cuts to a commercial break. He says something pretty scary to the audience: "be thinking about where and when you have heard somebody say something to you or about you that stuck with you." This is incredibly vague. Later he talks about mean comments again, but he still seems to see weight loss as a solution to other people being mean about weight. (Just ponder how little sense that makes.) I think his ambiguity sends another message. He is actually saying: "audience, remember when someone has shamed you about your weight either to your face or behind your back, both of which are unacceptable but I'm absolutely fine with it. These shaming statements stuck with you not because meanness hurts and we should change the dialogue around weight in this country and beyond but because, as a TV therapist I totally support shaming as a viable approach to strengthening mental health. In fact, I engage in it myself -- that's what this whole show is! But I'm a white guy in patriarchy so I'm beyond reproach. You should listen to those people and lose weight to please them, and to please me. You should bend for other people and constantly worry about how they judge your body. That's how you keep your mind right and heal your feelings." Okay, buddy, I'll get right to it...

Then Dr. Dastardly has some "success stories" from his 20/20 diet test group. A woman and a man talk about how much they love the diet. This segment stresses portion control. They say that in "phase 1" they eat much smaller portions than they are used to but learn to savor the food more. What is interesting is that Dr. Numnuts seems to encourage people to apply his prescribe plan to all of their eating instead of listening to their bodies. They are supposed to go through phrases where they eat portions he has chosen in advance. They are supposed to eat 20 foods he has chosen over 20 days. They are supposed to combine those foods in particular ways. Well, what happens when they stop doing that? They'll gain the weight back of course and maybe gain more. It happens a lot with diets. But for some (promotional) reason the "doctor" guarantees that you won't gain weight back on this diet. Ha! I've heard that before!

There is one more story. A girl named Nicole used to do body building to such a degree that he had to put vaseline on her lips to help her smile. After that she gained 60 pounds. The body goes from starving itself to eating heavily in compensation. It's natural. The "doctor" promises Nicole that in a matter of weeks on his diet she can "return to health." Who said she was unhealthy at her current weight? She certainly needs healing around food, as we all do, frankly, but there is nothing to "prove" that her physical health is in jeopardy at her weight. If she has health problems, there are many ways to approach them that are not weight dependent. Unlike with Kate, treated the worst because she's the heaviest, her height, weight and BMI are not coldly rattled off. So there is no way for anyone to claim that her weight causes her health problems, and even if it did, she is still a worthy human as she is who does not deserve to be shamed. As Ragen Chastain beautifully says, body size is not a barometer for worthiness.

There is still more to say, but I am dismayed and worn out. Dr. Douche is not going to dominate my life. I do think it would be worthwhile if someone bought this 20/20 book and deconstructed its method, explaining its false assumptions. I am not science-oriented enough to go into these kind of details. My focus here has been on deconstructing ideologies, not on dealing with statistics. In conclusion, both Dr. Phil and our diet-obsessed culture in general are absolutely unconscionable. There is no justification for the distortions, shaming and cruelty that weight loss culture promotes. It claims to be the solution to the problems it perpetuates. We don't have to be trapped in cruelty and ignorance. It can be really tough, but we can be free.

During this writing I have been thinking about a story commonly told in Buddhist circles. There used to be a large animal (I don't remember if it was a lion or tiger) at the Washington zoo that had spent most of her life in a cage. When she was given a better environment to be in, she continued to pace the length of her cage until she died. She was so accustomed to suffering that she couldn't see her increased freedom. Another Buddhist story reaches the same conclusion. A monk once asked his students, "is the rock heavy?" They all said yes. He said, "no. The rock is not heavy if you don't pick it up." Freedom is closer than we think. We are all being treated like Ingrid Bergman in the movie Gaslight. The things her husband claims are happening -- that she forgets where she puts a letter, that she hears sounds that aren't there, etc. -- are actually not. They are designed to make her go insane so he can rummage through the attic and steal her jewels without her being able to object.

We don't need to be victims of gaslighting. We don't need to stay in the imaginary cage or pick up the heavy, pointless boulders of the diet and weight loss industries. Whatever analogy we prefer, we can be free, and freedom is actually right here. Bodies in their diversity are here, and they are all great. They are limited and do not represent everything about us, but they also have wonderful things to recommend them, like keeping us alive, giving us pleasure, allowing us to get from place to place, and giving us a way of experiencing the world. All bodies are here to be loved. If we directed more energy to that love and less to weight loss products and ideologies, we would be too busy loving each other to care about what anyone weighs. Diet books would grow moldy as we would all hug and dance and jiggle together. That's the kind of world I want to live in. And I think that world is there to be experienced. We just need to put down our boulders and walk out of our imaginary cages toward the sun, toward the big, wide, hot, fat sun.Gabyhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9107696238785062203.post-38287435748624388022014-12-03T10:45:00.001-05:002014-12-03T16:33:50.333-05:00Preamble: Dr Phil Just did a Weight-Loss Episode and It Is Not OkayIn my academic life, there are certain things I go for. I like to be somewhat off the beaten path in my arguments, and I like to be at least somewhat subtle and open to the ambiguity of my subject. I like things that are transitional, ambivalent, doubting. I try to describe the complexity of something while still making a strong argument. This is not so easy but I think I do okay most of the time. And I feel at my most liberated and creative when I don't distinguish between high and low, when I take "Beavis and Butthead" or "The $64,000 Question" as seriously as I take (neo-)avant-garde artistic production from Rauschenberg and Whitman's contributions to "Nine Evenings in Art and Engineering" to Magritte paintings to performance and video art to Bresson films (a stark modernist pleasure of mine). I am not interested in condemning "crappy" TV for being TV, which is still a surprisingly popular thing to do academically, even though television studies is also a fairly big thing these days.

However, for this post, most of what I wrote is going out the window. My academic shoes are being replaced by activist shoes. (I don't wear hats but have loads of different colored sneakers, so I thought writing shoes would be more appropriate. I have an Adidas shoe addiction. I love those 3 stripes.) Even though I think it can get curmudgeonly, cultural critique is an incredibly important and powerful tool because our late capitalist culture does present a lot of bullshit in very convincing ways. To be thoughtful and free one needs to see through it.

Cultural critique at its best is like the sword of Manjushri, the bodhissatva of wisdom, as it cuts through elegantly presented delusion. As I discussed in a previous post, ideology tends to be presented as fact. It's naturalized. French theorists like Barthes, Althusser and Foucault (everybody's fave apparently, though I like Barthes better) point to the ways in which ideology masks itself as an apparent truth. Of course it's "bad" to be fat, right? (No!) Someone recently wrote sarcastically on my wall questioning why I would be critical of weight loss promotion and incredulously asked if fat could really be beautiful. The thought! This person has been unfriended and the comment has been deleted.

Hating the kind of body I have is absolutely not okay with me. There is no way for me to emphasize this enough but writing it in bold on my blog is a start. I don't permit fat hating on my Facebook wall or in my life. So it takes some work, often valuable and satisfying work, to see through that, to wield Manjushri's theory sword. And that is what I intend to do here.

For while I enjoy seeing issues from multiple angles, there are things I'm sure of. Weight-loss ideology is crap. It's about keeping people down, particularly women, and encouraging them to buy products they don't need. It is capitalism operating at the expense of happiness, which, sadly, is nothing new. Our culture is bigoted against fat people and this needs to end.

It is difficult to shift this tide, and so I don't think there is any need to be ambiguous here: all bodies are acceptable and wonderful as they are and weight-loss bullshit like diet books and TV shows should all end. There should be no reason to oppress yourself, to decide that you need to lose some weight to be acceptable, that you should work on being "moderate" or "good." The way to approach food "moderately" is to tune in to your body's intuition without judgment, and this is precisely what weight loss culture makes impossible. Having been through the diet racket, this is still hard for me. But there are amazing fat activist and fat acceptance communities out there that help make this possible. I am so privileged (in a good way!) to be part of these groups. I have amazing online conversations with fellow proud fatties all the time. It is really special and absolutely enriches my life. I also have a really sweet and wonderful husband who supports my fat activism.

What does not enrich my life, however, is Dr. Phil shilling his latest weight loss book. (How's that for a segue?) There is no doubt in my mind that this guy is full of shit and that he is an embodiment of patriarchy promoting not only its values but more insidiously, its penchant for shaming people into submission. I am fascinated by the bald mustachioed man I like to call Dr. Fuckface, but my fascination turns to indignation when he hops on the weight loss train. That is why I am devoting my next blog entry to tearing apart the weight loss episode that aired on television yesterday and is now on youtube. Diet culture is not okay with me. No promotion of it is okay with me. So I am going to go through the episode and write about everything I feel is wrong with it. I will also provide links to amazing fat activists who argue against weight loss in ways that are tougher for me. I am not science-minded. I'm a humanities brain. So if you want statistics and studies on why weight loss is shit and deconstructions of studies that supposedly support weight loss, there are other people to read. Like Ragen Chastain, Lucy Aphramor, Linda Bacon, and Angela Meadows. I'm doing links later but just look up these bold amazing women.

I have to go out now, but stay tuned. I'm hoping to deconstruct Dr. Fuckface later today when I get back.Gabyhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9107696238785062203.post-2539543240903281542014-11-24T00:43:00.000-05:002014-11-24T01:19:47.986-05:00Diet Culture, Shark Tank and the Cold War, or, Just Eat the CookieOh no!

I wasn't sure it was possible, but Shark Tank has reached a new low. And yet, it is a revealing low, one that deserves some critical attention and analysis.

On Shark Tank, entrepreneurs pitch their products to a panel of "shark" investors, hoping to get a certain amount of money and the investor's expertise in exchange for giving the shark a percentage of their company's profits. With its combination of television spectacle, dramatic bargaining, and over-the-top infomercial-esque product presentations, Shark Tank is explicit about the connection between contemporary media, claims about "reality" (it is billed as a "reality show"), and the condition of late capitalism. In this sense, Shark Tank can be seen as a perfect show, because it is so much more open about the relationship between television and capital than any other show on the air. The Voice, for instance, markets a certain image of pop music and sells iTunes singles of its latest songs, but it is less obvious to see its selling behind its rhetoric about artists expressing themselves for the supposed purity of the act. (And indeed that's the point.)

Shark Tank is less ashamed of itself. It is the proud descendant of the earliest TV programming where the 1950s and 1960s camera lovingly focuses on the sponsor's name and/or logo -- Geritol tonic for instance (said to help "tired blood," whatever that is), or Hazel Bishop cosmetics, among others. On postwar TV, the focus would ostensibly be somewhere else. The set of a quiz show or a biography show like "This is Your Life" would have a strategically placed logo on it, and the sponsor would be mentioned several times, but this would be presented as an aside. In some cases, the disjunction between the products featured the show and the theme of the show reached morbidly humorous heights. On "This is Your Life," celebrated citizens would receive either charm bracelets or gold cuff links (gender specific, of course) from Marshall's Jewelers, even Hana Bloch Kohner, profiled in 1953 as a Holocaust survivor. (I love TV.) The extent to which sponsors effected the show -- the knowledge, for instance, that the Revsons of Revlon Cosmetics had substantial say over which contestants were kept or sacked from the quiz show "The $64,000 Question" for instance -- was carefully kept hidden until the late 1950s quiz show scandals made it to the Supreme Court. (Oh God, they're rigged!!!) Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz did shill for Philip Morris, and their animated images were used in Philip Morris commercials between segments of the show, but a distinction was still made between the cigarettes on the one hand and the show on the other. In the image below, What's My Line? may have been shilling Kellogg's in 1961, but the product display and the blindfolded contests do not seem related.

Shark Tank takes shots of sponsor's products, combines them with late night infomercials, and the business-related suspense and judgment of its reality predecessor, The Apprentice, and turns it all into a show where distinctions between television programming and product placement have completely eroded. The show takes on a meta dimension where viewers at home figuratively occupy the same space as the investor shark judging panel -- we get to decide how well products are presented (with Kantian disinterest?) and if their creators deserve help to make these products easier to buy. Product selling is acknowledged as an art that can be judged, though it is interesting to note that when artists and entertainers come to the tank wanting backing for their latest project, they are nearly always rejected.

Since I am not a depressed Adornian or Debordian decrying the ascendancy of the culture industry or criticizing the ways in which our lives are "colonized" by spectacle, I am usually not upset by this show. It makes connections clear. It's a humorously perverse theater of (the cruelty of) the object where investor Kevin O'Leary makes stereotypically cold-blooded capitalist statements (I don't care if it's useful as long as it can sell, you're dead to me) and is at least the most straightforward of the panel of five. Typically I get a kick out of this show. But the show reached a new nadir when it marketed an insidious project that champions weight loss. As a fat activist, I can't sit by. Shark Tank: this sucks.

On the latest episode, Ryan Tseng and the absurdly enthusiastic, fist pumping David Krippendorf peddle a product called "Kitchen Safe," a container that can be locked for a specific period of time. The safe is supposed to prevent you or your children from accessing "unhealthy snacks" for a set duration. Tseng and Krippendorf boast that the system has no overrides. There is nothing anyone can do to open the safe if it is locked! The Kitchen Safe is marketed as a "commitment device" that helps you in your challenging yet noble quest to behave with willpower and self-control.

Ryan Tseng calls it "fun, effective, and easy to use." Guest shark, GoPro CEO Nick Woodman, feels that this product satisfies a consumer need. After Kevin O'Leary repeatedly calls the safe "a piece of crap" -- there is a reason he is nicknamed Mr. Wonderful, after all -- Krippendorf adamantly disagrees. He feels this producing is about "helping people out" which is more important than its (also admittedly important) money-making potential. Several sharks immediately praise Krippendorf for his "passion." "I've seen a lot of people who are overweight," Krippendorf intones as sad music plays softly,

"and it's hard. It's hard to have that temptation around your house every day. We used to buy a thing of ice cream, and we'd eat half of it and then I'd throw it away because if it was there I would eat it...We deal with the customer emails all the time and when someone's like, 'thank you, I've been looking for this for ten years, I've finally found something that makes a difference,' that keeps me going."

QVC shark Lori Greiner is "touched" that Tseng has been crying during Krippendorf's impassioned speech. Woodman calls them a "strong team." By the end of the negotiations, the Kitchen Safe men accept an offer from Lori Greiner and Nick Woodman who offer them $100,000 in exchange for a 20% stake in the company. Greiner says to them, "both of us believe in you and we believe in what we can all do together as a team." Woodman promises to become "personally invested in the business to help you guys succeed."

The problems with this product are legion. I actually don't know where to start. The product endorses what fat activist Virgie Tovar calls "diet culture," the mentalities that American culture, and Western culture more broadly, hold around weight loss and food intake restriction. Kitchen Safe assumes that food is bad and that the only way to handle the caloric devil is to fight against it.  Krippendorf makes this antagonistic attitude clear when he starts the company pitch. He yells, "Sharks! America is fighting a battle we must win! The enemy is junk food, temptation, and it is everywhere!...It's no wonder that two thirds of us is overweight! There must be a better way!"

In his crazed carnival barker style, David Krippendorf couldn't be more clear. For him and for so many of us, food has a moral valence, and it's not a good one. If you do not "defeat" the "enemy," you become "overweight," the supposedly kind word for fat, and even this gentler word makes you cry. The problem with this attitude is that, in case you didn't know, people have to eat food in order to live. (Newsflash!) You must constantly fraternize with the enemy for your very survival.

You become like a tragic comic book character: what keeps you alive is also your biggest threat. The word threat is important here. The enemy is actually not food, which is a necessary, nutritious, and pleasurable part of life, but the perceived or imagined threats of having an "overweight" body and of being "unhealthy," in other words, of departing from the body type and values around food our culture finds appropriate. In this way, reality TV has not changed substantially from television's Cold War beginnings. That many 1950s game shows were designed to manage invisible threat is apparent even in their titles, like "To Tell the Truth" or "Truth or Consequences." The title here plays on the halo/pitchfork, angel/devil dichotomy the show relies on. Typically people answered questions incorrectly on purpose so they would get to do whatever silly stunt was the "consequence" of their incorrectness. Whether consequences are valued over truth or vice versa, the polarity is maintained through humor and ritualized play.

In its earliest period, TV was haunted by the fear of Communists and spies (or both in one); the new threat, food, is more personal and perhaps even more lethal. In each case, the enemy is inside us. In each case, television uses standardized, reality-based formats to proclaim and eradicate, or literally contain, threat. Through these attempts, television reveals the anxieties of its age.

It also reveals the kinds of solutions to anxiety that its age envisions. On Shark Tank, the solution to food as enemy is action-directed punishment. Instead of doing something as ridiculously New Agey as examining your relationship to food and bringing kindness to your cravings, the solution is to ignore your desires and lock food away in sadistic containers. The creators of Kitchen Safe point out that this punishment-oriented device can be used for more than just food. A remote control can be put in the safe for a few hours so that a child learns to do his or her homework before watching television (which clearly one should never do). In this model of parenting, children and adults do not discuss how to handle homework together. Parents do not try to empathize with their children's feelings and needs and allow solutions to emerge from collaboration and connection. Treating children like capable, worthy humans would indulge them. "After all," someone might say, "no one indulged me, and I'm proud of how cruel I've become, so I am happy to use a new product to perpetuate the punishing attitudes I resented growing up. This is great!" Children, too, are a threat to be contained.

