I've been having a busy social time lately, especially compared to the last couple of COVID years. I go skating with a few women and I attend lyra classes where afterwards we talk/get a beer. I've been feeling uninteresting during these times, at a loss for what to talk about. At the same time, in settings like class at SMC, I've been consciously trying to go in low/easy. Listen more, be present in my body, pay attention to the people and dynamics around me before I jump to any course of action. Hang back, essentially. I've always done that, but in a shy/panicked way. My head's been too full of terror to let in information like, Oh that person's nervous. Or: those two seem to like each other. Or: that person seems smart and pleasant to be around. I'm wondering if that strategy is at all good within a small group of people, who already know each other, who are already friends. Should I be wracking my brain for questions in order to get a conversation going? Should I practice being okay with that silence -- not stress it, see if anything spools out? I'm ready to except a large number of small failures in other areas of my life -- I expect it. Is it okay to expect some failed conversations in this social context? Or is the risk there of tanking/losing those connections forever? Is that kind of failure, the awkward silence, the lull, the fear that I might not have anything interesting to say as a person in general, so painful that it must be avoided at all costs? Will it always be remembered and henceforth avoided? Worth experimenting with, probably. (But of course it's not like I design theses "experiments" with any kind of rigor. There are no controls, no isolated variables. The results I get are happenstance and vague at best. Plus of course it's as damaging to one's sense of reality to learn the wrong lesson as it is to persistently learn no lessons at all.)
BLog Time!
Hagen, Sofie – HAPPY FAT
Published: 2019
Read: 3/2022
I listened to Richard Herring interview Sofie Hagen in a retro RHLSTP. It was the first time I’d ever heard of Hagen, and I liked her enough that I got her book from the library. Happy Fat is a memoir/collection of essays on being fat and on fat liberation. I’ve read similar books to this – Shrill by Lindy West comes to mind, also Hunger by Roxane Gay – but I figured it would be okay for me to tread some old ground. This book had lots of explanatory footnotes for terms that people might not be familiar with. I appreciated that even though (or especially because) the tendency in a lot of these kinds of books is, I’ve done a whole lot of labor already (says the author) why don’t you just google whatever terms you don’t know. Fair enough. But it was also nice to just have Hagen explain it to me (or to confirm my understanding of whatever it was).
I am not a fat woman, but I’ve been preoccupied with the idea of fatness since I was a child. I wrote a journal entry when I was a first grader complaining about how my tights made me look fat. (Also, I wore tights in first grade? Fancy.) When I look in the mirror, I have eagle eyes for it. Evidence of fat. Small swellings of fat. Reading Hagen’s book made me a little self conscious; I thought, well being thin is the only thing I have going for me aesthetically. If being thin doesn’t matter, then I’m ugly indeed. That’s not nice, or the intended message, I’m sure. I could always change other things up: clothes, hair, makeup. Get some foundation under these old eye bags. I’m not a fat woman, but the idea of fat acceptance still sunk in a bit. I did lyra on Sunday and it was too hot for the outfit that I was wearing so I did it in just my sports bra. I posted that video, because it was a good one, on Instagram. Is that anything, I wonder? I mean is it anything political, as it’s coming from not a fat woman? I’m also far from a model. It’s not a perfect or filtered body that I’m putting out on the internet. It feels to me just like a factual thing, kind of dull. Maybe to some extent, I’m meant to be in it instead of look at it, my body I mean. There are all these lenses through which we can see things. See bodies. Through the lens of a magazine, airbrushed being the expectation. Through the lens of a lover, a critic, a historian just looking for body counts. As a product of evolution. Through the lens of a scientist. Of a parent or sibling. There isn’t really a stand-alone lens of the self. How to view the body through the lens of the self. It’s as if we need to borrow another one, an outside one, in order to start looking.
Rating: ★★★
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