I listened to another episode of Fatcast. They’re up to ten now, with a couple of extra unnumbered episodes thrown in. Yesterday they talked about exercise and it was so awesome that I feel the need to tell you what they talked about. Sometimes just saying “listen to this” isn’t enough after all.

First of all I should say that they ALSO talk about why they love exercise; Lesley says she feels like a gazelle when she swooshes away on the elliptical for hours on end, and Marianne talks about how she loves running because of the impact with every step she takes, and how it makes her go “wow, I’m HEAVY, and it’s awesome”.

But the part that I found the most interesting was when they spoke about why exercise is such a double-edged sword for most people. And not even in the whole disordered eating becoming obsessed with working out kind of way.

A few things they talked about:

* How classist and ableist it is to assume that a) everyone can afford a membership to a gym, b) everyone has the TIME to go to the gym three-four or more times a week, c) everyone has the ability to run, jump, skip, etc, for hours every week. And in many cases, at least in the U.S. you need a car to get to a gym, and the less than stellar neighbourhoods has no gyms nearby. None. It’s the whole grocery store desert all over again.

* It might be sexist too, and Marianne said this bit awesomely:

“So it’s classist and it’s ableist to have all these cultural expectations that everybody is going to exercise in this one particular fashion and I would also say it’s sexist because it’s predominantly women. There was this study recently about how women past a certain age need to up their exercise an hour a day to maintain their youthful figure or whatever. And that pissed me off on so many levels, I mean, there’s so much WRONG with that kind of bullshit, both from an ageism perspective and a sexism perspective and a general fuck-off-it’s-my-body-perspective.”

* Somehow, in many ways it’s become some sort of demented truth that ONLY THE GYM counts. Like, going out dancing for three hours straight or playing football with your kids in the park doesn’t count. It has to be at the gym and it has to be torturous, apparently.

* The TV thing, and with that I mean that kids are said to spend a lot more time in front of the TV these days, and how people are horrified that it means they’re sitting still. Lesley points out that there’s like a hundred other ways this is troubling, and as somebody who watched some American kids TV with a boy I was babysitting… yeah. I agree.

* Fat people are told they have to work out to become thinner, BUT most of them have grown up learning that going outside in ill-fitting clothes (because workout wear for fats is hard to find), especially to a place where most others are fit and capable of much more than you, is a bad idea. And this is hard to re-learn.

* Just the idea of a gym, especially the big franchises are in many ways advertised as a way of losing weight, and more than that, has ads where everyone is skinny and perfect, which is a way makes you feel like, and I quote “it’s trying to erase your body and it’s trying to erase you as a physical being”.

Marianne talked further of this from a feminist perspective:

“As women we are taught that we need to minimise ourselves, that we need to, you know, take up as little space as possible, that we need to have as small of a physical body as possible and I feel very strongly that that is an actual physical manifestation of the minimising of women’s power and embodiment and self-will and all that stuff.”

So, yes. Regardless of size it’s not as easy as it sounds to “make time” for this stuff. And if you’re fat you have all this extra stuff to work through to get there. And even if you do, you are sometimes made to feel like once or twice a week isn’t enough and makes no difference so why should you bother?

I do want to point out that once you do make it to the gym there’s no pointing and laughing, there’s people of all sizes, everyone works out to the best of their abilities and the trainers (of which I’ve talked to two), while skinny and lean (the women) or ridiculously muscled and shiny (the men) do NOT talk about weightloss unless you specifically ask. They’re happy to find you a workout route that works depending on your abilities and while I was scared shitless the first time I’ve come to love that place.

And that was something I never thought I’d say.

Anyway. Listen to this episode. It’s fascinating as it talks about both the cultural expectations, about the actual physical act of making it to the gym, of alternate versions of exercise (dancing around your living room in your underwear was my favourite), of why they exercise and find it fun, and of course there is a rant about workout wear for fat people…

There’s always at least one rant. It’s awesome.