And it is this cruel shoving off to the side, of course, that incites rebellion. The product's founders and its website stress that the safe helps with "temptation." Of course it doesn't. It increases temptation by making something "bad" more difficult to attain and therefore more desirable. It increases the mentality that causes you to ignore your body and eat more than you actually want: you rebel against restriction by overdoing and lose any sense of how many supposedly evil cookies you would have actually liked, which may have been just one or two. (Or it may have been the whole damn box. Whatever.) Products like this use absurd and mean-spirited rules to replace inner knowing around what your body needs or simply wants.

It is the paranoia that Kitchen Safe encourages that turns food into a threat, an all-consuming enemy that you fight with your timer container before it annihilates you. When you actually listen to your body around food -- a task that is harder and harder to do in our society -- your body will kindly tell you what it wants and when to stop. Is it really so bad to eat a little or a lot? Is it going to ruin your health to have a bunch of cookies? Let's say that whether you restrict yourself around food or not, for a variety of genetic or environmental reasons or the pressures of diet culture, you become "overweight." Did you know you can be happy anyway? Did you know it's possible to be happier fatter rather than thinner? Did you know your weight does not have to determine your happiness at all?

The great monk Ajahn Sumedho says that approaching the world with lovingkindness means taking on an attitude of not fighting. A non Cold War attitude. No Communists, no threats, no spies. We don't have to fight food, and we don't have to fight ourselves. We "win" because there is no war to lose. There is just our humanity, our pleasure, and our own sense of rightness.

Gabyhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9107696238785062203.post-53477035299077402572014-10-19T03:23:00.001-04:002014-10-19T03:28:17.667-04:00I am Shiklah, Queen of the Undead, or The Joys of Fat CosplayIt's October 2013. My fiance and I go to Comic Con together, as we've done the past few years. My honey is dressing up as -- or doing Cosplay as -- his favorite Marvel character, Deadpool. Every year he refines his Deadpool costume and is often asked to be in photos. I am too hesitant to dress up myself. My fat activism is only a month old. I'm shy, but I'm getting fired up. And here I am at Comic Con, a temporary community that accepts and even embraces the unconventional. As my guy and I are walking around, we hear someone say, "now that I want to do this Cosplay, I have great motivation to lose weight." On fire with my new body positivity, I can't resist replying: "hey, you can do your Cosplay at any weight." He replies excitedly, "no, for the specific effect I'm going for, I need to be thinner."

I want to say more, but we get separated in the crowd. I continue to make comments, and not in a quiet voice, about the incident. Isn't Comic Con about enjoying weirdness and not conforming to societal expectations? Why should such prejudice be here? I feel so hurt. Just as loving my fat body is becoming a real option in my life, someone rejects that possibility in a venue that typically encourages self-acceptance. In addition, my guy is a BHM or Big Handsome Man whose adorable teddy-bear stomach has never stopped him from doing fantastic Cosplays of a character who is drawn with a thinner body. Nonetheless, he is much calmer about the situation than I am. His priority is to move on while mine is to vent the injustice. We are frustrated at each other for approaching the situation so differently. Neither of us knows what to do.

A year goes by. A lot of things happen. We get married that summer. I continue with my fat activism full speed ahead: I read blogs and look at tumblrs, join online communities, do e-courses about body love at any size, read gorgeous fat poetry, get more comfortable wearing clothes that hug my stomach and thighs. I deeply enjoyed listening to Ragen Chastain and Jeanette DePatie host the first annual online Fat Activism Conference and I appreciate Stephanie Payne's great talk on plus-size Cosplay. I start my own fat blog. I see the fat troupe Rubenesque Burlesque perform live at the New York Burlesque Festival, meet them and get pictures with them. Now I'm ready. I want to do Cosplay, too.

My now husband (!) comes up with a great idea. Just as we got married over the summer, so did his Marvel obsession, Deadpool. He suggests we go to Comic Con as fictional and real husband and wife. Deadpool's wife is Shiklah. She wears purple and black, some pretty cool jewelry, and is a succubus who is queen of the underworld and lord of the monsters. Cool, huh? I am not the avid comic reader that my husband is, but I read some comics with Shiklah in them and did some online "research" and decided that this was a cool character. The next week, hubby and I went to a costume store and basically bought a nice purple and black witch costume to adapt into a Shiklah Cosplay. I was feeling down that day, sad about unrelated things, so I mostly sat there and pouted while my husband resourcefully put together an amazing plus-size costume. I did not appreciate the astonishment of some skinny sales ladies when we announced that we were looking for large purple tights, as if no woman over a size 8 has wanted to wear such a thing, but somehow we found those, too. Okay, the tights were a little bit small in the end, but they were good enough for a one-weekend costume.

Here is how my Shiklah, Queen of the Underworld, Lord of the Monsters, came together:

I'm Shiklah. Fuck you.

We stopped by a Halloween shop in our neighborhood so Hubby could do my make-up before the Con.

Husband and Wife Kiss! I had to rub some of my black lipstick off of his mask after this.

Ruler of the Deadpools! My husband is the one in the cap. I took off one of my gloves so I could actually use my cellphone and stay in touch with people...it's easy to lose track of them at Comic Con!

Here I am with Wonder Woman (above) and a gender-bending Thelma (below).

Jinkies!

As you can tell from these photos, I had a great time doing my first Cosplay! There were people of all shapes and sizes, and we were all fine. Fancy that!
At Comic Con I was able to buy awesome Adventure Time clothes, which I love to do. I got a BMO sweater in XL and a fitted 2XL black polo shirt with Lumpy Space Princess on it. I decided to layer these items a few days later and hubby took a (blurry) picture of me, which I present below:

I can think of conservative not-fat-appreciating people (mother, cough cough) who might think that my stomach here is unflattering and I should wear something looser. But this is exactly what fat acceptance and fat activism do not require of me. Personally, I love the look. I love that I can proudly present the cuteness of BMO the talking game console, my breasts, and my stomach. If a "muffin top" is a bad thing to have, well, I just don't agree with that.

There's no reason you have to be a particular weight to do Cosplay, to pose for pictures, to wear a sweater. In a culture brimming with pictures of skinny women, it's easy to feel that it's a problem for you not to look like that. I hope that my playful Shiklah and BMO pictures can point to the arbitrary tyranny of such a standard. Magazines, movies, tv shows may discriminate, but images, whether photographed or drawn or digitally composed, don't have to: they can celebrate all bodies. And they can present bodies not as impossible ideals to identify with or try to match, but as sturdy and flexible inhabitants of a changing world. It's amazing how easily we make the conceptual leap from "there's a thin body" to "that is desirable and I need to be it." Aren't there other ways of relating to images than feeling the need to conform to them? Of course, and I hope that my little photos, humble and awkward and fun and lovely as they may be, help point to that.Gabyhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9107696238785062203.post-52419872081271222402014-10-06T00:37:00.000-04:002014-10-06T00:37:31.211-04:00In the FleshLast week I had the incredible pleasure and privilege of seeing Rubenesque Burlesque perform LIVE at the New York Burlesque Festival! Rubenesque Burlesque is a fat, fat positive burlesque troupe based in Oakland, California. There are lots of neat things about living in NYC, but I miss out on many cool fat positive events in the San Francisco area. Since it's rare for RB to be in my neighborhood, I knew I had to go see them. Plus, some of their members, Juicy D Light and Magnoliah Black, spoke beautifully at the Fat Activism Conference in August, and I chat with them in fat positive Facebook groups. I bought two tickets so I could take The Husband. That's right, I took my husband, to whom I have been married for a bit over two months now, to a show involving nearly naked women, entirely of my own volition. He is a very trustworthy and attentive guy, and I wanted us to celebrate our mutual appreciation for fat positivity and big breasts. We also shared some amazing chicken wings. His caesar salad was the only thing at the event that was overdressed.

This is me rockin' some not-so-feminine fatshion before the show.

Here's me with the amazing women of Rubenesque Burlesque after the performance! Look what respectful people we are...

There were plenty of great acts, and I am completely biased, but let's face it, Rubenesque Burlesque was completely the best, and I really do think they received the most applause of anyone. They started out wearing bright red shirts that said Fat Camp on them in glittering letters. They were following an annoyingly perky skinny woman who was guiding them through an aerobics routine. Some of them were into it, but others were aggravated and listless. Then the four women surrounded the aerobics teacher and carried her to a table. She disappeared and the fat women walked downstage while chomping on her head and limbs. The skinny bitch was so annoying they ate her! Then they took off their shirts and wiggled their gloriously voluptuous breasts which had sparkly red tassles covering the nipples. At one moment they turned their backs to the audience, impressively shaking their thong-clad fleshy asses at the cheering crowd. Their moves were truly fantastic. I felt a little shy to talk to such awesome ladies after the show, but I was determined and my wonderful hubby was there to cheer me on and get pictures. It was so nice hugging and belly bumping Kitty vom Quim, Magnoliah Black, Lucia N. Hibitions, and Juicy D Light! They were gracious and fun. It was nice being close to their super sparkly lipstick. Impressive!

The show was a success to me not only because of the glorious beauty of the fat performers but also because of their parodic exaggeration of tropes about fatness. They took the idea of the gluttonous fatty to a ridiculous, transgressive degree: instead of eating "too much food," as fat women are said to do, they eat their exercise instructor. They give new meaning to the phrase "eating everything in sight." Their cannibalistic act exaggerates stereotypes about the gluttony of fat people to such an extent that the flimsiness of these stereotypes is exposed and they fall apart. They have no legs to stand on because their legs have been eaten. (Forgive me.) The women of Rubenesque Burlesque subsume the false dichotomy of the active, perky thin woman and the lazy, surly fat woman so that what remains is not the oppressiveness of both real and television versions of Fat Camps but the dynamic beauty of their fleshy bodies.

lovely drawing by Luma Rouge

Gabyhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9107696238785062203.post-28326692332228692682014-09-27T02:35:00.000-04:002014-09-27T02:35:47.363-04:00Notes on FatshionI have conflicting feelings about fatshion. On the one hand, it's great for us big women to show off our bodies. We get to say that we are beautiful at our current weight. We contradict stereotypes about fat women, disproving, for instance, that our weight shows a lack of self-care, that you can only be pretty, desirable, and proud of your appearance if you're thin enough. We don't have to wait for pounds to drop to look awesome. We don't have to keep ill-fitting clothes in case we're "lucky" enough to get "thin" again. We get to occupy space.

The main thing that concerns me about fatshion is its emphasis on the hyper-feminine. I'm not willing to name blogs because my goal is not to throw anyone under the bus; I'm speaking about fatshion as a whole, or you might say fatshion trends. I've looked at a lot of fatshion blogs and pretty much all of them showcase very feminine modes of attire -- flowy dresses, tight, curve-enhancing skirts, or whimsical a-line skirts, ruffles, 'skinny' (or tapered leg) jeans, jewelry, bright lipstick, etc. If you know of exceptions, please tell me in the comments or on facebook because I'd love to see them. It seems to me that quite a bit (though in this case certainly not all) of fatshion is vintage-inspired, a take on the 1950s pin-up.

You might ask, why would I be concerned about this? On an individual level, there is nothing wrong with having a feminine take on fashion, regardless of weight or gender identity. I wouldn't go up to a fellow fat woman and say, "how dare you wear a dress!" In fact, I would probably say, "nice dress, I love the color!" because I believe in supporting my fellow fatties in the world. I make a point in New York City of noticing fat women who look awesome and complimenting them on it. It's may way of saying, "we're allies in this. Maybe despite your awesome self-presentation you worry about being a fat woman in the world, but I know what you're dealing with and I support you." I often ask the woman where she got what she's wearing so I get more ideas about fat friendly stores. And it's a way for me to challenge my own internalized prejudices about what kinds of bodies are desirable and even just acceptable. Sometimes I feel self-conscious about my belly and my thighs, and if I can acknowledge to myself that other big women look great, I can accept myself more easily and move through my shyness about a tight shirt on my belly and feel proud of it.

Complimenting fellow fat women, for me, is a kind of code, a secret hand shake or belly bump. I just wish it were more successful. Usually when I compliment a woman, often on the subway, she thanks me sheepishly and returns to what she was doing. I don't tend to get the "I understand your code and send it back to you" feeling I dream about. Maybe the women in question don't want to be bothered during their train ride. Maybe the book they are reading on their iPad really is that amazing. But maybe the lukewarm reception indicates the importance of my gesture. It isn't really okay to compliment fat bodies out there, even if you have one, too. And that's why I feel the need to do it.

But as I described in my post on interpellation, there are limits to approaching fat issues only in terms of the personal. The personal is where and how we act (it's political, after all), but subjecthood is a loaded and problematic position. The personal often expresses our own unconscious participation in the oppressive systems we've been born into, to which we submit ourselves "freely." And so it is worrying to me that the personal on fatshion blogs is so overwhelmingly represented through feminine tropes. Against the wills of the bloggers involved, this trend as a whole conveys the idea that fat is only acceptable when it is framed in a particularly feminine way, when fat means big breasts and thick lips and sensual curves even though not all fat bodies have these qualities.

Many fatshion outfits show belts around the waist with a dress or skirt because fatness is most accepted when the waist is smaller than the hips and when large thighs are camouflaged by fabric. This trend -- and not any individual person -- runs the risk of communicating that fatness is inherently feminine, that the only argument to be made for fatness is that it enhances a narrow view of femininity and is actually not allowed outside of those codes. If fatness is only to be associated with the hyper feminine, it can easily slip into other feminine stereotypes, for instance, that fatness is secondary to a strong and taut masculine, that it stands for the excessively emotional, the histrionic woman who cannot control either her moods or her appetites. It is easy for fashion, fat or otherwise, to express a woman's subordination rather than her power, and not just her historical subordination to men but her economic subordination to the whims of the market, and her philosophical subordination to the Western paradigm that bodies are composed of an inner essence and an outer presentation with the latter expressing some kind of deep truth about the former.

These are the risks of fatshion. These problematic messages are in there even though the women in question do not consciously believe those messages. I would like to see a bigger variety of fatshions to dilute the sad connotations that accompany fatness and femininity. Does fatness have to be dressed up or can it rest in t-shirts that show muffin tops, jeans that don't elegantly taper at the bottom, sneakers instead of leg-lengthening heels? What if online plus size stores other than ReDress had a butch styles section? Fatshion is worth it, and that is why it is worth being critically assessed and hopefully broadened.

Gabyhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9107696238785062203.post-20601264832646761892014-09-17T02:17:00.000-04:002014-09-17T02:27:22.072-04:00I'll Take That Milky Way, Good SirTonight I was at my film class which is almost four hours long and goes through traditional dinner times. In this course, we begin with a screening or two, have a break, and then have a discussion until 10pm. Naturally, during the break people go get coffee if they didn't have it already or eat some food. I had half a turkey sandwich, a lemon-lime seltzer, and some pretzels left over from lunch. Toward the end of the break, my eagle eyes picked up three mini Milky Ways on the table the professor uses as his desk or station. I thought, "when did those get there?" When Proffie came back into the room, he was just as surprised as I was to find candy there. It turns out that another student had leftovers and didn't want them, so she put them on the desk for anyone to take. He was about to speak, so he did not take one but offered them to everyone else.

And no one moved. Not one person in a pretty crowded classroom.

I thought to myself, "I love Milky Ways. Why shouldn't I have one?" From my position toward the front of the room, I reached out to the table, took one and ate it. Besides fulfilling my desires, I thought this move would give other students permission to take the remaining two, which I would have been happy to take myself if I were so damn self-sacrificing.

The Milky Way was amazing. It definitely made slogging through early Antonioni more bearable. It was a few seconds of delight.

And yet nobody followed suit. The other two fun-size bars just sat there, neglected.

Why did no one eat the other Milky Ways? Well, on an individual level, there is no way of knowing exactly. I can't speak for everyone (or anyone). I'm sure there was a variety of motivations in the classroom. Maybe some people were just not hungry. Maybe some people don't enjoy the deep pleasures of chocolate with caramel. Maybe others felt they were too far back in the room go to get them.

Academic environments are also strange in that there is a sense of decorum people don't want to break but no one has articulated exactly what it is. At my department's lecture series, they serve Chardonnay and Perrier in plastic cups. The tone of the event is indecisive. Tonight a fellow spent time worrying about what seat he should take so as not to usurp what he expected would be the visiting lecturer's position. Then she chose to stand at the front of the room instead of sitting toward the back (actually at the head of the table) as is more common. Everyone is tensely guessing what is appropriate to do while laughing a bit and pretending to be relaxed. As strange as the academic environment can be, and trust me, I could elaborate on this point, this probably wasn't the main issue here because the professor invited people to have the candy. The chocolatey goodness was unambiguously approved for us.

