Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

Dear E-mail Interface,

Please do not auto-correct "et al" to "at all." "Dear [name] at all," makes us both look stupid. Well, it would. I corrected it. Now it just makes you look stupid.

(In fact, didn't I tell you not to auto-correct anything? I'm changing that option again, but how did it get changed back? Harumph.)

Sternly,
M'ris

Dear Clothing Manufacturer,

I realize why it would be beneficial to you to sell overlapping but non-identical sets of clothing in your stores and on your website: you can try to sell more things to people if they have to go both places to see the stock. But can you please not pretend that it is some kind of favor to me? "Internet exclusive" means "available to anyone who has a computer or can get into a public library." Just admit that it's for your own benefit as a for-profit business, since we already know that's what you are, and move along.

Not impressed,
M'ris

Dear My College,

This "making an unmarked field of people's former homes" thing: it does not do you credit. Engraved paving stones cost less than $100 apiece. Look into it. Also: it'll be ten years in March. Plant some damn trees around the Shakespeare Pit already. Without the trees it's just a hole in the ground. Nobody likes a denuded Shakespeare Pit. It's unsightly.

Good job on seeing how cool Jen is, though. Rah rah rah, well done skool skool skool, as the man says.

Oh, all right, at least a little bit of love,
M'ris

People. I woke up this morning with bad fantasy novel heroine bedhead. No kidding: when it says, "Her hair was a tangle of curls around her heart-shaped face," and you know that she's supposed to look just adorable but when you wake up your hair always looks postpunk at best? My face is the same shape it always was, but my hair is doing that thing this morning. It is winsome. It is fetching. Quick, everybody come look, before I put it in that fork dealie to keep it off my neck while I work out and mess it up permanently. I may never have bad fantasy novel heroine bedhead again.

Also the crick in my neck is substantially improved.

Also the fridge appears to still be fixed after this weekend.

I know entropy is still winning, but if you squint just right....

I was looking through sale items at a store online, and I came upon a certain skirt. "Hey!" I said to myself. "If I bought that skirt, I would be the Sympathetic Grown-Up in an E. Nesbit story!"

Then it occurred to me that I already am that model of Sympathetic Grown-Up. Mostly. Without quite so many self-contradictory class issues. And with more of a personal life than the later, C. S. Lewis model of Sympathetic Grown-Up.

I bought the skirt.

I hope it fits.

I hope those of you who are celebrating Passover have a good one. My own religious observances have gone almost entirely non-traditional this year: Maundy Thursday will involve sharing a meal with friends, but likely not bread, and possibly not wine, either, depending on what they have at Cambodian restaurants. (Insert Haugean rant about beer and Twinkies here.) Good Friday has been eaten whole by Minicon. markgritter and I will go to church Easter morning, but then I'll go back up to the con. Probably no Easter Dinner per se -- no guests, no plans to go anywhere, and no intentions of roasting some large hunk of meat whole. No Easter Egg Hunt -- I mean, I could hide treats for missista, but I don't think she'd really get what it had to do with Jesus. (Umm. Now that I bring it up....) I will probably listen to "Jesus Christ Superstar" today, tomorrow, or Friday morning, though, so that's a pretty important observance for me, and one it's easy not to miss. (This is where the whole "devout but not orthodox" thing comes in.) At worst, I can listen to it on my way to the con hotel.

I spent a chunk of this time of year explaining to half the people in my life that, yes, they knew it was Easter, that's why they scheduled the convention then (so that people would have time off), and then turning around and explaining to the other half that, yes, it actually is a religious holiday for me, not just for my relatives.

We are in that time-honored stage of pre-con time, the "ack! what do I wear?" stage. The weather appears cooperative enough, because I don't want to wear wintry things. What I really want is for cpolk to be my fairy godmother and wave her wand over her patterns and come out with a beautiful blue sundress and maybe a green A-line skirt and maybe (if I had been working really hard in the ashes) something full-skirted and red. Also, while you're at it, the sparkly unicorn that shoots rainbows out its horn and...wait, this phrasing is where I got myself into trouble before. It does not help that I would prefer not to wear jeans and a T-shirt to the Thursday dinner we've just added to the agenda. I think this is a "when in doubt, look at the jewelry" situation. Hmmmmm.

magentamn did a quiz thing, and I wanted bits of stuff to poke at while I worked on the first scene with the Ojafnatharmen, so here we go:

( Read more... )

(Long time passing?)

I am no longer super.

( not *too* personal, but personal enough )

Still. Sigh. Sic transit etc.

