Hipster

When I was in middle school, I got teased for being fat.  A LOT. 

“You are NOT fat!” my mother insisted when I cried about being teased (middle schoolers are assholes).  “Those other girls are just jealous because you’re more developed than they are!”

I laughed bitterly, scornfully, and otherwise adverbially at her.  To me, “more developed” meant one thing:  bigger boobs.  And I was not the most “more developed” girl in the seventh grade—not by a long shot.  Despite my girth, I stayed steady at a B-cup.

For those of you who aren’t American or aren’t women, let me explain that reference thusly:  most girls start off as A-cups.  My best friend ended up as a double-D.  B-cups?  They are not exactly excessively large.  They are not even average.  And they certainly did not balance out the enormous hips I developed between the ages of 10 and 12.

It was those hips that had everyone, including me, convinced that I was a heifer of epic proportions.  The other kids had never seen anything like me, y’all.  My hips, and the thighs and ass that went with them, could stop middle school traffic.  They were practically an institution—the other kids even named them (well, my ass, at least).  But they were not a sign of being “more developed.”  I never thought of them in those terms, even though as the years have gone on, my ass has stayed the same (literally), and everyone else has started catching up. 

The thing is, big hips just weren’t part of the narrative of growing up.  I mean, everyone knows the tragic tale of the prematurely big-boobed girl:  the stares, the groping, the inability to find a bra that fits outside of a maternity store, getting hit on by guys three times your age, having every girl in class call you a slut and a stuffer, etc.  But big hips?  File it under “fat” and move on.  Except it’s a little more complicated than that.

I was wearing a women’s size ten pants when I was ten years old.  By the time I was twelve, I had jumped to a sixteen.  When I was fourteen, I had, appropriately enough, yo-yoed down to a fourteen.  And people were mistaking me for eighteen and offering me credit cards.

Whatever my actual age is, people usually tack two to four years onto that.  I got hit on ferociously from the ages of twelve to sixteen, but then nothing afterwards.  Why?  Because due to that “add two or four” thing, once I turned sixteen ALL THE TEENAGE BOYS THOUGHT I WAS TOO OLD FOR THEM.   

The other day I looked at a picture of myself that I had lying around and thought, “Wow, what was I when this was taken, seventeen or so?”  THAT PHOTO WAS FROM THE SEVENTH GRADE.

It wasn’t my chubby little baby face that made everyone think I was so elderly:  it was my prematurely matronly figure, and the prematurely matronly clothes that went with it (the days before Lane Bryant came to my hometown were hard for my people).  If you looked close enough, you’d see my round little cheeks and my big wide eyes.  BUT NO ONE WAS LOOKING AT MY FACE. 

Sound familiar?

 All I’m saying is, if you see a teenager with big hips, give her a smile and a pat on the back and take her to a bar so she can have a goddamn drink.  Don’t worry; you won’t be charged with corrupting a minor because NO ONE WILL CARD HER.

UGH.  THE HUMANITY.

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Short, Brutal, and to the Point

Robin McKinley, The Door in the Hedge

I really hate to admit this, but the more I read McKinley’s work, the less I like it.  I really enjoyed her stuff when I was a child, and I actually just picked up some good used copies of The Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword.  But in all of her work, she skimps on character development and ladles on the heavy-handed exposition; her short story collection, The Door in the Hedge, is no exception.  We don’t see people fall in love:  we’re told that people fall in love, and it usually happens instantaneously and with no explanation.  There are no suprises–the second someone mentions a missing prince, you know he’s going to turn up as the heroine’s love interest in a few paragraphs.  And even though these are, for the most part, supposed to be retellings of various well-known tales (“The Princess and The Frog” and “The Twelve Dancing Princesses”) there’s nothing new or fresh about McKinley’s take on them.  They’re exactly the same stories, except with her trademark corny pseudo-Tolkien names tacked on.

I will never forgive her for the name Lissla Lissar, okay?  Okay.

Guys, if I merely wanted to revisit the fairy tales of my long-ago youth, I would read this book.  I expect a little more from an established fantasy author who is well-known for her retellings.

Recommended for:  NOT.

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In Which I Dismiss An Author’s Entire Body of Work

I believe I’ve mentioned before that when I like something, I really like it.  Seriously.  When I got the first season of Veronica Mars on DVD, I watched the whole box set in less than 18 hours.  I AM THAT OBSESSIVE, YO.

And not above hitting the fast-forward button, either.

So anyway, regular readers may remember that I read All She Was Worth and really liked it.  I even bought a copy of the book afterward, which is really the highest recommendation I can give anything (I am cheap).  And after I bought the book, I then I checked out pretty much everything else Miyabe’s written that’s been translated into English (which isn’t much, unfortunately).  So I read The Devil’s Whisper and Crossfire in two days last week.