Last but not least, there’s a few programs to help you get started, if the gym is scary. Tansy talked about Life Be In It, which sounds great but has such a couch-potato-fat-hating comic on the webpage that it makes me want to hit things. I’m told there are good things about it, but as I’ve not experienced it myself I’m not sure if I should actually be linking to it. In the podcast they also talk about the Couch to 5k project, which I looked up. It sounds fairly good, but requires you to run with a stopwatch or knowing the exact distance you run, which is a bit on the obsessive side.

Anyway. Podcast. Listen.

I stole all these from my sister’s Facebook. That’s what it’s there for, right? Anyway, probably boring if you don’t know my family, but this is my blog, and thus I post boring picture of faces that tell you nothing. I did, btw, manage a full five hours of socialising, new goal reached!

There was Sangria and lots of cousins and their friends, although half the clan didn’t arrive until half an hour before I had to leave. Which was midnight. Damn, I’m getting old.

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See? We do raise on of these.

And then we dance around it, like madwomen.

Family.

In the evening we sent our parents off to our grandparents summer house, and had our own little party at our cousins’ summer place. And I tried to help in the kitchen, but cousin Frida and her friend Linda were busy arguing about who should do this and that and that and this, so I went outside and had a drink instead.

Industrial size fairylights.

Beer and ridiculous amounts of meat on the barbecue. I brought my own quite delicious tofu, thank you for asking.

Cousin Sofia and I, and something weird is going on with my hair.

Hanging out.

Cousin Lisa.

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Yes, I have a lot of cousins. Yes, they’re all awesome. And this is less than half of them…

It’s Midsummer, one of our biggest holidays of the year. It’s always the Friday following summer solstice, and it’s delightfully void of any religious connotations. Some say the shape of the thingy you raise and dance around (see pic) is obviously phallic and has to do with pagan fertility rites, but according to Wikipedia (which obviously knows EVERYTHING) it hasn’t been proved.

Mostly it’s an excuse to do shots (many, many shots), fall over drunk in a heap and do things you regret the following day. I’m going to a party tonight, but I’m not going to drink much. I’m instead armed with my camera that my sister claims has a “Russia a la 1987″-filter, that makes everyone look dreary and grey and ugly, but that’s a story for another day…

In all, the last few weeks have been a bit insane. I finally started what I call “pretendy work”, which is basically a project where people who have been on sick leave for a long time go to hang out and take walks and do crafty things, as a way of getting back into routines and seeing other people. It hasn’t gone so well, because I don’t function very well in the mornings, but next week I’m going to try afternoons instead, and see if that works better.

I say afternoonsssss as if I go there every single day. It’s a once a week occasion, for the time being. But yes, I’ve been doing that, and I’ve gotten a therapist (finally!) and he’s asking some really difficult questions, but in the end… I think he’s helping. One thing that he’s doing is giving me sheets of paper where I’m supposed to record the things I do during my days, what level of anxiety they cause and how it makes me feel. I was very surprised to see that I’d actually managed to do things that would cause me to curl into a ball only a few months ago. Nothing big, really, mostly things like phone calls and voice mail, something I had a very hard time with for a long time. Maybe some time I will actually be able to make phone calls as well!

I also saw a physical therapist for my knees, which helped a lot, although the daily stretches are a bit of a pain. They do help, though, together with the little knee braces he told me to go buy.

Currently I’m writing a story about my home town, just to see if I could. It’s kind of fun and has involved research about how it used to look a few hundred years ago. I think I might have to visit the museum too. It’s tiny, but I still remember this model of this town in medieval times, from when I was about ten. I don’t think I’ve been there since.

I’ve been doing a lot of short stories as of late, because I’m in a period where I’m kind of doubting my ability to pull together a novel length plot. It’s just kind of daunting, so doing bite size writing instead has been a nice break. Except, of course, that the last “short story” I wrote morphed into a novella instead…

Ah, yes. Being succinct has never been my thing.