So why didn't most people have any? At a broad level, I think it relates to myths about food consumption. It is gluttonous, unrefined, inappropriate to show an interest in food, especially fattening, decadent food like a Milky Way. I was once chastised as a young child for showing too much enthusiasm as I asked someone about a type of food I had never seen before. You're not supposed to want to eat, besides your coffee and possible bag of nuts during the break. I think there is a largely unconscious desire among many people to prove cultural refinement and discipline by abstaining from food. In addition, taking a small candy bar would involve moving to the front of the room and back for most people. Making yourself visible in relation to food is also not generally considered acceptable. In an academic environment, it might seem that you are supposed to draw attention to yourself through the mental, through sophisticated comments, rather than through the corporeal and the carnal, the act of getting up for a chocolate and sitting back down again.

I try to live as freely as I can. I wish I were better at it, but fat activism is one of the most powerful ways I know to live more freely in the body I have. I knew that I could worry about disturbing people or seeming gluttonous or immature or drawing attention to myself for the wrong reasons by take the Milky Way. But I didn't care. I feel enough confidence in my body to know that I'm not a terrible person for having chocolate or for being fat. As a fat activist, I work to see how attitudes about food can enslave and oppress on the one hand and how they can liberate on the other. And in this case I was able to choose a liberating option for me, to just have what I wanted. I still participated in class. I was still a "sophisticated" "intellectual" person who had come prepared and motivated. And I also had some fucking god damn chocolate.

As I end, I want to be clear that I am not trying to read the mind of everyone with whom I was in class. I am not saying that people were "wrong" not to have the candy. It is completely fine for people just not to want it. I'm not interested in saying what people "should" do but in analyzing what happens. The point is to speak more broadly, more systemically. I like to concentrate on the structural and not the personal. We're all affected by cultural norms and I am guessing that harmful cultural attitudes about food were, probably unconsciously, affecting quite a few of my classmates. The point is not reading my peers' minds but just noticing the unspoken norms and restrictions in the room with us. And I easily could have been affected in turn because I am a fat woman in a room with thin people. I could have stayed away from the chocolate out of embarrassment; what if the thin people judge me for eating something caloric and non-nutritious? I could have been too shy and oppressed to go for it. But I saw the restrictive ideologies in the room with us and I didn't feed them. Instead I fed myself.Gabyhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9107696238785062203.post-64481137809479614322014-08-31T03:33:00.000-04:002014-08-31T04:02:40.076-04:00Ideology and Weight-Loss -- It's (Not) Personal
...Subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king?
-- Shakespeare, Richard II

Ah, weight-loss. Some of my Facebook fat-o-sphere friends have made some great comments about the problems with weight loss, particularly the amazing fat activist pioneer, creator of the Yay! scale and author of Fat!So?, Marilyn Wann. All the fantastic women -- and the men! -- of fat activism are inspirations for me, but Marilyn deserves to be singled out. Her quotation summarizes my position on the issue:

I just basically consider it unethical to encourage any human being to undertake a weight-loss goal.
Many comments follow such a daring and revolutionary sentiment. Some of these comments are better-informed than others. Instead of concentrating on the overall meaning of the quote, on its insistence that diet culture and basic morality are antithetical to one another, on its assertion that the body does not need to be made smaller to be acceptable or even healthier, people seem to spend a lot of time searching for any circumstance in which weight-loss is "okay." Some insist that people have the human right to lose weight if they choose to do so, and if weight-loss is a personal choice that does not come from a larger pressure, that this choice, like other personal choices, is worthy of encouragement and even support.

Guess what? I don't think so.

Such an argument implies that the personal is beyond reproach -- that if I (think I) do it "for me" and not for diet companies or beauty standards or pressuring relatives, it can't possibly be problematic. I argue that this is untrue because the personal is not such a neutral, ideology-free zone. It is in seemingly personal choices, philosophies etc. where harmful ideologies often run rampant, where they are not scrutinized or balanced by any kind of critique. For one thing, personal preferences do affect the broader community; the personal does not exist in a vacuum. Let's say the apocalypse happened and most members of the fat activist community dieted together and they all lost hundreds of pounds. As a fat person looking at all of this weight-loss in a supposedly fat positive community, would your "personal" choice really be to stay at the weight you are? Of course not.

While I created an improbable hypothetical situation, in a way it's not far from reality. A lot of fat girls and women like me are watching friends, relatives, media personalities, etc. lose weight (temporarily) and discuss the pleasures of losing weight and being thin. It's going to seem like there is no option not to be attempting weight-loss. It's going to seem like losing weight is the only way to be happy, moral, attractive, capable, and even worthy of existing at the most basic level. I'm not sure why under these circumstances -- under our circumstances -- anyone would make the personal choice not to lose weight. There is no innocence in Western culture around weight. One can't lose weight for the hell of it. Unless weight-loss is the byproduct of something else -- you have a health issue or new medication, you get really involved in a new sport or discipline that shapes your body, you do psychological work on your eating and feel less compelled to binge -- it is being forced on you by this culture; it is a result of the enormous pressure on fat people to alter their condition.

And this is the insidiousness of the seemingly personal: our culture compels us to lose weight and convinces us that it's what we want! For French Marxist theorist Louis Althusser (who has been one of my strange obsessions for the past year), this is how ideology works. Ideology is paradoxical in order to be effective. He writes, "it is indeed a peculiarity of ideology that it imposes (without appearing to do so, since these are 'obviousnesses') obviousnesses as obviousnesses" (in "Mapping Ideology," ed. Slavoj Zizek, p. 129). Or: "one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says 'I am ideological'" (p. 131). In other words, ideology operates by concealing itself, by convincing you that it is the only reasonable way to understand things. This way, it isn't forced upon you. You have supposedly chosen it, when in fact it has chosen you. (In Soviet Russia...) Ideology is that which "we cannot fail to recognize and before which we have the inevitable and natural reaction of crying out... 'That's obvious!' 'That's right!' 'That's true!'" (p. 129).

Doesn't this sound familiar? "Of course being fat is unhealthy! There's no way to be healthy at that weight -- look at them!" "People want to lose weight to feel better about themselves!" It is ideology because it does not seem like it, because it convinces us of its truth over and over. We read about the "obesity epidemic" and say "of course" because we already believed it, because we are subjects in (subjects of, subjected to) a culture that already believes it and, like God -- for Althusser the ultimate ideological construction -- it creates us in its image. Ideology names us, or as our theorist puts it, it "hails or interpellates" us "as concrete subjects" (p. 130). Althusser famously uses the example of a policeman seeing someone on the street (a much more loaded example now than it was then, might I add, and yet, perhaps all the more appropriate). The policeman or anyone really says, "hey! you there!" And you recognize yourself as the person who has been called, who was already that. You're the "fatty" for instance, the defective one, the one who needs to change.

More simply, social forces and interactions "call" you; they shape the way that you are seen and see yourself. For Althusser there is no subject outside of these social interactions; you're subject to your subjecthood. What seems the most free -- your individual subjectivity -- is actually the most constrained, and this is how ideology stays in place. Althusser says it here: "the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to the commandments of the Subject, i.e. in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection, i.e. in order that he shall make the gestures and actions of his subjection 'all by himself'" (p. 135).

Ideology, then, creates you as a subject (subjected to it) who believes in it, who fits into an Ideological State Apparatus like a political party, a school, a church, a family, or, oh I don't know, a diet program, a dieting culture... In other words, a person "wants" to lose weight because he is hailed or interpellated as a fat (bad) person in a thin-centric culture, because he adopts the codes and goals of this culture "all by himself." By this logic there is no such thing as losing weight (or doing much of anything) "for yourself" because you are called to do it by a system that inscribes you as a bourgeois American Dream-loving subject that knows that if you just work hard enough you can make yourself acceptable. And of course you did that by yourself and for yourself. Or not.

Althusser also points out that "all Ideological State Apparatuses, whatever they are, contribute to the same result: the reproduction of the relations of production, i.e. of capitalist relations of exploitation." So because you "choose" to lose weight, you contribute to diet apparatuses -- Weight Watchers, Slimfast, Atkins, the "War on Obesity," the general belief that one "should" weight a certain amount, the idea of "good foods" vs. "bad foods," any and all of that. And by contributing to diet apparatuses, you keep them in business; the ideology underpinning them strengthens the exploitative relations that allow them to exist in the first place.

What can we do about all this crap? Well, I'm not totally sure, but I have a few ideas. We can work on being aware of it and be honest that we are part of it. I catch myself having certain ideas about both fat and skinny people that appall me. And as a fat activist, I do hold out more hope for human agency than Althusser does, even though his arguments against it are persuasive to me and have their use. I think it is possible to create and align ourselves with a different ideology, a countercultural one that is more accepting of different body sizes. I think Althusser warns us, rightly, that our position as fat activists is as ideological as any other. But that doesn't mean it's not legitimate. It's a position that creates a kinder and fairer world, one where rhetoric supports us in enjoying our bodies and caring for them as they are rather than condemning them. That sounds pretty good to me.

The excellent fat poet Kathy Barron has a very good blog post on similar topics. She takes on the "it's a personal choice" argument very effectively without invoking needlessly complicated theory. Check it out!

Gabyhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9107696238785062203.post-22228647406524845102014-08-28T01:35:00.000-04:002014-08-28T01:56:43.661-04:00Live and Let DieFirst, I'd like to get some of my self-doubting out. I've LOVED getting such kind responses to my writing here, on Facebook, and at Offbeat Bride, but I've noticed feeling pressure to make every post "that good." And I don't think it's going to be. I have a list of post ideas and they are not as personal as the last post I did. They're not going to grab people in the same way.

Like other fat bloggers, there are certain issues I want to discuss, modes of argumentation I want to take apart, and so the tone of this just-a-little-baby blog is going to vary. I have a variety of plans for the kinds of things I want to do here, and we'll see what sticks, what settles. I'm open to kind and loving feedback! *deep breath* Good to get it out.

*

I've never been an activist through standard means. I don't do protests or get behind someone's campaign, for instance. I don't pass out tracts, though I will admit that when some of my not-so-body- positive relatives have birthdays they do receive copies of Linda Bacon's Health At Every Size and I have given HAES materials to doctors and nurses even when they have not fat shamed me. (Hey, I brought the stuff, they might as well have it, right?) I'm not interested in being effective on a large scale. I like to do what is meaningful and fulfilling to me, and that's enough. Part of that is carving out my own little space in the Fat-o-Sphere, but there's a bit more...

As a hater of all things Good Manners, I do have a badass streak in me and so I like to make what I consider to be fat positive micro-interventions into my environment. For instance, I gave the middle finger to an issue of People magazine devoted to drastic weight loss (even more than usual). Then I posted the photo to Facebook. Observe:

Then at a dental appointment I found more weight-loss-centered magazines. I responded to them in this manner:

Finally, when Hubby and I were visiting family on the West coast earlier this month, we came across a Weight Watchers in a strip mall. I wanted to express myself about the value of such places and the photograph I posted was the following:

Most responses I got were very positive. I got some shares, too. But I got one less encouraging comment on the anti Weight Watchers photo that was really interesting. It was "live and let live." In other words, I should let them do their thing and do my own thing without expressing any form of aggression or distaste. I disagree. My only regret is that SuperCuts was in the line of fire. I like getting my hair cut at those places. But I rest easy knowing that SuperCuts took a slight hit for a good reason.

Let me just say that I do not feel critical of the person who made the comment. She's a really nice woman who has been kind to me in real life. So I'm not interested in a personal critique, but rather in a structural and systemic one. The point is not who said it but what assumptions are embedded in it. One is the idea that it is somehow inappropriate or wrong to express aggression, especially for a young woman. I certainly grew up with ideas about what sweet, gentle, refined young ladies do. (Hint: not a lot of eating. Or opinion-having. Or middle-finger-giving.) On one level, I was encouraged to be a critical thinker, but some adults in my life would also express frustration if I was "too strong" about my points. This is, of course, ridiculous. I can be as strong as I want.

And what is wrong with this picture? I am not singling out anyone for ridicule. I genuinely do not believe in that. It is clear that I am pointing at the sign. I am critical of the diet culture that Virgie Tovar so eloquently condemns, of Weight Watchers telling women what to weigh, how to be, how not to take up space in the world. I'm critical of institutions, Weight Watchers among them, that profit from the misery of women. Weight Watchers makes money because the institution is all about not letting people like me live, so why should I let them off the hook? If they basically want me to be half my size, why shouldn't I give them the finger?

It is because I am supposed to be a "Good Fatty." I'm relatively new to the Fat-o-Sphere and its terminology but in my understanding Good Fatties give in to societal pressure against them: they dress in a "flattering" way to conceal their large figures, and they exercise and diet to lose weight, just as they are "supposed" to do. The Good Fatty wants to be thin and apologizes for not being so. The Good Fatty is held to a higher and more debilitating standard than thin people are. Thin people are not required to count points or avoid carbs or conceal their bodies or exercise more than they want to. It is fat people who are supposed to put themselves through the ringer until they become thin (and then gain it back, and then try again, and then shorten their lives from the weight cycling).

In this case, the Good Fatty is supposed to be a bigger and more self-loathing version of the Sweet Young Lady. Even if other people, or, more insidiously, companies, institutions, states, countries are oppressing her, she should just let them live. People can attack her right to happiness as much as they want and she is supposed to be polite. When I was little adults in my life told me not to "talk back." I was supposed to accept my miserable place in the hierarchy; I was a child, below the adults who got to talk and make the rules. Here I am supposed to accept my place as a subhuman fatty in need of change. I am supposed to accept that soul-crushing authority and not respond to it with my actual feelings, with my own, full, fat humanity.

Guess what -- I refuse. I'm not a Good Fatty or a Sweet Girl. I'm loud, silly, weird, and take up space. I love to swear and dance around waving my middle finger in the air. I claim my agency in the world. That doesn't mean I can stop Weight Watchers from existing -- unfortunately -- but I can use imagery, technology, and social media to talk back.Gabyhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9107696238785062203.post-49736707637983210392014-08-25T23:09:00.000-04:002014-08-25T23:18:54.191-04:00My Wedding, My Body
"I ain't the same scared kid I used to be." -- Bon Jovi

I remember being ten and getting ready for a family wedding. I would be wearing a fancy dress with a bolero jacket tailored to fit me. The idea that I could pick what I wore was a foreign one to me and to my family. I was the tomboy on the monkey bars who had trouble parting with her sweat pants, even when they got holes in the knees -- how would I know what to choose for a formal event? So it was chosen for me. The dress was cream-colored and I was given firm instructions not to stain it. (Somehow the fact that I was not likely to wear a dress like this again eluded everybody.) Staining had been an issue for me as a kid. As a fast, enthusiastic eater, I managed to get some kind of sauce on nearly every shirt I owned. The fact that this did not seem happen to every child my age -- even my younger friends could make it through meals with their shirts unharmed -- drove me to shame.

I was determined to "do things right" this time for such a formal and meaningful occasion. I wanted to look nice while still keeping up with the other kids there, all of whom were taller, thinner, and faster than me. As usual. I was accustomed to being the fat one in a class of sticks, stunned that everyone could be so much smaller than I was, seemingly without effort. "Oh you're not fat, sweetie," adults would say to me, "just pudgy." As if that was somehow better, cuter, something I'd get rid of in time. I didn't understand why I was different, and I had the good fortune of never being teased or bullied for it by my peers, but I knew about my difference and its unacceptability.

I was the one kid who, when the door to the playground would only open slightly one day before recess, could not fit through it. I was the kid with the big thighs in tennis class, the one who would cry about my legs when I looked down at them in the shower. I was the ten-year-old dieting with my mom, eating steamed chicken breasts and half a banana while the thin kids ate pizza and candy bars. I knew who I was. By the end of the wedding celebrations, the bottom of my cream-colored dress was riddled with grass stains. I remember my parents arguing about the importance of this error, but whatever they resolved, I got a familiar message that day, the message that my body and I weren't good together, that I didn't look and move like the rest or wear fancy things as well as I should. I was just wrong inside and out.

Things continued this way. I felt like athletic kids -- especially tall, sports-oriented boys who would never look at me -- owned bodies. They "were good" at having a body; they did it right and were well-regarded as a result. I felt that I was good at having a mind, as I excelled in most subjects at school, but my body was both deficient and removed from my true self, from my intelligence, my wit, my scathing criticisms of everyone else I knew. For physical education my high school had fitness classes in which students would run around a circular track every other day. With my own peculiar mixture of confusion, disdain, and envy, I would watch these boys run past me repeatedly. I was always on some kind of protein-based diet, trying to avoid the starches or carbs that I really wanted to eat. Even my intake of carrots had to be limited as carrots contain a substantial amount of sugar. At least I could snack on celery sticks dipped in low-fat French dressing as much as I wanted. I even tried a juice cleanse. It tasted like orange juice, very sweet, not terrible, but I would get so hungry on my non-eating days that I just gave it up. When I was tired of dieting after high school, I went to the other extreme: I ate everything I wanted, beyond the point of fullness, gorging my body and then ignoring it. At least I wasn't depriving it. I didn't know what else to do.