Okay, people. I, too, am concerned with Hollywood's focus on emaciated actresses. I, too, find it alarming that unhealthy body types are being held up as ideal and as the only ideal. (The idea of anything being the only ideal is alarming regardless of what that only ideal would be.) But can we please stop it with the force-feeding comments? If you came upon people admiring extremely large women and someone said to them, "That woman ought to be chained and starved for three weeks for her own good," would you not have an issue with that? If not, you should. Some people do need medical treatment for eating and weight-related problems, but last I heard, "hold her down and force-feed her a sandwich" was not really an accepted treatment for anorexia, bulimia, or any other eating disorder I have ever heard of.

(Why is it always a sandwich? Because lasagna is too messy and you're not sure you can get good naan for force-feeding bites of curry in that neighborhood? Because ice cream melts and you're not sure you'll be able to make it backstage in time? Why sandwiches?)

I am disturbed by people who cannot distinguish between thinness and anorexia.

I am also disturbed by people who assume that everyone really, truly, deep-down appreciates the dominant social notions of beauty and only endures involvement with mortals of different shape, style, and hue because of resignation to one's fate or some kind of noble high-mindedness. Sure, I prefer geeks for conversation and non-sexual interaction, but I am also allowed to enjoy the geekotypes we commonly see around us on an aesthetic basis! It's not charity, dammit! I do not put up with the scruffy beard in order to get at the book collection! I'm allowed to like both! ("Scruffy beard" is a stand-in for all sorts of traits and geekotypes, some of which are beardless. Still.)

I almost lost another contact lens. Since that would be the second in about three months and also the second in fourteen years of wearing contacts, I am mightily relieved that markgritter found it for me, reminding me once again that I keep him around for more than decoration.

I'm not feeling very fabulous today, but I'm hoping it's the kind of non-fabulous that goes away soon if you pamper it. I have a hierarchy of things to wear when sick. It goes like this:

Too sick to stand up for a five-minute shower*. Wearing whatever pajamas I put on before falling over. This is very rare.

Fresh jammies after the shower. This is giving in entirely to The Sick. But sometimes it's just the best thing. In the winter, plaid Portuguese flannel. In the summer, cotton washed into oblivion.

Sick Clothes. I'm wearing sick clothes today. They're composed of geeky T-shirts, leggings (which I haven't worn for five years at least and didn't wear much as outerwear even then), and large fuzzy things over top, flannel shirts or old tatty sweaters or something. Slippers. No bra, because any activity requiring support is too much time vertical.** All garments chosen for individual comfort rather than because they come anywhere near matching each other. While sick clothes would not get me arrested in public, I don't wear them out of the house, and if someone who counts as people*** is coming into the house, I'd change out of sick clothes.

Sick But Stubborn Clothes. Jeans, baggy warm tops, things I can wear to Byerly's if everyone else is sick or out of town or something and I absolutely have to go to Byerly's.

I'm Not Sick Dammit Clothes. My normal clothes worn at an inappropriate time. Usually more form-fitting and/or revealing. Often in colors that look lovely when I'm well and emphasize the three-days-dead nature of Norwegian-girl-skin when sick.

What do you wear when you're sick?

*And I hate baths. HATE. Baths feel like punishment to me. They're like naps in that you're supposed to lie very still in the middle of the day and not do anything. With no one to talk to and nothing to read lest you drop it in the tub. Ick. And they're unlike naps in that naps, despite all their other flaws, do not get progressively colder unless something is very wrong.

**For those of you who don't know, I get dizzy easily when sick. Or when not sick, actually. I can mostly predict when I'm going to fall over these days, so I sit down or lie down and try to avoid it as best I can. Still, if you're with me in person and I say that I'm dizzy, please take it seriously. Do not just let me fall and gape like a fish like certain high school friends not on this friendslist once did.

***Generally it is a good thing not to count as people, but it has its disadvantages. Being greeted with eye-searing combinations of sickwear, for example. I managed to combine olive green, bright-bright orange, cherry red, black, and navy in a particularly comfortable set of sick clothes last winter. If I'm still icky tomorrow, I'll probably wear exactly that, because it was just right. But hideous, my land, hideous.

I've seen lots of people link to this entry, the one about the Size 6 Harem. It frustrates me immensely, because the person who reposted it says in a comment that she believes the story literally, that the writer went to a large department store and was told they didn't sell skirts as large as a 14 or a 16 and focused 4s and 6s. And I call bullshit. Show me the "large American department store" that doesn't stock skirts in 14s or 16s, and I will show you the empty building with the tumbleweed blowing through it. Every large American department store I've ever seen has had a "plus sizes" section that went larger than a 16 -- and no, I'm not claiming that the larger sizes are stocked well or even adequately, but I am claiming that it's absolutely ridiculous to claim they're not there at all, if you're talking about a 14 or a 16 as a "larger size." (Which it isn't: I forget whether the average American woman wears a 12 or a 14, but it's one of the two. I think it's high time to recenter the norm and add on a "small women's department" in addition to the "large women's department," because they're calling things large that are average. But they're stocking at least some of them, is the point, and this essay claims they just aren't.)