Technically there’s no cheese in this dish. None. I do however like it better than the regular from scratch version I tried, I guess because I’m so much better at vegan cooking than I’ll ever be at any other kind of foodage. This is, of course, not vegan unless you use soy/oat/ricemilk instead of regular, but that goes without saying. This one’s for about four people.

Ingredients:
6 dl or 600 ml worth of pasta (we don’t measure pasta in weight here)
vegetables of your choice (for me, bell peppers, corn and broccoli)
half a chopped onion
2.5 dl or 250 ml milk of your choice
4 tbsps nutritional yeast
2 tbsps cornstarch mixed with equal amount of water
salt, pepper, chilipowder, turmeric

Directions
Put the oven on 200°C. While it heats up, cook the pasta and vegetables (I only steamed the broccoli, the rest I used as is), and mix it all together.

Sautee the onion in some olive oil. When it looks like it’s mostly done, add the nutritional yeast, stir it all together and pour the milk in. Spice it up quite a bit. The salt is the most important, and the turmeric follow no function except to make the food Kraft-dinner-yellow.

Mix cornstarch and water and pour this in too. Stir as it simmers, and let it cook until it thickens. If you want you can make a roux instead, it’s actually my preferred method, but apparently it doesn’t work with glutenfree flour.

Put it all in a casserole dish, sauce on top, and put in the oven for… uh. 10-15 minutes, I think. I forgot to check.

I’m reading a very interesting essay in four parts about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I don’t have it, but the way it’s described is spot on for how my social anxiety is working. Long quote, but bear with me:

Hyper-arousal is more or less the physical equivalent of hyper-vigilance. In my experience, it’s the single most common PTSD symptom, at least in people whose trauma involved violence.

Imagine you’re watching a horror movie, and the music builds and builds, and oh no! She’s going to the basement! She’s walking down the stairs… feeling for the light switch… The moment of your highest tension, right before the jump-cut to the monster that makes you scream, is what hyper-arousal feels like. Only more intense, and all the time. Usually including in your sleep. If you can get to sleep.

Sudden noises make you jump. Sudden motion makes you jump. Touch makes you jump. You’re taut as a guitar string. Walking down a busy street, with all those cars moving fast and making noise, is like running a gauntlet. You sweat. Your heart pounds. You breathe fast. You always want to look over your shoulder.

Once when I was in a really bad state, someone admired the necklace I was wearing, then reached out to touch it. Normally that would have been fine, since I had warning, but I was so edgy that I jumped back, without meaning to.

“Er… may I touch your necklace?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said, figuring that it would be fine since I knew it was coming and vowing to stay still, like a normal person. She reached out her hand toward me. Just like it had the first time, it felt as if someone had suddenly and without warning lunged toward me in a threatening manner. Entirely without volition, I jumped backward.

That is what I meant earlier about some PTSD symptoms making you feel and act as if you are losing your mind.

I call it sensory overload. I’ve no idea if that’s a proper term, but there you go.

Today I have, in addition to the crafty things, done the following:

- Got a hair cut. It’s shorter than ever! If “ever” is code for “eleven years”. This marks my first use of Photobooth on my shiny Macbook, and I’m not even going to tell you how many attempts it took to make me look almost presentable. When my sister saw this pic she said “but don’t you know that you need to take the pic from above and give the camera the emo look?” Sadly I can’t bring myself to flirt with the camera. I tried. I only end up looking like I’m possessed. I’m not even kidding.

- Watched two football games, none which involved RVP, pictured above. He’s just my favourite boy crush. And no, I’m not ashamed. What I did watch was Mexico-South Africa and France-Uruguay. In the former Vela did three ALMOST assists and was pulled off the pitch in the eighty-something-th minute without ever finishing anything up. Game ended 1-1, and I missed Mexico’s goal because I strangely enough got sucked into a hiphop playlist I’m composing… France game ended 0-0 and was immensely boring, but both Gallas and Sagna got hacked down. I think we can safely say that Gallas is just old and squeaky and would snap in half if anyone looked at him for too long, and that Sagna was lucky that he didn’t break his leg. They’re all gonna come back broken. Damn World Cup.