The anxiety and alienation I lived with became too much for me as I hit my senior year of college. When I got rejected from graduate schools, I spent long periods crying in my dorm room, questioning if I even wanted to live. But I did want to live -- just differently. I started to explore meditation. I could sit with my addled mind and fat body without being completely invested in my judgments of them. I started to do meditation retreats -- I even took time off from the pressure of graduate school to do more of them. I could walk slowly in a dark room and feel unbridled joy in the movement of my legs and the feeling of my feet hitting the floor. Then I'd go to dinner and enjoy the spaghetti. Moving and nourishing my body didn't have to be incorrect; those activities could feel pleasant. I didn't have to worry about those athletic boys anymore; they went to college, too, lived their own life away from mine. I could just be fine on my own terms.

And somewhere in the midst of all this growth and exploration I found fat activism. Until then I harbored mostly secret criticisms of diet culture and the so-called "obesity epidemic." I felt attacked and intimidated by those things, by my cousin's exclamations of "growing girl!" whenever I returned from the buffet table with food on my plate, by my mother's parade of diets and my father's willingness to do them with her (besides the occasional ice cream and bag of chips). I felt oppressed by these things and that there was no way out except to ignore them and plunge into my meditation practice and graduate work.

But as I found fat activism, threads of my life seemed to come together. I could understand and honor the alienation I experienced as a fat, dieting child. I could use the critical thinking and knowledge of French theory I was honing in college and graduate school to deconstruct and undermine the diet culture in which I lived. And I could use my meditation practice to see beyond cultural judgments about size and savor my own embodiment. With fat activism, and a deeply supportive fiancé, I could bring my interests together into a celebration of myself, body and soul.

After feeling deeply alone for most of my life, here I was at twenty-six, madly in love. I was getting married to the silliest and kindest man I'd ever met, not an unattainable athlete but a cute computer guy, a Pokémon-obsessed comic and video game nerd who loves giving me hugs. And yet every time I thought about a wedding dress, I saw myself as that "pudgy" dieting ten year old who didn't know how to have a body properly and couldn't take care of her clothes. I saw that kid who was disappointed in herself and scared of other people, who felt apart from and desperately angry at the world.

I wasn't willing to get married like that. I was done forcing myself to be otherwise. I'm still that tomboy on the monkey bars. I don't stain my shirts as much, but it happens sometimes, and I no longer worry about it. I'm still fat -- in fact, I'm fatter than I've ever been, and I'm happier, too. People tell me they feel better in their bodies after losing weight, but I feel better being heavier. At five foot one, I rock extra large shirts and size 20 pants. I am in a doctoral program with women and a some men half my size, and instead of being insecure, I feel amused and special. I didn't want to be a demure bride, the slim, sweet young lady I always failed to be. My wedding outfit, I decided, would be like the rest of the quirky ceremony I was creating: it would buck tradition and follow my own and my future husband's desires. To honor that sensitive tomboy that in me, there would be no dress, no high heels, and not so much white.

I bought a pair of flowing royal blue pants from a plus size website, size 2x, and had a cleaner shorten them for me. For the top, I did end up choosing white, because I found a beautiful fabric at a little Indian shop where they would make clothing large enough for me. I stood with my arms raised as Sarla measured every part of me to make me a custom tunic for the big day. Instead of worrying about my thick upper arms or feeling pressure to go sleeveless when I am not crazy about that fashion, I told Sarla at a fitting that the arms were too tight and that I would like more spacious sleeves. The next week, I had them. After four fittings, the tunic was done. I wore blue polish on my fingernails and toes to match my electric blue pants, and when I was outside, I just wore sneakers. My outfit was comfortable and reflected by personality and agency. Who knew such a thing could even happen?

I got married at my meditation center, across from a statue of Kuan Yin, the goddess of compassion. She is someone I have found in myself over the last few years. We had a ping pong party after the wedding ceremony where I surprised my new husband with cake pops in the shape of his favorite Pokémon, Mewtwo. During the party, I noticed that I had stained my white tunic. I have no idea how it happened and nobody cared.

Gabyhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9107696238785062203.post-15399472105225846572014-06-05T01:59:00.000-04:002014-06-05T02:06:10.272-04:00What I Would Like
Let's talk of graves, of worms and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.
Let's choose executors and talk of wills:
And yet not so, for what can we bequeath
Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
-- Shakespeare, Richard II

I would like to live in a world where we don't feel the need to use shock tactics, in art or anywhere else, to talk about oppression based on racial, gender, power, and monetary inequities. I would rather not stare at a mammy sphinx made out of sugar. I would like to sit upon the ground and talk with people about how we've suffered. I want to hear other peoples' stories and to be heard myself. I want there to be space for difference -- I know that I have not dealt with the specific suffering of non-white ethnic groups, of homosexual, bisexual and trans people, of lower middle class, working class people, people living at and below the poverty line. At the same time, I want there to be space for similarity -- according to Theravada Buddhism, we are all "brothers and sisters in suffering." I want to sit down with a group and appreciate that, as people do when they meditate together, as people do when they come together at Shalom retreats and share their biographies.

I want a circle that can be like the earth, which accommodates everyone and everything. If all of us are granted this compassionate zone, maybe we could all apologize to one another, not because we are at fault, but to give each other the apologies that we deserve. If we are willing to suffer together, we can imagine restitution together. I think this collective imagining, outside of any real world outcome, is intrinsically healing. I don't want to be lectured to, yelled at, castigated for what my white ancestors have done, for what they weren't able to see. If that's morality, I would take a cue from some of the hippies and drop out of it. If morality, though, involves hearing one another, caring that we all suffer, and letting ourselves do whatever we need to do when we don't have the space to care about that, I am all for it.Gabyhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9107696238785062203.post-61798067114192233292014-02-10T18:15:00.000-05:002014-02-10T18:15:27.651-05:00Insight RequiredGen Med, my awesome young adult meditation group, has been discussing a depressing NYT article on the supposed non-benefits of meditation by Tony Schwartz. I responded to our group in the following way, and I think it makes a good blog post. Here are my thoughts on the matter:

One that that struck me is that he quotes teachers very selectively. Jack Kornfield does talk about the dangers of spiritual bypassing, as Tony Schwartz shows, but he also believes in the effectiveness of a spiritual path, a "path with heart." Schwartz seemed to be using that quotation to show that even meditation teachers consider what they do to be largely ineffective when Kornfield doesn't say that and writes copiously on how to use spiritual teachings to help you in ordinary life. Schwartz might do well to read him! He also quotes Catherine Ingram, who left the Buddhist path, but is still a spiritual teacher who does "dharma dialogues" and retreats, which I've been to. I think she has a complex relationship to Buddhist practice, but she definitely works to bring spirituality into daily life in a way that is not at the expense of meditation. She just likes to be less structured about it, as Schwartz's quote shows. He uses these teachers' statements in a misleading way. These teachers have a lot of spiritual faith, in practice both on and maybe especially off the cushion, and Schwartz gives no sense of that.

Another thing that struck me, and I think we've talked about it, is that he creates more of a separation between meditation on the cushion and mindfulness in daily life than there really is. Even the title of his article conveys this -- "more mindfulness, less meditation" -- as if they are not interrelated practices. In my experience, cultivating mindfulness on the cushion is a training ground for bringing mindfulness into daily life, and I think that is one of the points of sitting. It is not always easy to bring meditative insights into daily life, but the two forms are connected, the way that laypeople support monastics and monastics offer their vision of the dharma to laypeople -- there is supposed to be a symbiotic relationship between the cushion and the world, at least as I understand it. And as [Group Leader's name omitted] pointed out, that involves more than just sitting -- listening to dharma talks, reading dharma books, hanging out with sangha, even being part of other spiritual communities -- all of that helps enormously. I have been doing psychotherapy pretty intensively with experienced meditation practitioners for a bit more than four years now. I've had the chance to see that the combination of Buddhist practice and therapeutic reflection is extremely effective, I would say more effective than either one of these by itself, but that observation does not discredit meditation practice. Sometimes I bring insights I had on the cushion into therapy sessions. Sometimes therapy helps me identify a particular repetitive thought pattern when I'm sitting, because if I've discussed that thought pattern in therapy before it is easier for me to see it as mental conditioning, as a preoccupation rather than the truth, and so I can be less identified with it.

I don't understand the idea that meditation does not create transformation. I don't understand what you wrote, [Group Leader's name omitted], about the Buddha saying that it doesn't. Meditation is how he got enlightened. Practice is the only way to work with greed, hatred, and delusion at an experiential level, so it must be transformative, and that is what I've experienced. I would say that meditation does not work in isolation (what does?) but it absolutely transforms the mind and heart. If Schwartz has not experienced that, I would encourage him to speak to a spiritual teacher and alter his practice. He's missing something.

I would go so far as to say that transformation is the point, and it happens. But I think it doesn't happen the way we want as fast as we want. Maybe that's what Schwartz is dealing with. I know it's something I grapple with a lot in my own practice. Sometimes the transformation of practice is just noticing what is going on in more detail. Sometimes behavior doesn't change, right away or for a while. Some of my patterns have gone from incredibly difficult to deal with to now being somewhat repetitive bummers. I get upset they're not gone, but I try to remind myself that practice has its effect by helping these patterns be less debilitating, helping me live more freshly and freely. I also think that spiritual practice isn't linear. Sometimes certain wounds hurt over and over, and that's just the nature of it. Practice has a lot of beneficial effects, the chief one being awakening, eventually. I may get hard on myself and lose faith in myself, but I have a lot of faith in the path.

Gabyhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9107696238785062203.post-89534414166009974492014-02-07T02:46:00.000-05:002014-02-07T02:46:09.105-05:00Both Sides Now: Musings on Quality and ValueI'm really tired but I'm holding an intention to write in this blog close to once a day.

So I asked my lovely future hubby Fusion Warrior what I should write about. He said that I need to write about Mewtwo's birthday. I told him I have little to say about this but he wasn't open to that statement. So in case you were wondering, Mewtwo is the greatest Pokémon ever. He is kind of like a purple cat but has psychic powers of destructive intensity. February 6, now yesterday, is his birthday. Naturally, Fusion got a cake and took a picture of it on our Mewtwo shrine which is bigger than my Buddhist shrine. As my colleague said today, we have our priorities right. I would like to make it clear that I share in Fusion's celebration of the greatest Pokémon ever. His birthday should be a national holiday with parades in the street. Fusion replied, "that sounds about right."

Now to a different subject...why after such a long absence am I choosing to write here much more frequently?

Because I want to teach myself that my words matter.

I feel very torn on this topic. I've always valued my own words to some degree. As an academic in training I spend a lot of my time writing research papers. But in that case my words are sanctioned -- they're for a "better purpose," my learning and my take on some school subject in art history or at times film. What about when my words are just for me, not a clever argument but simply expressive of my own experience of life from moment to moment?

Ideologically I take a democratic and even idealistic attitude here. Everyone's words are worthwhile -- well, maybe not a member of the Tea Party's, but...close enough. I think the internet is a great place for sharing where everybody and nobody gets to be an author. Jonathan Crary, in his reactionary and not entirely sane way, may refer to blogs as "the death of the political" (this from the guy who thinks we can only be social by sleeping and waiting our turn in line as if we're in preschool) but I think they're Barthes' wet dream. It doesn't matter if people read your blog or if it's "good." The point is that you don't have to worry about oppressive, hampering notions like "quality." I am using quotations not to be pretentious in a postmodern fashion but because I think that quality, while being an influential principle in human thought, is ultimately nonexistent. It's just an idea that hurts people, that maintains stratification and alienation. Ideally, we could all express ourselves within a few ethical limits and it would all be of value. Artists have been breaking down this harmful construct from a variety of angles for at least a century and a half. And then people judge how well they do that. Quality is an agreed-upon insubstantiality like money. It's something to work with, but just as a twenty dollar bill is piece of paper, quality has no reality independent of peoples' prejudices. As Shakespeare, revered as the greatest playwright who ever lived, wrote, "nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so." Quality never goes away, and it was never there to begin with.

But quality is still something I worry about. I would like my papers to be as interesting, persuasive and well-written as I can get them. And that is what one does in a doctoral program. I want to grow in my area. (Shit, now I am having thoughts about Greenberg and mastering one's "area of competence." Shit shit shit...) I want to "do good." I think that's understandable. But that's a kind of training. I also worry that my thoughts are "stupid" and I "suck." I would like to just trust my thoughts, not in the sense of them being excellent or even accurate since for Buddhists most if not all thoughts are delusion, but I just want to feel like my thoughts matter, that it's okay to just have them and write them down. I want to be free to explore my internal universe without shame. I want to be open to my thinking and writing processes because those are interesting things and I use them.

One reason why blogging could be valuable is because everyone is a special snowflake, because everyone has something unique to offer. I do not believe this. I have a lot of reservations about the idea of uniqueness. I cannot find proof that everyone is "different" or why that is somehow a positive, helpful idea, a justification for liking or appreciating things. Maybe my thoughts are totally derivative. Not only are we, as humans, derivative in the most fundamental sense -- our derivation from our parents gives us existence -- I think we like it more than we care to admit. Otherwise no one would watch TV...

So I can't, in good conscience, value my words for being "unique" or for being "mine," as if a separate self were real anyway. But that doesn't mean I don't matter or have nothing to offer. The opposite is true. I think I can value my thoughts and words for being a part of expression, just for doing their thing, for arising based on causes and conditions.

It's a struggle for me. I want to allow my thoughts, emotions, written meanderings, arguments to be whatever they are with no strings attached. But there is something in me that always feels like I am coming up short. I don't want those fears to run my life but I also can't deny them. Those fears, too, are something that exist, that don't want to be hurt for not measuring up to their siblings, happiness and joy. They, too, want their place in the sun. And they have it. I like the way Pete Seeger puts it in his addendum to Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now:"

Daughter, daughter, don't you know
you're not the first to feel just so.
Let me say before I go
it's worth it anyway.

Someday we may all be surprised,
we'll wake and open up our eyes
and then we all will realize
the whole world feels this way.

We've all been living upside down
and turned around with love unfound
until we turn and face the sun
yes, all of us, every one.

I like this basic okayness in the midst of instability, the insubstantiality of quality and value of all things in the midst of concerns and categories and criteria about quality and value. I was talking to a friend about feeling like I'm flowing out of control in a river, like when you fall in and are drowning, and I try to grab on to something like a rock or tree branch to get my bearings in the rapid, frightening stream. She replied, "it's all the river." It's all scary and it's all okay. I think this is what Pete, as he approached his fiftieth year, was offering to young Joni.Gabyhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9107696238785062203.post-27354120579745641682014-02-05T18:07:00.000-05:002014-02-05T18:07:31.159-05:00I Ingest YouI was talking to someone I know about my wedding planning. We were having a really fun discussion. It is important to Fusion and me to have an informal, fun, non-traditional wedding that is authentic to us. I was sharing different details about our plans. For instance, we are looking to have a custom cartoony cake that includes Jake the Dog from Adventure Time (pretty much my favorite character ever), Catbug from Bravest Warriors (my second favorite character ever), Deadpool of Marvel Comics fame, and the Pokemon Mewtwo. The last two are Fusion's favorite characters. But I don't want to make stark divisions. We love them all. We have pictures and toys of them all over our apartment. They are part of the fabric of our lives. So what better way to celebrate our marriage than to eat them?

It's really a good question. I am thinking of an anecdote that comes up in Buddhist talks. Apparently the recently dead children's author and illustrator Maurice Sendak gave a young fan a drawing of his. The boy's mother replied back something like "Max enjoyed your illustration so much that he ate it." Isn't consuming a great way to show your love? Don't we consume through kisses? Don't we actually take in other bodies as much as we can through everything from hugging to sex? It is the ultimate compliment. You are so wonderful to me that I do my best to transcend physical limits and to make us one. You are so exceptional to me that I defy the limits of traditional mathematics for you, making two equivalent to one, one the actual physical manifestation of two.

This makes me think about Plato's Origin of Love. The idea, briefly and I'm sure simplistically, is that people were cut apart, separated, and that sex is a way of trying to regain fundamental wholeness. People are envisioned as incomplete halves striving and failing to make one. This perspective relates to psychoanalysis. (It is no accident that film scholar Baudry talks about the cinematic apparatus with both Plato and Freud in mind.) Again, to be simple about it, I think that psychoanalysis often presumes that the subject is forever in search of the wholeness of the maternal womb. And in Lacan's mirror stage, the baby is exhilarated by, and also longs for, the "organic totality" he encounters in his image. He is lacking in comparison to this whole image because of his limited motor function. He experiences himself as a fragment, needing a nurse or the famous "trotte-bebe" to support him. In these scenarios, the partial wants to become complete, and the sad normalcy of life is that this can never happen. Needless to say, bodies separate after sex, the maternal womb is never regained, the baby may accrue more independent motor functioning over time but he never attains the ideal whole of the image, which in fact inaugurates him into a world of separation (an image of me versus an image of you, for instance). Lack is the paradigm.

I have always been deeply touched by the emphasis on lack in psychoanalytic thought, by modernism's broader attempts to cope with many forms of alienation, so I do not wish to dismiss these things, but I think eating might have an edge here. When I think of eating -- and even more when I am loving (kissing, sex, spooning, anything) -- lack does not enter the picture in the same way. I am (something like a) whole generously yet insistently taking in another whole. I am making one two.