In a word?  Eh.

They’re not good, they’re not bad.  Having now read four of Miyabe’s novels, I feel I can safely say that she’s a “gimmick” novelist.  Each book has to have a new “hook”:  All She Was Worth was credit cards, Shadow Family was the internet, Crossfire was pyrokinesis (wut?), and The Devil’s Whisper was hypnotism.

For the most part her need of a “hook” renders her plots a little…well, hokey.  I mean, hypnotism?  Seriously?  Pyrokinesis?  FOR REAL?  With The Devil’s Whisper, I couldn’t stop feeling like, “Oh, God, hypnotism doesn’t even work like this!” and as for Crossfire…it was okay, it was just hacky.  I mean, it wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t that much different from a Dean Koontz novel.

I think what made All She Was Worth such a good book, despite the sometimes-stilted prose and the paper-thin characterization of some of the actors, was the fact that its plot centered on a cipher.  The center was nothing and no one.  The villain/victim/missing girl was just that—missing.  The hero and his cohorts do their best to reconstruct her, but in the end, the protagonist can’t wait to meet her because he just wants to ask, “Who are you?”   

But we never get to talk to her because that’s the point.  This is a woman who’s had her whole life destroyed by credit history:  by money that doesn’t even exist and by debts that aren’t actually hers.  She never mattered.  Except when it was time to pay up.

All She Was Worth is so compelling because its premise is compelling and its author has just enough talent to not COMPLETELY fuck it up.  Miyabe’s other books, however, are fairly workaday because she, herself, is fairly workaday.  They’re reasonably good novels by a reasonably talented author, but that’s all they are.

Recommended for:  All She Was Worth is worth it (har, har), but skip the rest of Miyabe’s stuff.

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I Am Frivolous

Steve Almond, Candyfreak

Man loves candy.  Man eats candy.  Man tours candy factories so that he can score free candy.

Okay, there was also some stuff about how the Big Three candy conglomerates are pushing everyone else out of business.  And a lot of mostly unanalyzed whingeing about Almond’s childhood and his depression.  Seriously.  I have no idea why that man was so sad, because he was too busy making jokes about masturbating and finding a lump he thought was cancer (but was actually just part of his anatomy) to explain his ennui.  But whatever.  It was fun, and it made me eat a lot of candy.  Seriously.  It is impossible to read this thing without holding a Snickers bar in one hand.  It just doesn’t work.

Recommended for:  Do you like snark?  Do you like candy?  Are you alive?  Here you go!

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Ask Me About My Asian Fetish

Awhile back, Racialicious did a post on John and Kate Plus Eight and the Gosselins’ pathetic attempt to teach their children about their Korean heritage.  I say “pathetic” because this attempt apparently consisted of one dinner, which was largely hijacked by Kate “Honky-Ass” Gosselin.

I liked the article, but one of the comments got on my last fucking nerve:

B. Canseco wrote:

I don’t have a link but maybe someone out there does, but i saw an interview maybe last year with Jon & kate’s sister/brother in law and the sister let it slip that Kate’s original fascination with Jon was about his korean heritage and not about him as a person. Kate is allegedly is really “into Asian guys”.

I’ve heard this a couple times from different folks connected to these two. maybe someone can find links or can verify. i know i saw it but just don’t have copies of it.

My point is just as a good friend of mine explained “Rice Kings” to me a few years ago (white men who fetishize asian women/asian culture), I think Kate G is a Rice Queen and their specific relationship is one of a interracial fetish that simply went off the rails and once the kids came, they saw no real way out.

Okay, how do I put this nicely?  People know shit about shit, especially when it comes to interracial relationships.

I’m not getting into the whole Gosselin clusterfuck, because it is indeed a clusterfuck of epic proportions, but you know what?  “I heard that some relative of hers says she’s TOTALLY into X ethnic group!” does not actually mean that the lady in question has a fetish.  It probably just means that her relative is a moron, or the speaker is, or they both are.

As a woman in an actual honest-to-god interracial relationship, I know this from painful personal experience.  Because you know something funny?  Every time I express admiration for a white guy’s physique–as in “He is TOTES HAWT!”–that’s just amusing to the people around me.  But if I express admiration for a man of color, suddenly I have “a thing” for his racial or ethnic group.  And by “thing,” I mean fetish.

Seriously, one time there was an EXTREMELY hot young Indian man standing at a bus stop and I said, “Hey, that guy is hot,” because yea verily, he was HOT.  The sky is blue, grass is green, and that man was attractive, okay?

The (white) guy I was in the car with said, “Oh, so you have a thing for Indian guys?”