- Been told to hashtag all my football tweets so people can filter them out.

-Did I mention the hiphop playlist? I know. It’s so not my kind of music, but I got this idea that working out will be awesome with music with a nice beat to it. First thing I did was fall in love with Janelle Monáe, who is, um, not hiphop. But she’s brilliant, and I’ve been listening to this song ALL DAY. In short, she’s beautiful, an amazing dancer, her hair defies gravity and in this video everyone – and I mean EVERYONE – wears suits with bowties and cute little black-and-white shoes. It’s quite refreshing, and I can’t watch her dance enough. And I never care about those things. (I found some proper hiphop too, don’t worry.)

- Realised that, yes, my cats sneaks out the window and sits all rolled up on the window sill OUTSIDE my third story window, all calm. The day she sees a bird, however, we’re in trouble. Must be better about closing it all the way.

- Finished reading Valiant, from Holly Black’s Modern Faerie Tale trilogy. I thought it was the second book, but now I’m not so sure, because the first and second had totally different POVs and the main character in the first was only in one scene of the second. I might’ve read the third, or she neatly brings the two of them together in the third book, tying all loose ends up.

There was more, but now I can’t remember. Am so very tired.

Today was our national day, which, generally we (as in my family) don’t celebrate, but it was also a Sunday and the weather was nice, so we did a barbecue thing. Just because. It was nice, and I got to wear my birthday dress, which I love, although it’s slightly too big in the chest area, and slightly too small over the arse, which makes it ride up in the back. Such is the life of the dis-proportionate, I suppose.

Anyway. Took some pictures, most which I will not post, because it’s only so much fun to look at a hundred pictures of various flowers. I think because it’s the first summer in I don’t know how many years that I feel well enough to pay attention to anything but my own anxiety (depression makes you not only selfish, but boring as well), it feels like I’m seeing it for the first time. It’s quite something.

So, here you go. Picture time!

When the sky is nearly as blue as the flag it’s a good day.

I love their house so much. It’s amazing and makes me so happy, every time I go there.

They have three kinds of lilac, white, pale purple and this freaky colour that looks like it’s been seriously photoshopped. It hasn’t. Promise.

My parents apparently have some kind of aversion to looking into the camera.

The cat is unimpressed with the camera, but the honeysuckle always makes me happy. It smells like home.

I suppose I could’ve picked a more flattering pose. Or possibly a smile.

Mum FORGOT to add tamari to my marinade (they used icky wheaty soy sauce), as you can see, so I spent a lot of time obsessively brushing it over the tofu as E. superglued little Simpsons people to their chairs and dad poked the meat with a fork. Despite the picture the tofu came out yummy and afterwards we had fresh (store bought) strawberries.

Mostly I’m waiting for the weather to get warm enough for the strawberries and raspberries in the garden to get ready. It’ll take another month or one and a half, but once they’re here it’s delicious and awesome.

And with that said it’s nearly bedtime. Tomorrow is weaving day and the day after that I am going to my pretendy-work thing for the first time. Am nervous, but I should be able to manage once a week. I hope.

You may have noticed my lack of posts. It’s related to several things: a) having a writing related everything-I-do-is-crap-crisis (not to worry, they come and go pretty frequently), b) I started blogging in Swedish (although haven’t shared the URL with anyone), and c) well, there is no C.

Anyway. Planning on a big shiny book purchase soon, so this is a reminder to myself:

Black, Holly: White Cat
Green, John and Leviathan, David: Will Grayson, Will Grayson
Rayner Roberts, Tansy: Power and Majesty
Rees Brennan, Sarah: The Demon’s Covenant

Also? I’ve started going for runs. In the forest. The first time it nearly killed me. By now I’ve realised that whoosing along on the threadmill is a hundred times easier. I’m now running nearly half of my twenty minutes! Very exciting.