To argue with me, you could point to excrement. What enters the body partially leaves it. I concede that there is no perfect fusion. (Except my fiance, Fusion Warrior, of course!) Nonetheless, what interests me here is the logic of ingesting, which, more with kissing than with eating, is both addition and exchange. You're not a half looking for a missing half; you're more than one. This is communion, the incorporation of the body as food into you. And maybe this is why the idea of "oneness" as a desirable state has always irked me. True communion is more than one; it is an affectionate defiance of the standard idea of what one means. It's more than one, but it isn't exactly two either because ingestion complicates the clear-cut separation of bodies and of material. It is a liberating more, on the other side of lack -- when the boy ate the drawing, he didn't lose it but possessed it in and as part of his stomach, fully. It is an expression of enthusiasm for and inclusiveness with other things.

*
The writing process is amazing. I am fascinated by it. I had a completely different idea in mind for this post, but I got to eating, loving, corporeality, communion, and Adventure Time, and realized I just had to go with it. It's fascinating how writing is both an intentional process -- I need to formulate ideas, craft sentences, type them with my hands -- and an unknowable, subconscious force that grows of its own accord. As with pretty much everything, my control is limited when I write. I can edit, but the creativity involved in the actual formulation of content is not entirely, or largely, my own. As a meditator responds to conditions -- the length of the breath, the sensation of the body, the noise of the room, the intensity of thoughts -- I respond to my own writing that is both of and other than me. Who knew you could find anatta in writing? What a great place to look. Gabyhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9107696238785062203.post-16267778754617301522013-10-01T03:24:00.002-04:002013-10-01T03:47:00.382-04:00Inventory
time will tell
as the world crumbles to hell
what they created
was a family story no one will tell
it's a photo album too terrible
but the pride and the pallor continue to swell
as the matron silently prays
-- Bad Religion

I've been thinking lately about how so much of what I learned about life is utter bullshit.

Is this just the way it is for most people? Is this due to a generational divide, the differences between people who work explicitly toward healing versus those who do not? Is this the issue of ones twenties, to sort through what one has learned, to find what one didn't learn, and to make choices and changes and find a satisfying way to live? Is this a personal version of philosophical schisms, the way postmodernism mocked modernism's beliefs in originality and genius, the way modernism balked at the enlightenment's optimism around reason?

I suppose my main question is: is this problem general or particular? In other words, is this because daughters tend to be disillusioned by mothers, the younger generation sees the flaws of the older one and wants to correct it, or is this because my background is exceptionally flawed? Is this all our fault? But how unusual is it for a middle to upper middle class family to hide its traumas behind a cultivated facade? Aren't most people delusional anyway? (The Buddha would certainly say so.) Surely it's not just me, but it feels so shameful and so lonely. The happier I become in my own life, the more loneliness I feel. This is a special hole, a unique dilemma, and no other happiness can compensate for it.

Does any of this even matter?
Well, my mind can come up with many reasons why it does not, but my heart is not convinced. My emotions are in a knot about this issue. For them, it is as if no one has even been disillusioned before. There is a special sense of shattering, of mourning, loneliness, confusion, and anger. No amount of rationalization, or even of reflecting on the good things in my past and present, can change these emotions. They insist on their existence and on their enormity. I think it would be useful to do an inventory, not necessarily an exhaustive one, but I'm also scared of the task. I don't want to look at all the rubble. I'm worried I'll feel even more upset by it all than I currently do. But I want some clarity.

I learned that the world is a scary place full of people who want to take you down because you're brilliant. I'm finding that the world has suffering in it, but it's also a fun, dynamic, exciting place to be, and that most people want to help you out, especially when it's their job (professor) or they're struggling in your position too (colleague).

I'm learning that the world's suffering is not usually caused by people who suck and get perverse pleasure out of blocking your deserved path to greatness, but rather is a condition of the world. Suffering is not other people's fault; in fact, people suffer with you, and this is a great opportunity for connection and compassion. Suffering is not inflicted on you by shitty, vindictive people. Rather, it is part of the world, and instead of being condemned to its injustice, you can see it for what it is, you can navigate it, and still be really happy. There's no one to take you down.

At the same time, I also learned that I'm one of the most brilliant people ever and I need to achieve in order to prove this to everyone. And if I don't or can't prove this, I don't count and it's like I'm dead. Now I can assure you that I am not one of the most brilliant people ever, but I don't think anybody is, even the da Vincis of the world. Whether brilliance is "true," it's not a useful concept; it definitely doesn't lead to freedom from stress. What I'm learning is that I don't have to be the most brilliant person ever to be okay and happy. I can still enjoy my intelligence, and I can also enjoy everything else, like my averageness, my stupidity, my humor, my awkwardness, my kindness. I can not be perfect and still do a good job and contribute.

I learned that I have to do "the right thing" all the time, that there's a right decision to be made in every moment and I'm fucked if I don't make it. This is a tricky one for me. I'm learning that there is no right thing to do. That I can make decisions and go with them. That it's just okay. That my happiness is not contingent on every little decision. That I can trust myself, and learn to trust myself little by little.

I learned that there isn't enough to go around. So if someone else is 'smarter' than me or does well, I'm totally fucked. Now I'm adopting more of an abundance mentality. There's no need to compare. Everyone has praise and blame, gain and loss. One person's praise doesn't mean another person can't be praised, for the same reason or for different ones. No one's success cancels out my own, and certainly doesn't get rid of my possibility to learn, which can happen in every moment.

I learned that I need to complete everything really early, because that's the only way to be safe. Now I know that life is too variable for this. Sometimes I can get things done early, but sometimes I'm barely catching up, and that's okay too. I'm safe in the moment and I can allow things not to be ideal. They can still turn out well. And if not, I have refuges. It doesn't mean I'm finished or dead.

I learned that the only way to get good at something is to pursue it single-mindedly. Now I know that dedication is a good thing, but being single-minded adds a lot of stress and doesn't give the mind the space it needs to breathe. It's actually more helpful to enjoy different aspects of life, to have a variety of intellectual, spiritual, psychological, physical interests and friendships. This variety only enhances dedication rather than taking away from it. This is a big new learning for me that contradicts what I grew up with.

I learned that the vast majority of people are soulless, uncultured shits beyond redemption. Now I'm seeing that while people can indeed be annoying, they can also be really great, and can share joy and vulnerability with you, which is nicer than anything. People have their difficulties, but they are worthwhile. I can actually say this now. There is a lot to gain from connecting with people and just allowing that, more than I ever would have guessed.

I learned that learning involves being really good at something all the time and just getting better at it. I learned that learning is like "winding up a watch," where you may move backward a bit at times, but only to get further ahead (which is proof of your innate superiority). Now I know that learning isn't so simple and believing it is is a set-up for disappointment and anxiety. Learning is not to be taken for granted. It is a complex, moody, contingent process worthy of attention and reverence. I actually think reverence is a wonderful word for learning. Learning involves a lot of not knowing, cluelessness, forgetting, the brain getting overfull, being confused, feeling like you know less than you did an hour ago and even a year ago, feeling overwhelmed at how much more is out there. Learning is growth and growth involves pain. Learning is the farthest thing from a linear process. And learning does happen. It has fits and starts. Dedication and getting help, breaking it down and sticking with it and allowing it to be hard and full of failure actually gets you there. As you stay with the bumpy process, you do learn and grow and have ideas and contribute them. There is a fun and rewarding, eye-opening and even exhilarating aspect of learning, but learning is part of samsara, it is a conditioned thing, and that involves suffering, too.

I learned that bodies, especially female ones, are supposed to be thin and pretty, demure and ladylike. I learned that it is refined to eat vegetables, avoid carbs, avoid sauces because they are "bad" and always leave food on the plate. Now I'm seeing that fat bodies are awesome. They can and should be accepted. I'm seeing that ideas about 'bad' foods and restricting yourself and punishing yourself at the gym are crap. Instead, I get to enjoy lots of different food -- including loads of awesome vegetables -- eating intuitively, moving my body as I like to, appreciating my body's hunger and fullness signals. Fat positivity and health at every size are amazing worlds that are the opposite of everything I learned about my body and how to treat it.

I learned that women should look ladylike, that this matters for whatever reason, that even pinstripes are 'too masculine.' I now see this is absolute bullshit. If a woman likes feminine fashions, this is fine, but I've always been a tomboy, and if I want to wear adidas shirts, horizontal stripes, silly cartoon t-shirts, pants with flared or wide legs, and sneakers, that is fucking excellent.

I learned that people are incredibly volatile, that it's fine for them to yell at you and degrade you whenever they want because they have authority over you. I now know that this is abuse. No one gets to yell at me, degrade me, shame me, blame me for any reason. I can expect kind treatment from others and I can protest when they don't give it to me and choose to avoid certain people. I don't have to be the scared, angry, confused child I once was and just take it because I have no choice. I now have the pleasure of being in lots of relationships, especially my romantic one, where people are kind and fun and not about to yell at me. This makes humanity a lot more tolerable to say the least!

I learned that it's fine for a man to bark at all of his relatives and humiliate and shame his daughters and constantly worry about the prestige of everything. The fact that he was a prominent surgeon, as well as a fine violinist and artist supposedly made everything wonderful. I know now this is crap that has deeply wounded everyone in my family, even though most of them are too busy drinking the dead man's kool aid to admit it. I know that a man's talents do not come close to compensating for his cruelty.

I learned that suicide is caused by being too smart, sensitive, kind and wonderful for this world. I know now that suicide is a choice, and one that can be sadly spurred on by taking some strong medications. The world is not to blame for suicide, and it does not make the dead person a saint. I know that those levels of pain deserve compassion, and that suicide is not a good solution to anything; it just creates more pain for the living. There is a special place in my heart for this knowledge.

I learned that the way you deal with anything unpleasant, especially anxiety, is by immersing yourself in your chosen field and 'ignoring' everything else. The happiness this immersion, and the resultant success, gives you compensates for everything else that every happened to you and to your family. I now know this is total nonsense. You deal with anxiety and trauma by facing them, by working through them, and by seeking out community that can help with that. You deal with difficulties by developing resources, and therapy, meditation, Buddhist practice, focusing, nvc, even fat positivity are all amazing resources for processing life and dealing with adversity.

You can't drown out your issues through brilliance and hard work. Those things are largely irrelevant to the enormity of your pain. There is no substitute for working through it and developing meaningful human connections that help you do that. I don't buy the idea that art, music, science, academic inquiry can heal you. They can help, they can be ways of working through things, and they are definitely profound in their own right, but they are necessarily incomplete. Only doing the work of healing heals you. There is no way around this. When people tell you that they channeled all their frustrations into something, like their art, their music, and that this redeemed their life, they are completely delusional, they are buying into romantic myths that can't make you happy. Caspar David Friedrich was not known for the cheerful quality of his paintings, after all.

The intellect is wonderful, but nothing is better than working toward your own healing. And doing the work of healing only enhances every other area of your life, including your intellectual life. This is the most powerful thing I have learned in my twenties and it is the opposite of everything my family seems to stand for. They seem so sure you can ignore your hurt places and just surmount them through force of will. This is untrue and it harms you and everyone around you to believe otherwise.

I learned that it's important to be disciplined at all costs. I know now that discipline can be effective, but it can also hurt you and backfire. Nothing is more powerful than pleasure. I do things because I like them, I care about them, and I try to do things from a place of self-compassion and self-regard instead of to punish myself and hopefully reach a higher plane. This is a more relaxing way to live.

I feel like Hedwig at the end of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, where he's not in drag anymore, where he's naked and stumbling in an alley. I'm stumbling into lots of great things. It's not all uncharted territory anymore, but it's adventurous and rewarding territory despite the dukkha in it. I'm not sure how my sadness and anger and mourning are going to continue. I would like for them not to be completely stuck and I think that's what motivated me to write this. But I can't determine their timetable. I wrote earlier about this lonely hole that keeps commanding my attention. Sometimes it does feel like that, but the problem with that metaphor is that it's too solid. The territory is always changing. The lonely hole doesn't necessarily get filled up, but it is part of the shifting sands, the empty, ever-changing aggregates of being, and I can only wait to find out what its next shape will be.Gabyhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9107696238785062203.post-10121597980637632202013-03-30T15:23:00.000-04:002013-03-30T15:23:08.105-04:00car si l'on me perd...forgive both the drama and vagueness. perhaps that's what blogs are for. i don't appreciate either one of those, but i can find no other way to discuss something important to me, and i need to mention it here.
to heighten the drama, and perhaps the fun for me, i'm thinking of writing a letter to her personally. this lover has never had a gender, but it feels more like a girl than a guy to me. maybe i think this way because my toughest break-up, as i was telling a friend tonight, was with a girl, not a boyfriend. this is by far the toughest breakup yet. i've been lucky in my limited romantic life. a few boys have come and gone, and now one is here to stay. my lost loves haven't been lovers.

but i could swear by your expression
that the pain down in your soul
was the same as the one down in mine
that's the pain
that cuts a straight line through the heart
we called it love
-- "origin of love" from hedwig and the angry inch

dear lover,

it's over. i know you will continue to haunt me -- breton, right? who am i? whom do i haunt? -- to live with me, but as something i soothe and release, not as my sole connection to existence. you are no longer my way of doing things and my reason for doing them. you are still in my heart though our romance is done.

i try to remember your good intentions. you came to me when i was very young, maybe even 7 or 8. 5 or 6? truthfully, i cannot remember a time in my life without you there.

you knew what i couldn't articulate: that i wanted to die. that i found living to be a hopeless and stressful bind. and you cared about my predicament, sincerely. you rushed in to help. you gave me another option, to live for you. were you the mephistopheles to my faust? i could live if i gave you my soul? you chide me for this comparison. that is a cliché. it is too dramatic. you should look up faust; you're not completely sure if this is accurate. i'm sure you could do better. oh, my love, i have been so dedicated to you, so persuaded by you, governed by your priorities and frightened by your wrath. i have been so enmeshed with you that it is hard to live another way. but things are not the same between us anymore. i see that you're sad, angry, and frightened, i feel those in you, but you can't deny that we are growing apart, and i know that it is for the best.

i liked having the sense of purpose you gave me. we were good together, and people acknowledged us, telling me how smart and precocious and exceptional i was for loving you. i liked the sense of dedication we were building to each other. if i stuck with you, if i spent all of my time in our relationship, cultivating you, giving you knowledge and interpretations and thinking and writing and good grades and french tutoring on the side and being in museums and lots of time pondering what it all really means; if i could come up with penetrating analyses in all moments of sleeping and waking, i would be able to tolerate and even justify living. you told me that we would take the shit of the earth and turn it into glorious theoretical books. together, we would make life more than tolerable; it would be worth living through. you and me against the world.

you wanted to love me. you wanted to see me live and thrive. you believed in the power of ideas and creativity, the dedication of sitting, learning, and thinking in new ways. no doubt these are wholesome things and they're how you saved me. but, my love, your personality is too extreme. i am still not completely sure why. i wanted you to just be loving, to enjoy things with me, to find meaning and friendship with me, but it got complicated. you had a firm idea of the kind of lover i needed to be for you. we have been in one of those relationships where the man, let's call that you, is controlling and paranoid and afraid of losing his love, so he follows her around and tells her how to dress, what to say, how to behave. you said you were just loving me, but you gave me standards, and made it clear that i should die if i couldn't meet them even for a second. after taking the french exam in grad school, and being worried about if i passed, since half of it was much harder than i expected, i genuinely felt, at your prodding, at my agreement with you, that it would be such a disgrace to fail that i should commit suicide. that there would be no other way. and then i passed it. it was like you got fed, and you were happy again.

you learned how to love from my mother. where else would you learn how to behave? you taught me what had been taught to you, that love is entangled with perfect behavior and performance, and if any of our unspoken rules are breached, the only thing to do is to berate me, to make me want to die. my life has been in your hands. you would save me from dying, but if our exacting strategies did not seem to work -- if i was not the best all the time, ahead of everything, having a wonderful time inspired by my own great ideas -- you were quick to remain me of the other side of the bargain, that if i didn't match what we agreed on i should die.

and so a lot of things in my life, like studying anything, writing papers, doing well in college and grad school, just meeting with a professor in her office, became the circumstances that would justify my life or signal that i was inadequate and need to die or at least hurt myself as punishment. why couldn't i live up to our agreement? why couldn't i just be brilliant and happy all the time? why couldn't all of my thoughts, my enormous, all-encompassing dedication, so strong it carried moral weight like a good priest's concentration on scripture, my reading and writing and creative work, my comments in class, the grad school acceptances i was supposed to have -- why couldn't these things calm me and fulfill me and delight me the way you always said they would?

if they didn't -- or rather when they didn't -- it couldn't possibly be your fault, because you were my protector, my best and only friend. then it must be my fault, i'd conclude, and i would want to die. why couldn't i just make our agreement work out? why couldn't i live up to you? why couldn't i resemble my projections of everyone else? you told me that everything would be fixed, that life would not only be livable but delightful, if i effortlessly became the next rosalind krauss. after all, she ended her book on modern sculpture with a quote from proust, and when i was 13 proust was our honeymoon, the first gift you ever gave me. some lovers give roses; you gave me swann's way. that was "our thing" in middle school and high school. it had purpose in it, unlike the dry, pathetic routine i lived, surrounded by incomprehensible teens with ensor-like masks for faces.