*facepalm*

What people say about your choice of partner often has little to do with YOU and a lot to do with THEM.  The automatic assumption that my relationship is the result of a fetish has nothing to do with me and everything to do with the fact that the person saying I’m a fetishist doesn’t consider POC as equals.  I mean, if you sit there and watch me interact with  my boyfriend and come away with the opinion that I’m a “Rice Queen,” then to each their own.  But if you see me and my boyfriend holding hands and automatically think, “Asian fetish,” then in all honesty you are a fucking racist.  Because you are projecting your inability to see Asians as your equals onto another person, and there is no term for that except racism.

So yeah.  I don’t consider, “Her relatives say she’s totally into Asian guys, hur hur!” to be a reliable indicator of anything, because guess what?  Her relatives might simply be unable to see Asian men as anything other than a fetish.  Or the person speaking may have completely made up that statement.  In any case, unless the woman in question says or does something sketchy, don’t make assumptions.  Because they say a hell of a lot more about your attitudes towards a particular racial group than they do about hers.

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Shelf Discovery

Lizzie Skurnick:  Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading

So Skurnick and a handful of co-writers, including my own beloved Jennifer Weiner, wrote a book of brief essays about the YA novels they love.  Since the authors are all in their thirties or forties, these books generally date from the 60s, 70s, or the 80s—and yet, I’ve read most of them.  Huh.  Not to knock those books, but I think my knowledge of them speaks more to the dearth of good YA written when I was a kid than to the enduring whatever of these novels.

Seriously, I love Judy Blume and all, but when I was a kid?  I would have killed for a “contemporary” novel that, you know, actually depicted my contemporaries.  Seriously.  We had Fear Street and the occasional Newberry-winning sob-fest and that was it.  PITY ME.

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A Standardized Life

So my mother and I have very little in common besides our senses of humor—we have just about opposite personalities, frankly—but we do share one strange quirk:  both of us have significant others who are CONVINCED that we are smarter than them.  In my mother’s case, I can kind of understand it.  My dad is a smart guy, but my mother’s a genius.  Literally.  No, seriously, LITERALLY.

But in the case of my own relationship, I just don’t get it.  My boyfriend can build a robot cat, but I’m the smart one?  Engineers, so nonsensical.

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Jessica’s Guide to Dating on the Dark Side

Beth Fantaskey, Jessica’s Guide to Dating on the Dark Side

Jessica Packwood, the daughter of vegan, sustainable-farming professor parents, gets a right shock her senior year:   a “foreign exchange student” will be living in the apartment over her parents’ garage.  A foreign exchange student who’s a vampire.  A vampire who’s her vampire fiancé.

Jessica’s always known that she was adopted from Romania as a baby, but what she didn’t know?  Is that she’s actually a vampire princess, and she’s contractually obligated to marry her “prince,” Lucius Vladescu, in order to create a lasting peace between their warring clans.

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About Heather

Once upon a time, I had a problem with procrastination:  I distinctly remember faking sick when I was in middle school so that I could stay home and complete a project that was due the next day.  And when I say “complete,” what I really mean is “Brainstorm, write, and edit,” because I hadn’t even STARTED the goddamn thing.

By the time I got into college, though, I’d turned over a new leaf:  the very first day of classes, I sat down and read the chapter my brand-new Environmental Science teacher had assigned.  It had been quite thoroughly beaten into my skull that College Was Going to Be Different from High School, so I was terrified of getting behind.  And it was honestly a fear that served me well—by the time I started doing psychotic things like taking full credit loads each semester, I was so goddamn on-the-ball that I had a reading and paper-writing schedule that probably put most of my professors to SHAME. 

But a tragic side-effect of being so prepared is that, in the name of getting shit done on time, I had a tendency to bite off more than I could really chew.  Which is how I wound up writing my senior thesis not one, but TWO semesters early.

My reasoning for this madness was actually pretty sound:  every fourth (or fifth) year student that I knew was an exhausted, gibbering mess.  Most of them spent their lives huddled in corners and crying softly about how they hadn’t slept in five days and hadn’t had a period since before their sophomore year.  IT WAS NOT PRETTY.  I couldn’t imagine researching and writing a thesis under those conditions, so I made the very sensible decision to take my thesis seminar during the relatively slack semester at the end of my junior year.  Which was good, and fine, until I had to fuck it up by making my thesis subject so MOTHERFUCKING HARD.

Other people wrote about Myspace networking and the impact of Clinton-era welfare reforms in Western North Carolina, but could I do something as concrete as that?  NO!  NOT I!  I decided that I was going to analyze feminist theory about eating disorders through the lens of feminist theory about mental illness.  That’s right:  not just theory, but theory times theory! 

THEORY SQUARED!