Show me the "large American department store" that stocks mostly 4s and 6s, and I will get my size-4 ass over there right now. I will not stop to shower and change out of my pajamas and comb my hair. I will only put shoes on because it's legally required. If they're focused on 4s and 6s, maybe there will be something in there that fits me. Maybe if they vanity-size the 4s into what should really be 6s or 8s, there's some chance they'll carry a 2 that'll fit me -- and a 2, not a 1, not a straight-line teenager-shaped garment.

Generally they don't. Those claims in that essay were just not true, and I don't think they were harmlessly untrue, either.

Most women I know have a hard time buying clothing, because women's clothes are supposed to be more fitted than men's. I'm pretty sure many, maybe most, of us have thought, "It can't be like this for everybody." Actually, it can. When you take a really wide range of body shapes and sizes and try to standardize them into a simple numerical system, it is possible for the average to work well for no one. We shouldn't mistake the problem of averaging across a sample that isn't bell-curve shaped on more than one axis for the problem of thinking everybody ought to be a certain size. We have both problems, but not manifested as they're described in the linked essay.

People who listen to this kind of essay uncritically end up thinking that the system is skewed in favor of me and people like me. I'm average height, I'm on the thin side, I'm fairly curvy. It must be all my fault. Clothes must be made for me. Guess what? They're not. They just plain aren't. Some designs are ideal for skinny girls with boobs. They're flattering. They're pretty. And they're usually actually constructed for stocky girls with significantly less chest. Many of the styles that most flatter a thin, curvy figure are cut to give the illusion of that figure rather than actually fitting on it. Some of my women friends have claimed that I "can wear anything [I] want and it'll all look good on [me]." That's very sweet, but also very wrong. A wrap dress cut for my body type would indeed probably look fine, but a wrap dress intended to make someone else's body type look like mine is going to look ridiculous on me, and that's mostly what the stores sell, because they believe they'll be able to sell more of them. They may be right; they're in this business and I'm not. But it's destructive to blame each other for clothing problems, and it's destructive to assume the system is geared to cater to someone it's utterly failing.

Once in high school, I was having a particularly bad day, even by high school standards, and my locker jammed, and I kicked it and shouted, "I HATE THIS PLACE!" And the stoner guy with the locker next to me, the kid in the tatty metal band T-shirts who smelled as though he hadn't gone as many as 5 minutes without a joint in the last 4 years, blinked at me in shock. "You hate this place?" he said. "I hate this damn place so much!" I said.

He pried the locker open for me, shaking his head. "Even the brains hate it here. Hey!" And he called this amazing situation to the attention of a passing friend. "Hey, guess what? Even the brains hate it here." His friend stared at me incredulously. I reaffirmed my feelings about Ralston High School: "I can't stand it. Why do you think I'm trying so hard to get out of here early?" They hadn't thought about it that way. And from then on, we weren't friends exactly, but we were certainly friendly. We were fellow sufferers. We talked from time to time. He had thought that the system that was making him miserable was designed for my benefit and my enjoyment. He had thought that the whole institution was about making things good for "the brains." Once he figured out that it wasn't actually about that at all, I was no longer the enemy. And we actually were people to each other.

That's what I want here. I want to recognize that yes, being smart in high school made some things much easier for me, and yes, being thin makes some things easier for me, too. I just don't want there to be mistakes about what those things are. Some people try to go the other way and pity the skinny girls: "Oh, you poor dear, you must starve yourself for society's notions of beauty." No. I have a fairly small appetite, I get moderate exercise, I got decent genes, and for heaven's sake, I'm 26. I haven't had a kid. I haven't hit any of the major metabolic bumps people's bodies throw at them. I am not a starving waif under the thumb of the patriarchy, and I'm not an arrogant entitlement-mentality shopper, buying from an abundance of 4s and laughing at the lack of 14s. I have a hard time buying decent jeans. Just like most of the rest of you.

The essayist also blames men, which I think is destructive and untrue: other women are much stricter and snarkier about enforcing standards of appearance than men are. And the essayist doesn't seem to understand subtle gender dimorphism. Women are, on the average, smaller than men, so it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand why most married women have husbands larger than themselves. seagrit is shorter than all three of her brothers, and it's not because her parents starved her and kept her from getting healthy activity. If my parents had had a son, odds are extremely good that he'd be taller than 5'6". This is not a subtle social plot. This is biology.

So we read stuff like this, and we link to stuff like this, and it frustrates me, because the essayist clearly had some good points and some good images, but she veered off into counterfactual claims, and very few people seem to have a big problem with that. Almost everyone I read who linked to it said they thought it was "interesting" or that they found some of the images striking, not that they thought it was right through and through. That's a good thing. What's not a good thing is that the essayist felt she needed to make her points that way in the first place.