i've never been a platonist, but my intention in high school, college, and even some of grad school, was to make myself whole again by fusing with you. you held and supported my unspoken belief in plato's origin of love (or at least in the version of it in hedwig and the angry inch!). in intimate moments, when we cooed to each other, we agreed that once we had been one, a child of the sun or moon, and then were separated due to the wrath of the gods, and that i needed to spend my life attempting to fuse with you at pain of death. all of my encounters -- with museums, libraries, artwork, classrooms -- were supposed to both represent and consummate the glory of our union. and if they couldn't do this, effortlessly every time, devastation and annihilation were my only alternatives. our promise was broken from the beginning, because how could so much risk accompanied everything. union, ultimate consummation with ideas, like embodying the transcendence of a malevich, mondriaan, or even a pollock, is a rare occurrence, and it is too difficult for life to depend on this. is this what you mean to do, or was it just a natural consequence of our impossible pact?

i've been learning that between dreams and fleeting moments of fusion and fears of annihilation lies my actual life. and this actual life is worth living in, even when i don't meet our standards for how to live it. i feel a strange combination of relief and pain at leaving you. you are still in me, still part of me somehow, but you don't run my life. you're not my belief, my god, my only reason to live.

now i have an actual love of my life. we are getting married. we are living together, for each other, but with no false and empty promises like the ones that, despite your sincere caring for me, gave me. all we, my fiancé and i, want from one another is our humanity. i adore his humanity, and i know he feels the same way about mine, as much as you and i revile it when it doesn't conform to our brilliance-transcendence pact. there are no expectations and no fears of being annihilated with him. whether we're kissing, joking, watching transformers, taking a walk, chatting about todd in the shadows or spending time at a museum exhibit together, nothing is required of us except to be here and feel as we do. you have never been able to give me that, and that is love. i know you wanted something great for us, but it was never possible, and it wasn't even good for me. i could never fuse with you and i am done trying. i'd rather be myself, moment to moment, here.

sometimes i wish i could just banish you from my life, while at other times i feel sad and guilty that i have abandoned our attempts at fusing together. my real life is somewhere in between these two. you're still with me, because even though you were not a good lover, you are my oldest and best friend. you were my only friend when no one else would be my friend. you gave me reasons to live when i couldn't find any. i think you meant to protect me, to make me such a great and brilliant person that life couldn't hurt me as it hurt my parents and as it killed my grandmother. life led to people attacking my mother and not appreciating my father. my lovely, sensitive grandmother couldn't survive it all -- she was too kind and lovely for this world, i was somehow told. and i come from all of these people. i was worried i was marked for the devastation and failure that plagued my family, and i know you cared about me so much you tried to save me from this fate, to give me a path to happiness. you are often unkind, but i think you have been trying to save me. i appreciate your steadfast love, but our relationship has never been healthy, and you know it.

the question now is: what do i do with you? we are separated, bleeding and staring at each other. you feel wronged that i am moving on. how can she be happy with this chump who doesn't know half as much about the arts as i do? you cry indignantly. how can you be happy being a little shit when i've tried to save you from that? you shout at me. you still taunt me with threats of failure and it's scary. somehow, though, we need to peacefully coexist. because i'm still here and i know you don't leave easily.

you can stand next to me at times, we can have a chat. we have memories. we have a history. we have fear and resentment of one another, and mutual tenderness too. but i won't be your lover anymore. i refuse to even try to fuse with you. i don't want you in my bed. but you're still a part of me in some way. how can we get along without being lovers? can i tolerate you being there, and can you understand that i don't feel the same way about you? traversing these questions is our breakup. i know you need to kick, scream, and mourn the end of us. maybe i need that too. i want you to know that i care about your dedication to me, and i care about what you've done in the past, but i am done being hopelessly devoted to you. i'm moving on.

best wishes ;-)
roosterGabyhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9107696238785062203.post-21417244985364231522013-01-17T01:13:00.000-05:002013-01-17T01:13:12.978-05:00What Makes You BuddhafulGee, my last post here was so soul searching. And there is so much to say. But right now I will not say it. Except that Fusion and I are moving in together starting this Saturday. :-) We fell in love with the second apartment we looked at. We moved fast and got approved yesterday. We're filling out the lease paperwork today, during normal hours, and make sure our broker gets everything by Friday morning. So that's what I've been up to.

In the meantime, I've been de-stressing by writing a parody song, and that's what I put here for your contemplation. Be on the lookout for the 10 paramis and 4 brahma viharas as well as the Kuan Yin mantra. I managed to include them all in the song. Fusion gave me some good tips like the last line. I made him listen to the finished product before he went to bed. :-)

What Makes You Buddhaful

To the tune of One Direction's "What Makes You Beautiful"

You're insecure
Don't know what for
Your sila stops you from acts I abhor
Your wisdom's deep,
Resolve's so steep
You're gonna make it across the far shore

Devas, bodhissatvas and yogis see it
All of the Buddhists but you

Baby your grasp of the paramis is so refined,
Your dana offerings so large that they blow my mind,
You are more loving than Gandhi and King combined
You don't know, Kuan Yin
You don't know you're Buddhaful

If only you saw what I could see,
The deep composure of your equanimity
Your dedication to practice, your energy
You don't know, Kuan Yin,
You don't know you're Buddhaful
Oh oh
Paramis make you Buddhaful

You've got it wrong,
Your heart is strong.
You have the patience to listen to this song.
You've renounced crimes
Over lifetimes
You have the honesty to critique my rhymes

Brahmins and outcasts alike can see it
All kinds of people but you

Baby with boundless compassion you overflow
You listen to all my whining so I would know
Mudita gives you a lovely and radiant glow
And ergo
Oh oh
I conclude you're Buddhaful

If only you saw what I could see,
Despite my tantrums you still have serenity
Your lovingkindness prevents you from hitting me
So I know, Kuan Yin,
I know that you're Buddhaful
Oh oh
Divine Abodes are Buddhaful

Namo na-namo na-namo namo
Namo guan shri yin pu sa
Namo na-namo na-namo namo
Namo guan shri yin pu sa

Baby your grasp of the paramis is so refined,
Your dana offerings so large that they blow my mind,
You are more loving than Gandhi and King combined
You don't know, Kuan Yin
You don't know you're Buddhaful

Baby with boundless compassion you overflow
You listen to all my whining so I would know
Mudita gives you a lovely and radiant glow
And ergo
Oh oh
I conclude you're Buddhaful

If only you saw what I could see,
Despite my tantrums you still have serenity
Your lovingkindness prevents you from hitting me
So I know, Kuan Yin,
Paramis make you Buddhaful
Oh oh
Divine Abodes are Buddhaful
Oh oh
Kuan Yin you're so Buddhaful!
Gabyhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9107696238785062203.post-60870992423351486222013-01-14T04:47:00.004-05:002013-01-14T04:47:44.186-05:00a vehicle for blessingSo while I am going to attempt sleep, I was finishing Ajahn Sucitto's chapter on patience in his amazing book on the paramis and I found another encapsulation of (my) practice, all the things I was referring to in my last post. So of course I must quote it here.

And you can even feel respect for the ungrateful and the exasperating. They help you wear out your addiction to self view, to having your own way. And they help you to lose your fascination or irritation with the personalities of other people, and all that which is just kamma and no real self at all. Then you say 'thank you' to pointless situations and people who irritate you. This is the perfection of patience: it can make one's life a vehicle for blessing.
I am incredibly impatient, so when I am waiting for a subway (train or sandwich), in a line, waiting to cross the street, I can say "Yes! I get to wear out my addiction to self view!" *sigh* No one said it was an easy path...Gabyhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9107696238785062203.post-72462305574373587282013-01-14T04:22:00.002-05:002013-01-14T04:22:36.361-05:00many a refugeThey go to many a refuge, to mountains, forests, parks, trees, and shrines: people threatened with danger. That's not the secure refuge, that's not the highest refuge, that's not the refuge, having gone to which, you gain release from all suffering and stress.

Sleeping issues again, so I thought I'd post briefly.

I go to many a refuge. I look at images and I talk to people, and I often ask, them or myself, "how do you do it? what gets you through the day? how does life become bearable for you?" I don't find persuasive answers. Usually people, threatened with danger, recite a script they are stuck in. "Well I'm going to solve life's problems by living in a city." or "by living an isolated life" or "by being immersed in the classics of art and literature" or "by excelling in sports" or "by following my dream until I 'make it.'" Usually people don't even say these answers, but it's under the surface of their speech.

It reminds me of a time I was with my mother and a friend of hers. My mother was saying that it is too hard to go into music (as if this were the real cause of her problems) and that you may as well not do it. Her friend indignantly replied, "but what if [insert famous musician here] decided it was too hard? then what?" One philosophy based on bitterness and blame and the other based on an unconscious investment in ideas of genius and artistic destiny. Two seemingly opposite sides of the coin of delusion. And as an unenlightened being, I have my own side of this multidimensional coin, my own prejudices and attachments to them that I try to unearth.

It's just useful to look at other people. Arguing about delusions over coffee. I can't say it's a dumb thing to do. It's just human, and so it's often missing the mark. It reminds me of a conversation I had with a college friend at a bookstore. She was drawing diagrams trying to convince me not to hate human nature. If we can reason, we are salvageable, we have an inherent worth, she said to me. I would have none of it. I had all my reasons set in stone about why humans completely suck. And then a woman came over to us and recommended we read one of those sappy motivational best sellers, and I took this as proof of my argument. These days, following the river of change and development, I don't believe in either alternative. And I'm happier for it.

There are all kinds of people I could potentially relate to, but when I search around in my little universe, Buddhist monastics make exceptional sense. So do layteachers, but sometimes the wisdom of the monks and nuns really gets me. You'd think it would be hard to relate to people with such a different lifestyle. But they're so freaking honest. They struggle with life and practice like me. They don't gloss over it, because there's no need for pretense when you're a monastic. It's just real shit. Take this excerpt from Ajahn Sucitto on patience:

The reality of Dhamma practice is that, as much as we would like to be pure and free, we have to learn to develop patience with our attachments and passions, and our views and opinions about them.

Fuck it, man. That's my life. This bald English guy apparently knows what it's like to be an engaged twenty something girl studying, living, and moving in the city. Because he knows the mind. You don't need to compare dhamma to scientific studies of the mind -- just watch the mind on and off the cushion. All you have to do, the small and large task, is see what that instrument does. I want to be pure and free. I have a deep aspiration to awaken and I believe in it. I don't know what lifetime it will happen in (personally, I am inclined to trust the Buddha about rebirth, but of course I have no proof), but this path has an end I'm pursuing, and that's Nibbana. Stress reduction is fine, desirable, but I'm on the path to awakening, and I have the sincere aspiration to be free, and I don't need to expect that to happen in a certain timeframe or in an understandable way for the aspiration to be strong and to feel real.

So when I sit on the cushion, all that peace stuff is great, really, and, as Sucitto says, I'm sitting with my attachments and passions, my conditioning doing its thing over and over and over again. And on top of that I have the view that it shouldn't be that way, that I'm not "doing it right" because I'm experiencing what we all have, an unenlightened mind, and the frustration that accompanies it. Sometimes I just say "hey Mara, I know you're here, thanks for showing me these things so clearly." I don't love Mara, but more and more we can have tea together. I do appreciate the clarity she brings me at times, the learning opportunities. Here they are again, these are the things the mind does. Thanks for showing me.

Silence. It's so quiet. There's so much space here. So much erupting and flowing of new life.
Then Mara shows herself to me again.

It's unromantic. All this junk, too, is Buddha, Dhamma, Sangha, the four noble truths (suffering and its cause are one and two), the eightfold path, and this is a good reason to have compassion for it, however hard that may be. Sometimes what I do is notice: awareness isn't blaming. Awareness doesn't know blame. My mind has to work for that; it is not intrinsically there.

That's the secure refuge, that, the highest refuge, that is the refuge, having gone to which, you gain release from all suffering and stress.Gabyhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9107696238785062203.post-19251744862728704672013-01-03T04:41:00.001-05:002013-01-03T05:06:10.679-05:00Renounceathon AdventuresHappy 2556, the year in the Buddhist calendar.
I am having a lot of trouble sleeping, so I thought I'd write a few things.
First, I am getting hungry and craving bacon pancakes due to an excellent adventure time song and video. If I am up late enough, I could get banana pancakes and bacon at my local diner, which is excellent.

However, I can't get my typical ginger ale with them since I have sworn off soda for a month. I decided to participate in Santi Forest Monastery's 2013 Renounceathon. This Theravada monastery in Australia is doing a month long fundraiser that also helps you practice. You choose something to renounce, which can also mean doing less of something, or, for something more abstract, holding the intention (like renouncing thinking about the past, or unwise speech). People can donate to your cause and you can also contribute to the monastery. I was excited when I found out about this because I wanted to find more ways to practice. I like to up the ante.

I chose soda for several reasons. I wanted something that wouldn't be too difficult but that I would notice. I also wanted something concrete. If you're renouncing a type of thinking, it's too hard for me, because whenever that thinking comes up, I'd say, "oh, damn it, you're supposed to renounce that." So I find it more convenient to choose a physical thing I can stay away from and then watch what happens to the mind from there. Soda is a good thing for me to renounce because it's not good for me, and I actually really like it, especially diet soda. I probably have diet coke several times a week if not once a day. I'm also into diet ginger ale and diet mountain dew. So it makes a difference in my life to forego these things, but at the same time, I can enjoy water, selzer, my favorite diet peach snapple, fruit juices.

So far it's not a problem. (Yes, I know it is only three days, but I am excited about the rest of the month.) I like doing this. I like being reminded of practice in a daily life way that isn't on the cushion. It's easy for Western practitioners to limit practice to the cushion, or even to noticing the breath as you walk. That's all well and good, but Dhamma is vast. So this keeps me in touch. It's only been three days, but I feel like it's strengthening my confidence. I'm trying to notice what I actually do well instead of just being mean to myself. As it turns out, I have a lot to feel pleased about in my actions, which are often wholesome, efficient, even creative. So with renunciation, I feel like "I can do this." I also notice that as I formally renounce one thing, it is easier to adopt that as a frame of mind and do less of other things. It's sort of a positive slippery slope. That might be the biggest advantage of such a practice. On a related note, when I'm not renouncing, like buying many books for my Kindle, I notice it more, and notice the emotions and thoughts behind it. I'm such a book fiend that this is my addiction. It's like a mini rush. I feel excited and accomplished when I get one. Eventually I'm able to stop myself. So we'll see how this goes...

I had a very interesting experience with this tonight. I went to a local market to pick up rent money and dinner. This market is a block from where I live and has an Allpoints ATM which means I don't have a bank fee. So I always go there to get rent, and I get food while I'm at it. As I was standing in the line with my sesame noodles and chicken, strawberry and blueberry mix, and WATER (ha!), I noticed a man in the other aisle with three, count 'em, three bottles of diet mountain dew. This is my favorite soda ever and I prefer to have bottles to cans. So my greatest temptation was before me. The three bottles, lying in the man's basket, looked radiant with their urine-like yellow-green glow. I had a variety of strange delusional thoughts that went something like this:

"That man has diet mountain dew! I am not having that because I am renouncing that! Ha! Ha! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"
"You know, that guy is pretty fat and disheveled. Maybe it's really good I'm renouncing the dew. Maybe he should do the same thing..."
"Oh, those look so beautiful. He has three. He can't possibly need three. Why not give me one? Wait..."

I did not identify with these thoughts and was amused.
Not only am I announcing, I'm also preparing to do some dana I am really excited about. I have a lot of Buddhist books around the house that I either have read or don't read. These days I have both an iPhone and a Kindle Fire and in general I prefer reading Buddhist books on my devices instead of in print. So I put all the Buddhist books I wanted to give away in a small suitcase. (Putting books in suitcases is a surprisingly controversial thing and I will discuss that another time. To phrase it another way: there are a lot of bizarre and difficult people at a certain library...More to come.) I plan to take them to my meditation center and donate them all to the lending library we have now in the small room. Unfortunately, this mini library is in the same room as the dedicated practice sit and it tends to distract me when I am attempting to do walking meditation...