Oh, and even though my professor gave me a by and said I could cite everything in MLA (which I’d become very familiar with, on account of how it’s EASY), I decided that I would make things MOAR INTERESTING by using this as an opportunity to learn APA!

The horror…the horror…

I’ll be honest with you:  the only thing that saved my stupid, overambitious ass was working with my friend Heather.  Heather is now a free-lance editor and a college professor in Florida, but at the time she was my supervisor at the Writing Center, where,  for the princely sum of eight dollars an hour, I taught freshmen what a thesis statement was.  Anyway, almost all the tutors recognized the power and utility of going to another tutor and saying FIX MY PAPER GODDAMMIT, so I spent a lot of time working with Heather.  Who smoothed out my run-ons, questioned me on basic assumptions, always had the APA stylebook handy, and reminded me that just because a transition existed in my head, did not mean that I had actually committed it to paper.  She held my hands and stroked my hair while I labored over that horrible, red-headed step-child of a thesis for a semester, and kept me from killing my professor when, literally two days before it was due, the blasted woman insisted that I had to go through a thirty page paper and remove all the em dashes because she’d suddenly decided they weren’t proper academic English.

Why yes, little teenagers who are reading this:  professors really will do things like that to you.  JUST YOU WAIT.

I’ve never promoted a business on this site and I’ll probably never do so again, but like I said before, Heather now freelances as an editor.  Because she’s my friend, I’d like to support her; because I have worked with her, I know that saying she’s amazing at what she does is nothing more than the truth.  If you’ve got a college application essay, a cover letter, a resume, a book, or a biology paper that needs work, she can help you with it. 

Dude, if she could drag MY crazy ass through thirty pages of feminist theory, I wouldn’t be surprised if she could multiply loaves or turn water into wine.  Come to think of it, that’s probably what she does in her spare time…

Anyway, her website’s here.  I’ll be back to my regularly scheduled rantery Monday.

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The Bayou IS a Tribulation

My tribulations are just never-ending, y’all.  A few days ago, some folks got a good look at Oliver and were all, “We don’t mean to offend you, but your cat is…he’s really big.”

Guys, my cat is mother-fucking FAT.  You can say it, because it’s true.  I swear it will not hurt my feelings, or his.  He’s fat.  He is so fat that I had to buy a box of environmentally-friendly baby-wipes for his very own butt BECAUSE HE CAN’T CLEAN IT HIMSELF.  He is so fat that when I carry him upstairs, I wheeze a little.  Trust me, that DOES NOT HAPPEN with Original Flavor Cat, who is a more conventionally-sized feline.  He is so fat that every time I come home, I check his mouth to make sure the other cat’s tail isn’t hanging out of it because we keep him on pretty strict rations and I’m afraid he’s going to EAT HER.

He’s a fat cat, okay?  And yes, his weight does bother me because A.) I’m not very fond of wiping a cat’s anus every few days, thanks; and B.) He’s so big that it’s endangering his health, and as a pet-owner, I am not okay with that.  But it doesn’t shame me.  I don’t wake up every morning and go, “Oh, holy hell, what am I going to do about my 16 pound cat!  It’s so EMBARASSING!” 

Have we really gotten to a point as a culture where we are so hung about body size that my cat’s weight is supposedly shameful?  Seriously.  HE’S A CAT.  You’re allowed to comment on his weight—it’s not going to hurt anyone’s feelings.  As long as you let him sit on your lap and hold his chin while he purrs (he likes that a lot for some reason, the freakbar), you’re good.

My other tribulation is a lot more straightforward in the sense that SOMEONE TRIED TO KILL ME THE NIGHT BEFORE LAST.  I was making a perfectly legal lane change on my scooter when suddenly the car that had been going a sane and normal pace behind me flew past me in the same lane with mere inches to spare.

I laid on the horn and cursed the driver out, but I freely admit:  I felt all teary and shaky until I had a chance to sit down and take some deep breaths because THAT IS WHAT A BRUSH WITH DEATH DOES TO A LADY.

Seriously, driver of that car:  I know it wasn’t my fault, because you then proceeded to dart in and out of traffic, speeding zealously and changing lanes constantly in an attempt to get wherever you were going as quickly as possible.  And then we ended up side-by-side at the same light.  Because you are a goddamn fucking moron, and there is just no getting ahead on a packed road with many stoplights. 

But even if there had been a way to get ahead, wouldn’t it have been spoiled by that whole accidentally killing me thing?  I think that committing vehicular homicide in front of many, many witnesses would slow you down much more than say, OBEYING THE RULES OF THE ROAD.   Jackass.

But once again, nothing in my personal life can compare to what’s going on in Boinking in the Bayou.  Trufax.

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