I believe that is all for today.

About six months ago I wrote a post on Glee and disability and said some things, mostly defending the show. It didn’t go over so well, probably because it wasn’t very well thought through, and I have since deleted and regretted and blah blah blah. Of course, none of the people who thought I was being wrong on the internet (which, maybe I was, or maybe I just didn’t articulate it right, or…) then didn’t see me admit that I actually was…

And this is why I’m kind of hesitant to write this. Because I don’t want to put my foot in AGAIN.

But guys, Glee is getting worse. I know that they try to be all inclusive and talking about important stuff, but it’s not going so well. I feel like since I defended it, it’s gotten continously worse, and it makes me sad.

Don’t get me wrong, it still has its moments, the songs are (usually) amazing, but the storylines… Meh.

(SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS behind the cut)

Read the rest of this entry »

So, I’m BAD at sending parcels. A couple of weeks ago, when Tansy told me she would send me my birthday presents I kind of panicked as I STILL hadn’t sent her my Christmas one, and vowed to send her that one, so she’d get it before I got mine. And yesterday it came! Have I sent mine? Hell no.

Um. Yes. So I am a bad friend, or just a horrible procrastinator. Possibly both. But the contents of this one was so absolutely awesome that I squeed for hours, and then I took pictures and then the cat approved each present and KIDNAPPED one of them so I had to chase her down and take it back…

And now I will share it with you guys. My fifteen faithful readers. (Actually, I just checked and I have about thirty readers a day now! Exciting times!)

Anyway. Here comes awesomeness.

Box. With address blurred, and an outrageous amount of postage. And yes, I always takes pictures of the box when I get parcels from far away. The best one came from China. Sadly a business-y sort of parcel, I don’t have friends in China. (I limit myself to Australia, USA and Scotland these days. And, um, Sweden, of course.)

I got this awesome card, the envelope addressed to me by Raeli! This is actually the back of the card, which she decorated lovingly, and was so meticulous that she was late for school, I’m told.

Inside!

Recipe magazine and BOOKS. I’m very excited about these two, I’ve been wanting to read Dear Swoosie as I am a co-writer too, and want to see how these two do it, and I haven’t read anything by Margo except for Tender Morsels, which I loved so it will be fun to see some of her shorter work (this is a short story collection, right?).

Tansy’s dear friend Isabel got me this! It’s gorgeous, handspun, kitty approved yarn that I have hid away on accounts of her not kidnapping it. Again. It’s too pretty to be mauled by cat, whatever she says about it. (Yes, the cat. Shut up.) But yes. Thank you, Iz!

(I would tell you to get on Twitter and play with all of us, but Tansy says it would kill you.)

And here comes the present that blew my mind. It’s a beautiful quilt with FOOD and lots of inside jokes woven in. And also? Each of these pieces are HAND STITCHED together.

There’s blueberries and cupcakes and cakes and strawberries and cherries and raspberries and peas and sheep and rosebuds and so much awesome stuff that I never want to stop looking at it.

Also, it makes me want to take up quilting.

Two of the edges are beautifully jagged like this, which I love. And of course the whole thing is edged with blueberry binding, yay to writing books about blueberry farms!

(Although, I was suspicious towards blueberry farms when we started, here you just go out into the forest and TAKE blueberries. Whenever you want to.)

This is the back, all raspberries and strawberries and yum. I meant to take a pic of the label, actually, but when I flipped it right-side-up the angle got so weird that I felt kind of seasick looking at it. So you’ll have to turn your computers (or your heads) upside down to read that one.

And to read more about the process of making this quilt, check out Tansy’s blog.

Last but not least, any takers for how long it will take for me to send her HER birthday present? Seeing as her birthday is in late May (so soon!) I bet it will be for Christmas. But maybe I’ll at least get the Christmas one to her by her birthday…

I just have to buy more chocolate to replace the one I accidentally ate…