So whether I drag the suitcase over there today or tomorrow, I have a sense of fullness. Everyone benefits, because I have so many books it's nice to get rid of some and now fellow Buddhists can enjoy them. I am considering attempting to sell other books to local used bookstores. They'd be in a good place and I might get a little money. However, I feel less comfortable doing that with Dhamma books. In fact, many of my Dhamma books are published by monasteries and they say that no one is allowed to profit financially from those pure dana books. I have plenty of Buddhist books I've paid for, but if I donate them all, they all get a great home and different people can borrow them.Gabyhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9107696238785062203.post-77268066431852049732012-11-10T01:37:00.000-05:002012-11-10T01:53:20.786-05:00the searchlately it's really been on my mind that i did not choose the dhamma.

in a relative sense, i did choose it. i'm the one who ended up reading alan watts, jon kabat-zinn, tara brach when my former friend hellcat thought it was weird. i remember when we went to see our favorite comedy group of the time and i had alan watts essays with me. are you crazy? she asked something like that. nothing would deter me. i'm the one who found meditation and its insights to be an incredible blessing while i was struggling. i'm the one who plunged into my first retreat the summer after i started to practice, less than a year in, and i absolutely fell in love with it. i'm the one who reads and listens to ajahn for fun. i'm proud to express my love of dhamma and i've taken a lot of steps to put it in my life. i have a perfectionist streak that feels i could do more, but there's no doubt that by my mid twenties now (!) i am a very dedicated yogi and that this is my life path.

at the same time, there's something that's been happening on the ultimate level that is hard to articulate. dhamma has taken over my life. when i was looking for something to help me out, i had no idea i was looking for it. as a kid, i never envisioned myself coming to identify as buddhist. it still feels kind of random. i was raised to be a supposedly erudite, culturally refined jew, and now i'm taking refuge in buddha dhamma sangha? umm, what?

at some level, to refer back to my blog, the dhamma is my natural unfolding. or, the dhamma is naturally unfolding me. whether i'm doing a lot of formal sitting or not, buddha dhamma itself is pulling back my layers and teaching me what i need to know. i remember chas quoting one of the forest teachers (i think) at several young adult retreats. he said something about how you just put yourself in the way of dhamma and it unfolds in its own time according to your kamma, and that's it. just watch it flower. i remember doing walking meditation on the annex porch and being so struck by this. now i know i was struck by this because this is my life. and it's not in my control. the dhamma found me and mercifully, tenderly refused to let me go.

in some ways, my personality is the same, but less encumbered. the zany sense of humor, the inappropriate jokes, the love of modern art and francophilia. but in other ways, i feel quite different to myself. i don't hate all people. i've gotten into something called nonviolent communication and have some ability to empathize with myself and others. i'm much more fascinated by what i see on the street and feel no more need to have brilliant observations about everything. i remember rebecca saying at my last retreat, "meditation lets you be an ordinary person, and it's such a relief."

the dhamma is continuing to bring me to the ground, to the soothing earth that the buddha relied upon when mara questioned him. it reminds me of the simon and garfunkel song "the sparrow" in which no part of nature will help the dying bird because it's concerned about its reputation and other such things. until -- "i will," said the earth. "for all that's created returns unto me. from dust were ye made and dust ye shall be." the tenderness of the inevitable, the strong sweetness of this space that can take anything.

i don't want to get caught up in concepts of fate, in things as 'meant to be.' i don't believe in this. it's usually self-seving, as in, was meant to be great and that's why i was chosen to do blah blah blah. (see reality show contestants talking about how their entire life has led to their audition. or, rather, don't.) buddhism is not fatalistic because of its emphasis on present-moment unfolding. at the same time, i'm straining for words. the dhamma found me, and it wasn't going to give up. everything in my life leads me back to it, like it's a homing device, a compass in the woods, the north star. and that's the point.

i was doing a sort of meditation/mat trip spontaneously, and i could see quite clearly that in all my self-blame and my difficult, isolating childhood experiences, i wanted to die. everything was about deeply wanting to die or managing to try to live, like hanging off a precipice and grabbing a piece of wood with your teeth. i wanted to bite something so hard it would stop the inevitable fall into oblivion. like camus' clémence, i loved high places. but i always knew i was falling off of them, and, of course, blamed myself for it. i'm stunned that i clung on so tenaciously. i can't believe i have made it to a quarter of a century now and i have zero suicide attempts. no drugs, no smoking, no drinking, no gambling. i do like food very much, so maybe that's an addiction. i've always been into it. but i do okay. i used to self harm but not very deeply. i was never close to death or coated in blood; i couldn't stand it.

but i can tell you with certainty that at the bottom of my life for at least twenty years, i found it to be an impossible trap, an exercise in futile misery, and even in the books and papers and museums -- perhaps especially during this nice experiences because my emotions were heightened, i was more self-connected, i'd get anxiety -- i actually wanted to die. while i am obnoxiously intellectual, i also consider myself a devotional type, a puppy. i love something and that's the end of it. i'll relate to it forever, no matter what. i'm obsessive, compulsive, though undiagnosed. i've preferred to call it passionate.

and what seemed to keep me alive, what i've always been living for, is a way of being i could sink my teeth into, a spot where i could find meaning, significance, authenticity, but also ease, grace, love. a space that would open life up and make it worthwhile. i tried to make this my academic life, but i've learned with plenty of suffering that these are burdens that studying things like dali and bunuel movies and forgotten early french performance art simply can't hold.

but the dhamma can do this. the dhamma is this. and so, in a subtle sense, without fully knowing it, i've been looking for the dhamma my whole life. and somehow by the end of college i embarked on a journey of finding it, a journey that gives me incredible challenges and rewards today and forever. i don't know why my colleagues and some of my friends don't follow the dhamma, but i do know at a deep level that i couldn't live without it, that i've actually always been waiting for my chance to engage it, and that whatever it brings me i need to bear to reach a new stage of happiness. my reality had to catch up with my yearning, and then i could start to practice. and, as chogyam trungpa said, once you start, you have to finish.

dhamma makes every moment worthwhile, not by changing it or by denying it, but by illuminating it. it restores clarity and value to suffering, which after all, is a noble truth. when i pour myself into dhamma, it doesn't break. it's not like holding on to a precipice. the more you love it, the more ground opens up. it's more like finding a little patch of land and sitting or lying there while everything unfolds within and around you.

brel sings about "the quest" as an "impossible dream," an "inaccessible star." while i love the macho-sensitive poetry of brel's lyrics, the dhamma isn't this at all. what i find fascinating is that you can put the same level of passion into dhamma that you put into other things, but instead of caving under the weight, or "still burning after burning out" as brel sings, it makes everything lighter and cooler. (nibbana actually means extinguishment, cooling down.) buddha dhamma actually opens up more space, because that's what there is. it's tender and uncompromising at the same time. reality can't be altered by your delusions about it, but it can love you, and little by little you can enter a kind relationship with it. it's there for you to do this. it does not want, but it wants nothing more than to relate to you in this deep, authentic way.

i keep feeling like t.s. eliot in prufrock -- "it is impossible to say just what i mean." but i also feel like i've said what i mean to the best of my ability, and awareness and i, we have an intuitive inner knowing of what this means. a knowing worth awkward words. a knowing that actually insists on a penetrative love for the world. and a knowing that loves back.

may all beings receive the blessings of my life.Gabyhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9107696238785062203.post-60612908007498756752012-11-06T02:48:00.000-05:002012-11-06T02:48:15.015-05:00Spirituality and Learning, super long part 2

...coeur je connaissais trop;
j'avais l'oeil du berger
et le coeur de l'agneau
-- Jacques Brel, "L'enfance"

So, in talking about my relationship to Palmer's book, "To Know and Be Known," I'd like to take a really subjective approach, because this is my flippin' blog. I could spend time explaining how Palmer takes spiritual terms and applies them to learning or go through all of his themes, but I'd like to express these things obliquely by simply writing about what points affected me the most and why. I'm most interested in what main points I can take from this reading and apply to my own process of integrating dhamma and study.

Palmer writes a lot about truth, which sounds like a problematic notion. Who has the right answer then; who knows the truth? How can one talk about truth when learning is about seeing multiple perspectives and dismantling received ideas? Palmer is careful about this. I'm sure his book coming out when postmodernism was getting big has something to do with it. For him, truth is relatedness or community: "Truth is between us, in relationship, to be found in the dialogue of knowers and knowns who are understood as independent but accountable selves." By writing, "truth is between us," he is explicit that the point of learning is not in having or claiming to have a superior or clever interpretation. That's not the truth. That's part of the relationship, one facet of things.

One thing I've learned is that when someone has a particularly compelling argument, people don't want to 'concede to the other' and they want to argue against it. This can be annoying when you're the arguer! But as the person receiving the interpretation, I do this intentionally, to hone my skills. There are certain writers who are incredibly clever and persuasive and have dominated my field, and while I acknowledge my debt to them, I want to have the capacity to argue, to make space for something else, especially if my gut tells me there's something not accounted for. I focused on this in a seminar and I think the professor was partially persuaded.

But it doesn't matter because that's not where truth is. The truth, as Palmer would say, was in the interactions. I was willing to interact with this famous and very smart text, to have my own relationship with it instead of bowing to it. I noticed early on in reading it that a lot of the arguments, clever as they were, didn't match what the art looked like to me. So my interaction with the art, in itself, was not totally dependent on the text, and for Palmer it's important to have some sense of the thing in itself, of its own speech outside of interpretations.

I argued that many of the author's key images (not all, but I gave many examples from the article) did the opposite of what she claimed and I said why. I had another intuition that I pushed, and this is where my prof, Johnny Mac (due to her outspoken, unpredictable, entertaining ways) took more issue. I'm willing to hear that, but I wasn't persuaded by her. I had the sense she was so in love with a particular argument that she wasn't totally open to contradictions of it. But maybe I'm just annoyed she didn't agree with me. This ambiguity, how the professor and I respond to things in different ways together, is part of the relationship, and so that level of engagement, with our hearing of and confusions about one another, our arguments and stuck places, our willingness to look at an talk about, is, in my reading of Palmer, all truth.

One of the great things about what Palmer writes is that it's steeped in reality. When you're in a classroom, even if it's a lecture, especially when it's a seminar, you're in a position of relatedness. You're relating to the material -- what he calls the known, to the professor, to your peers who become your colleagues, and even to yourself as the knower. You get to know, by learning about, being able to talk about, the information, and you get to be known by others.

Palmer's idea of being known is interesting and it's one I've been puzzling over. Being known by other people seems straight-forward enough. A lot of learning happens in making yourself known and knowing others, allowing those things to emerge. The idea of emergence fits nicely, since Palmer talks about attentiveness, listening, allowing silence, making space. You're not alone; you're there to be known, too, and so you're supported in a mutual situation.

This is a helpful idea for me because what I sometimes struggle with in class, and struggled with more when I was younger, is that I'm supposed to always say incredibly smart things and be impressive in class or else I don't deserve to even be there. It gets me into worry around if I'm 'good enough.' This can inspire a lot of preparation, but more frustration and anxiety. I always end up feeling like I'm not good enough. You're never the smartest around; you can't 'win' and Palmer writes about the perils of having a competitive attitude instead of a cooperative one.

A competitive attitude is isolating because you're worried about if the professor 'likes you' and you're worried about how your comments compare to those of your peers. You're not setting yourself up for happiness, or even more maximal learning. It's not a realistic perspective because it doesn't give you a base from which to relate to other people, and yet there they are. You have this goal of proving how smart you are and other people could jeopardize this. Scary situation.

I feel ashamed of these things, and I have trouble not feeling competitive or down on myself when someone else seems 'really smart,' but I learned these things from a family system where you're supposed to be the most brilliant and that makes you worthwhile. My mom teaches, in a very different field from me, and she makes it clear that if a student isn't talented he or she isn't worth her time and should probably drop the subject altogether. For her, if a student has a lot of trouble with some aspect of learning, he can compensate for it through his other talents. This is all very scary and uncompromising and not realistic about the ups and downs of learning, as well as teaching.

Palmer's approach works very well because it allows me to relate productively and not competitively with others. I can learn from them, and they can learn from me, even the prof. This doesn't occur by me being the smartest person but just by being in relationship, in community, with them. Things form in this community for everyone; I'm responsible, or 'accountable' as he says, for my own faithful presence there, not for being endlessly clever, and this gives me a lot more flexibility and freedom in my learning. He likes to use somewhat archaic, religious language, but he does a good job of clarifying what he means. So when he talks about being "obedient to truth," I think he means being sincere and open to the learning relationships, offering your presence and inquiries and being willing to receive those of others. A willingness, a commitment to engage is being obedient to truth. I wouldn't usually use the term obedient myself, but it's okay, because I get it.

Where being known gets even more interesting, more subtle, is in relationship to inanimate things. For Palmer, this is a really important part of learning. Actually approaching material involves a dialectical relationship with the subject at hand; relationship is not exclusive to the classroom. I think it's important that Palmer extends his arguments here, to being known by material as you come to know it, because there's a big solitary aspect to learning, and Palmer doesn't shy away from that at all.

You could say, "community is all very well and good, but what about when I'm doing my reading, alone? coming up with arguments alone? writing essays alone? researching alone? what then?" I've had study groups that have disbanded because people wanted to focus more by themselves. I find that studying with others is more helpful if you're studied yourself first, and then you can bounce off people. So a lot of the nuts and bolts of learning needs to be solitary, and that's where it can be, in my experience, its most joyous and most frightening.

Palmer writes, "when we know something truly and well...we feel inwardly related to it; knowing it means that we have somehow entered into its life, and it into ours." This is something I experience in great moments. I can feel that connection to a subject, an interaction with it. I can feel getting into its world, and saying things that have personal relevance to me by talking about it. Interpreting is fascinating this way because the subject is deeply related to you just by virtue of your focusing on it, but it allows you to talk about something external to yourself. It is and isn't you. This is juicy.

I like his focus on relationship here, not only because it is accurate, but because it helps me correct another delusion I learned along the way. At some point I got the idea that "I" have to be smart enough for "it." "It" is masterful and "I" need to raise myself to that status by interpreting well. I think our culture makes it easy for us to fall into this approach. When you go to museums, for example, things are still quite traditional unfortunately, and they're very busy convincing you you're looking at masterworks. It's easy to feel small in comparison. I'm just some little shithole looking at amazing works by Insert Renaissance Master Here that have stood the test of time.

I've never been very persuaded by the myth of the great artist, so I love the stuff, of course by well-known authors, that criticizes it. But it can also be difficult for me to remind myself that these constructions aren't real, aren't primary, and they may exist, but so do many other things, and I don't have to take them as criticisms of me, or things I have to become. At heart, the subject, in a museum or not, is just another thing I'm relating to, and we are things that can affect one another. This gives me an increased openness to material. I can wonder, "how is this going to strike me today? what does it bring out in me and what do I see in it?" As Palmer writes: "our opening question should not be 'how logical is that thought?' but 'whose voice is behind it? what is the personal reality from which that thought emerged? how can I enter and respond to the relation of that thinker to the world?"

This allows me to be attentive and caring to all of my observations instead of worrying about which observations are 'smart' and which are 'hopelessly stupid.' I know this is silly, but there's something in me that wants to have an amazing interpretation of every artwork I come across. Just immediately. Like that. Because I am smart and awesome and cool. I cannot be the only graduate student to secretly want this. Who wouldn't? It would make life easier. And of course it doesn't happen. Because it can't. Because it's not reality. And not being in tune with, in relationship with reality is stressful because it's delusion, suffering.

So Palmer's approach reminds me to care about where truth is situated, in the relationship that is the encounter. There's nothing wrong with an encounter. It can involve silence, confusion, creativity, love, hate, boredom, anything. And it changes constantly. Palmer beautifully calls "the search for truth" "a continually uncertain journey." When I don't have to control the encounter by being the smartest, I can go more deeply into what comes. I can be more flexible yet more centered. Noticing the conditioning, my stress, can be part of the encounter. And I know from experience that this changes quite quickly. This often happens early on for me, but it's never the bulk of my relationship with a subject. The more I get into it, the more joy there is, and now I know that this is because I'm encountering it more fully instead of through punishing expectations. So now we have a nice fusion, because noticing the conditioning arising and passing away is a Buddhist technique, and being in relationship, knowing and being known by the subject, is Palmer's contribution.

The idea of a relationship with the "known," the pliability of the terms -- the knower is known and the known knows -- is also helpful because the effort is shared. I get quite a bit of worry around the ability to produce ideas. They need to come out, and what if they don't? What if I have nothing to say about this work, or enough ideas for the paper? I worry about sudden failure. This has never happened, but it's often felt like a real worry until, once again, it doesn't happen. With the idea of the encounter, the responsibility is shared. Of course the "known" object is not writing the paper for me. What I mean is that ideas get produced in the many encounters and relationships one has during the course of research, with the subject matter, with articles about it, with things by the artist, with my own flashes of inspiration and moments of unknowing, with my own writing process and its ups and downs. And on top of all that I can talk to colleagues and professors and learn from those encounters. Things are too layered and interesting and open for me to feel alone, that if I have no brilliant ideas I'll fall flat and die. Palmer's ideas about being in a relationship with the known give me a lot more to work with and take some burden off me.

The only thing I would add is that Palmer also talks about the importance of emotions in learning. When we relate to things, our whole person is present and it is only obstructive to ignore that. I love this because I feel like it isn't a problem for me to have my different emotions, whereas I've often worried that emotions made me weak and would distract me from insights. I used to feel like the way to work was to get lost in it, and it can be okay if that happens, there are advantages to that, but I'm allowed, even encouraged, to feel grounded in my body and centered in my heart, to invest myself as a living being in my work and in the classroom. Ups and downs are part of it, and I really want to keep infusing my intellectual life with dhamma and bringing out the amazing wholesomeness of learning. I want to shape my own ideas and contribute intellectually and I want the community's help in doing that. This is all possible, and I don't need to be anything other than myself for it all to happen.

Art comes into being through engaged relationships, between the artist and his concerns, his relationship to others and to issues of his time, between the artist and whatever medium or mediums he chooses, between him and his unconscious, or, to be more Barthesian about this, relationships between texts and intertexts, assumptions and interweavings put into play by the scriptor. Art, criticism, theory, scholarship are born and developed through complex and multilayered relationships and it is through relationships, the truth of many kinds of community, that these things stay alive and take on new resonance.

(PS -- too tired to explain opening quote -- fuck off! :-) )

Gabyhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9107696238785062203.post-38951936846238213342012-11-05T20:50:00.003-05:002012-11-05T20:50:44.054-05:00Spirituality and Education, Conditioning and Learning, a long part 1One of the things I've been doing lately is reading Parker Palmer. He is an educator and a Quaker, and is very interested in combining education with spirituality. I had heard of him because some dharma people like him, but I never thought to read him until his books popped up on Amazon, recommended based on other things I'd been reading. The one that grabbed me, and still feels most appropriate for my interests, is "To Know and Be Known: Education as a Spiritual Journey," which first came out as early as 1983 and also has a 10th anniversary edition.

I like it because it's very theoretical. This is both a strength and weakness of the book, and I'll discuss that more later. The book is about conceiving of learning anything in spiritual terms that enrich the learning process. Though it's clearly from a (liberal) Christian perspective, the book is neither about becoming Christian or only studying spiritual material. Palmer's doctorate is in sociology, and he writes in another book that when he focused on sociology of religion, he had to contend with professors who wanted to debunk anything religious. I like his approach here, on enriching your learning through a spiritual understanding of what that means, because two of the biggest things in my life, besides my totally wonderful boyfriend (see last post), are my Buddhist spiritual practice and my academic life. So the theoretical quality of his book gives it the openness to apply to a Buddhist former Jew who primarily studies modern art.

I see Dhamma as the center of my life, even when I'm not sitting as much as I could, and everything else radiates out from there. For me, my other wonderful tools, like Inner Relationship Focusing, Nonviolent Communication (we're meeting on my birthday!), Shalom retreats, and psychotherapy (with a fellow Buddhist meditator) are all aspects of my Dhamma practice. As you may be able to tell from reading this blog long enough, that practice stems largely from American applications of Theravada Buddhism as practiced by both the Thai forest masters and some Burmese sayadaws. Some of my favorite teachers are Kittisaro and Thanissara, anglophones (he is a Southern Jew and she is an Irish-born Englishwoman, what a fun couple!) who studied with Thai monastics and their English disciples. They do incorporate some Mahayana into their teaching and are into Kuan Yin compassion practices. I really resonate with their approach because it's rooted in my favorite Buddhist meditation tradition while also being open to other approaches. They are neither closed off nor so open that it all becomes an inchoate "all paths are really the same thing anyway" blob, which is a personal pet peeve. I could say a lot more than that, but for now, I'll direct you to Tahn Geoff's article "Perennial Issues."

I feel personally inspired by the commitment of Theravada Buddhist monastics, so I like to listen to and read Ajahn Sumedho, Ajahn Sucitto, Ajahn Amaro, and the super scholarly Bhikkhu Bodhi. These are Americans (Bodhi and Sumedho originally) and Englishmen (Sucitto, Amaro) trained in the Thai forest school, and they have all done a lot to bring it to the UK and US. I'm also really inspired by Theravada nuns like Ayya Anandabodhi, Ayya Medhanandi, and Amma Thanasanti who leads a weekly meditation and inquiry call on Sundays. On top of that, I like a lot of lay insight teachers, more of whom have practiced in Burma than Thailand. Carol Wilson gives really clear, wonderful talks, for example, so rooted in a really deep practice. I'm also inspired by Sayadaw U Tejaniya's approach (which I learned through her) because it's so focused on mindfulness of mind. I'm not into concentration practice for its own sake (read jhanas) and this is a very contested issue I'm not willing to go into here. There are a lot more lay teachers that I really like, but I've already spent a lot more time on this than I intended...

Before I got into spirituality -- which never happened when I grew up Jewish and was a total surprise to me as I encountered insight meditation -- I actually wanted something like it. I don't think I knew it or would have phrased it that way, but looking back it's clear. As a kid I felt sure that life was inherently meaningless, stupid and pathetic and that other humans were unreliable superficial bastards. A great base for spirituality, right? :-) Instead of giving up on everything, my goal for as long as I can remember was to find one thing, one way to make all the shit worth it.

I'm not sure why I had the good sense to approach things this way instead of just saying fuck it. That's never been my style. It probably had to do with the fact that my parents have always been very committed to their vocations, and so I learned how to get involved in something and wanted to do the same. I wanted one thing to basically be salvational for me, to be the space I could go for meaning, interest, fun, friendship, love, purpose, success. A tall order. At the time I saw this as the only way to live. Studying and writing about art, literature, and film, and eventually becoming a scholar, felt like the way to do this. It gave me a place for my passion and expression, and it gave me opportunities for success since I've always been pretty "good at it." It allowed me to look at fascinating things and think in new ways, to expand a world that felt oppressively narrow to me.

It actually felt like art -- from a scholarly, theoretical perspective -- was my saving grace. As I got further in my art history major, I saw the extent to which and the cleverness with which one of my other favorite things, that American megalith called "French theory," could be applied to things as bizarre and often ugly as modern and contemporary art, and I thought, "yeah, I wanna go with this, take this as far as it'll go."

In retrospect, what I liked about academics was finding something that mattered to me, plunging into it, having it change my relationship to the world and be something I could dedicate myself to. This is exactly what I've found with my Buddhist spirituality and meditation practice. I like it because it's so immersive. I can do retreats. I can go to my meditation center, which I chose not to do tonight due to the beginnings of a cold. I can study suttas. I can listen to dharma talks. I can practice mindfulness in daily life. I can observe my thoughts and feelings all the time and learn about the nature of mind and how to be free in its midst. I can do lovingkindness for people on the subway or street. I can feel sympathetic joy for my boyfriend and colleagues (the latter being like 100 times harder than the former...) Opportunities are endless. Waking up sucks a lot less this way.

Buddhist practice gets to pervade my life and give me direction, and I get to explore things in an authentic way on the cushion. The added benefit to spiritual life, the point of it, is that you suffer less, and have more tools when you suffer. You feel life suck less as a result of dhamma penetrating it more and more deeply. God that sentence is sexual. Oh well. With academic life, you may enjoy some or much of what you learn, but you don't necessarily suffer less. In fact, you can suffer a lot more because you get stressed and reliant on professor approval and certain grades and acceptances. You get reliant on producing "good" or "great" work which is not entirely in your control and not possible all the time, especially when you're learning a lot and things are new and challenging -- as in, grad school. So by the end of college I was beginning to learn that I had, unwittingly and with largely good intentions, put myself in a difficult position, because I was trying to depend on the undependable, achieve salvation through that which does not save. I was banging my head against the wall and expecting something great to happen, frustrated when my head just hurt more. This is the definition of suffering. I still suffer this way, but after almost four years of dharma practice, being more involved in various communities or sanghas, therapy, an adorable goatee'd boyfriend, and, let's face it, prozac, it's considerably better, and I get a lot more enjoyment out of every facet of life than I did as a college and high school student.

But it never seemed reasonable to me to give up academic things. I like them a lot. I never saw why meditation and study would need to be mutually exclusive, and I'm glad I didn't. I did take some time to pursue meditation without academics, and it was wonderful, but it was a season, and I never intended for that to be long term. It was part of my evolving relationship with both spirituality and my education. After a life where I was trying to have everything I wanted through my approach to education, it had become a huge strain, an endless suffering parade, and I needed to step back and pursue the spirituality element almost exclusively for a few months. It was awesome.

Since then I've been working on integrating the two. This feels like important life work to me, because I value them so much, and I want my academic life to be so suffused with my spiritual practice that despite the suffering inherent in it, I'm able to make work a lot like a living meditation and grow spiritually from it. My goal is not to stop spiritual practice, to have it seep into every aspect of my life, to live what Palmer calls an integrated or whole life, even when obsessively watching Law and Order SVU on Hulu. I do this not to live up to an ideal but for an eminently practical reason: life sucks less this way. I can be more present for my work when I meditate first. I can bring more clarity and joy to it when I can see where the suffering arises and be less identified with the suffering thoughts. Spiritual practice isn't about grades and productivity and being the greatest most creative person who ever lived, so when I infuse spirituality into my education I am less pressured.

I have a lot of conditioning around academics, around having tried to make it the world, around having lived with my parents who benefitted and failed and became bitter and confused by making their work their world without having any other, more direct way of approaching their minds and hearts. I feel personally ashamed, very ashamed, around the amount of suffering I've had, usually in the form of anxiety and perfectionism and self-doubt. Nonetheless, I've often been able to approach this suffering directly through meditation and therapy, and I feel like my life has benefitted very much from that. The space that was supposed to save me has become, at times, plenty of times, a personal torture chamber, and I feel that I am to blame for this, that I, single-handedly in my excessive and unwarranted neuroses, have ruined my ability to engage in what I love. That's my guilt. That's my story. In the process of changing, and I trust the process, as they say at Shalom...

So that's pretty much my top negative tune. Stuff around being a "fuck up." But at some level I know this isn't true. I value the journey I'm on, as corny as the expression may be.

I care about my academic life, most about my spiritual or inner or dharmic life, and about all the ways in which I can continue to integrate the two for the benefit of both. With the integration, I get more opportunities to practice dhamma since I don't have to irrationally drop my practice to work on a paper or reading. I get to engage more in my Buddhism while also bringing more joy and perspective to my academic life. Everything benefits from bringing spirituality to bear on something as awesome, joyful, wonderful, yet also as frustrating and decentering as learning. Practice gives me space to hold my conditioning around learning and to be less imprisoned by it. It gives me space for the joys and sorrows of it all. I have some places where I am often caught, where I continue to struggle, but I try to remind myself that this is just the way of practice, and what better way is there?

I've had a lot of change and progress in the summer and fall. My boyfriend feels like I deal with it all much better compared to when we started dating 15 months ago. So I struggle with feeling guilty, ashamed, deeply angry at myself, and feeling proud and excited about all the wonderful things in my life and how I approach it all with more gusto, integration, and less alienation. I've been finding that alienation can be studied and even appreciated (modernism, hello) while engaging more and more deeply in community. That's been a new thing for me over the last few years. I never expected to have such a fulfilling relationship or so many sanghas and empathy buddies. It's kind of insane, and this is one reason why I like to end my meditation sittings these says with a sharing of blessings. If my bullshit can contribute to other practitioners out there, of any tradition, it's pretty worth it.

May all beings receive the blessings of my life. Really.
Gabyhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9107696238785062203.post-17810031290995344832012-11-05T16:09:00.000-05:002012-11-05T16:12:53.243-05:00his n hersHey all. It's been an eventful week with hurricane Sandy here. I live downtown, so I lost power for close to a week, but my prince charming Fusion Warrior swept in and let me stay with him uptown. It was a fun and interesting experience. It was really nice to be so close to Boyface for that long, but it wasn't without its difficulties. Fusion loves trolling (internet for taunting) me. Sometimes I think it's adorable and sometimes I get impatient. It doesn't stop. So we walk a fine line with trolling, but I think that's normal in a relationship, especially one between two trolls. :-) For example:

Me: I am blogging about how you troll me a lot.
Boy: But you like it.
Me: Usually.
Boy: Always!
Me: ...Often.
Boy: *whisper* always!
Me: Grrrr!
Boy: Teeheehee!

Fusion lives with his family, and they're really nice, but I felt embarrassed staying for so long, and I wasn't always clear on where to go to get privacy. Fusion and I shared his room, which was nice bit a little small after a while, and he has a small study, but his dad is in there a lot and likes privacy. Much of the time we were next to each other on his bed, being cuddly, watching TV, doing stuff on the computer, and I did a lot of reading. I also struggled with wanting to help out and wanting to read, and then having no idea where things go because it's not my house. For example, without knowing it, I tried to recycle French fries. The boy is teasing me endlessly about this. It wasn't clear which one was the recycle bin!!!

I did a lot of sitting, so I was very glad to have dharma during this bizarre time and to have a cushion at his house. My meditation center has been closed for a week and the newly weekly young adult sit has had to be cancelled twice. The center is open again today though.

When we got stir crazy we walked around (by the time we could do that again, of course) and on Friday we had a fine time seeing two shows at the Met. On Thursday we paid a visit to my place, which was very cold, and it was hard to get from the powerless downtown to the relatively unscathed uptown. The busses were free, but extremely crowded, and the trains are still opening. We also got comics which was really fun and I got some tracing paper.

On Thursday we saw Boy's shrinkie, which was my second time seeing him. Basically, Fusion was going anyway and my shrinkie was cancelled due to power issues (ha, not that kind) so I tagged along. It was kind of fun, especially since I love all things therapeutic. Since I'd been there once before, I felt less awkward and said what was on my mind. I expressed my desire to do this on our way there and Fusion was cool with it. I didn't want to spring anything on him. It was fun and I felt understood. Boyface was very quiet because he was getting sick and was tired. Now it's my turn to be getting sick. Boy is out getting me things as we speak.

It's amazing though how different Fusion's therapy is from mine. His is 45 minutes and it felt incredibly short. Mine is technically a "50 minute hour" but we always do the full 60. My shrinkie basically has to kick me out. I have trouble stopping. I work on it, but it's an ongoing project... It's like this blog right now. When I start I just don't stop. Also, Fusion and his shrinkie are a lot more casual. They just kinda shoot the breeze and Boyface shows him cool things about Deadpool. I feel like a lot of it is chatting with some good therapy thrown in. I think this is a fine strategy, and I can tell that Boy and his Shrinkie have a great rapport. Of course that relationship is what matters most.

It also feels odd to me, unfamiliar, because my approach is much more "down to business" shall we say. I want to pack in everything from the week and mine it for insights, or just get the clarity and relief of communicating it. I do have a friendly relationship with my shrinkie, too. I joke with her, as with everyone, and I often start sessions by showing her iPhone photos of things that Boychik and I have done together. She's always very complimentary of the pictures and of how cute we are, because this is an indisputable fact. :-) I tell her about things like Comic Con and often explain my silly shirts to her. She always likes this. On Adventure Time shirts I have pointed out which character is which and told her she would be quizzed. Which of course did not happen. One time I wore a shirt with Jake the Dog in the pocket. Shrinkie thought this was adorable, of course, and I told her that Jake is doing an internship in psychoanalysis and is observing us today to get a sense of other kinds of therapy.

So our relationship is friendly, but instead of having the "shoot the breeze" attitude that Boychik and his shrinkie seem to have, I want to get everything in during the hour. I share voicemails and emails, usually from my delightful (sigh) mother, talk about how I'm feeling at school, about experiences in meditation if they are relevant (this is why it's nice to have a Buddhist shrink), about the difficult mind patterns I'm experiencing and how I'm dealing with it, and existential issues, just how I'm feeling about life. My birthday is tomorrow, and I'm happy about this, and already had a big dinner with the boy, but I feel like I'm really getting old! I usually tell her every reason why I think I'm screwed up, and she says I'm just human and basically that my parents deny that they have any difficult feelings so when I have normal feelings I think I'm retarded. She doesn't say it that way of course.

So I consider my therapy very meaty, and that's exactly how I want it. I go twice a week just for more meat. And this way I don't have to worry about not "getting through it all" on the first day. I want to get in there with any and all issues that are coming up in my life. I do tell her about tense moments with the boy, but I don't spend a lot of time on this because the boy and I deal with it well. It helps when you're in a relationship with a sweetie! We don't stay mad. We communicate a lot. I date a straight male who is a great communicator -- what will they come up with next! I like to think my NVC skills add to the mix also. I spend a lot more time talking about my anxieties about life and being "smart enough" because I get very triggered around that. So at the risk of being simplistic, overall I'd say that my preferred therapy strategy is to dive in while the boychik and his dude do more hanging out, establishing the relationship. I don't think one way is better than another. I know I would be dissatisfied with his therapy if it were mine on a regular basis because my meat quotient doesn't get full. But it's not mine. And I'm really glad he has something that works for him and that his shrink is a totally nice and open guy. I like to think that we have "his and hers shrinks" -- what fun! Every relationship should.

Even with the little things that would come up, normal during a hurricane (or even not during one), after spending so much time with the boyface I just love him even more now. I think he's the sweetest, most generous, genuine, adorable person, and he lights up my life. I love that I can tell him anything and he really cares and listens. I love that I tell him how screwed up I am and he doesn't even agree and continues to really love me. I love that he *finally* took my suggestion of shaving and has gone from his "wolverine beard" back to his mustache and goatee, which is a very cute look on him. I love that we take turns helping each other out. I love that we're the best couple ever.Gabyhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com