I just read How to Have Style, by Isaac Mizrahi. This isn’t the first “how to dress yourself” book that I’ve read. This book was in the middle of its genre. He created a dress for one woman that made her look fabulous, and he had some hair ideas that really worked, but he had some duds too, like when he asked a woman what feature she disliked, and she said “my breasts, because they’re too large” (FYI, they weren’t. C or D maybe). His solution was to put her in cute bras, and then have all her layers unbuttoned five or six buttons down so that the front of the bra showed. I don’t know if she liked it or not, but to me it said “I’m on heavy medication and can’t be trusted to dress myself modestly.”

One underlying theme in this book is that you should spend a decent amount of money on the basic building blocks of your wardrobe. This is where we part ways. For the “young woman on a tight budget” he constructed outfits that cost between $350 and $400. Honestly, that’s more money than I spend on clothes in two years. They also advise getting things professionally tailored, which is great and all, except that doing that will, in some cases, double the cost. Like new cars, designer clothes are one of those things that seem so extravagant that even if I were rich, I wouldn’t buy them. 

One book I read suggested that it was better to spend $500 on a jacket that fit well than $50 on a jacket that didn’t suit you. $50 on a jacket falls into the “this is quite a splurge” category for me. Here’s why: I buy used. You can try and sugar coat it by saying I buy on consignment, or I search vintage shops for unique finds to suit my eclectic tastes, but the truth is, I buy used because I want decent clothes at Wal-Mart prices. I buy used for my kids too, because I want them to get made fun of by their classmates.

I don’t have any of the “MUST HAVE” basics. I especially don’t have twenty different pairs of dress shoes, suitable for every occasion. I have four pairs of dress shoes, three of which I won't wear, because they are uncomfortable. They are uncomfortable because the heels are too high. I’ve been told I have to get “starter heels” of a moderate 2-3”, but honestly, 2 1/2 inches, in a well-crafted lace-up boot, in the brand that suits me best, is as high as I can possibly go, and even then I have to take them off after six hours or so because my feet hurt. 

Don’t get me wrong, high heels are undeniably sexy, but, like corsets, they are also undeniably uncomfortable and bad for your body. I’ve been told that if you get the better brands, they are comfortable straight out of the box, but I couldn’t ever justify dropping $400 on a pair of shoes. ($400 can buy a PLANE TICKET somewhere COOL.) Yeah, I know. High heels are hot, they make you look sexy, taller, thinner, more dressy. All true.   I bet there were a lot of people upset when corsets went out of fashion too.

I’d kind of like to look dressier, but honestly, isn’t the primary function of clothing to protect your body? I like shoes that keep dirt off my toes and that make it more comfortable to walk than being barefoot. Otherwise, why not go barefoot? I like pants over shorts because pants protect my legs from kitten claws, hot vinyl seats, bike chains, etc. I like jackets very much, and am happy on the few times when the weather is cold enough to merit them. I need to be able to bend over, to carry keys in pockets, to reach up and do a pull up, to walk through the coop without having ants bite me.

Nine times out of ten, I put on one of my plain Target tee-shirts and my Liz Claiborne Jeans (bought used) and my lace up low heeled boots (also used). The tenth time, I decide to do something different. A skirt maybe, or my heeled sandals, a dress, shorts and flip flops. I have grand aspirations. Then, after a few hours of trying to live a life in inadequate clothing, I get frustrated by the dirty knees or aching feet or lack of mobility in my arms, and I go upstairs to change back into my jeans and tee shirt.

The subconscious is the slush editor for the conscious mind. It takes in all the things around you, all the smells and sights and sounds and details, and figures out which ones are important. These filters help us navigate and not become overwhelmed, and most of the time they’re great. This is why horrible smells, like cigarette smoke and those nasty cloying air fresheners (they are all nasty and cloying) seem to disappear to a tolerable level until you get outside and realize the reek is clinging to you. This is why I never notice the constant hum of computers, servers, and monitors, until the power goes out and the silence deafens me.

Intuition is when your slush editors are whispering something in the break room, casting furtive glances and saying “nothing” when the conscious mind asks what’s going on. Some people are sensitives, and their subconsicious minds speak up to the conscious mind a little louder. The stereotype is that women and children have greater intuition than men, and I believe there’s some truth to this. Intuition, first and foremost, is there to warn you of danger. You get a feeling that he can’t be trusted. You get a feeling that it’s better to get inside before dark. Smaller people have more to fear. People who can’t fight their way out of trouble learn to be wary.

Smell, as I mentioned, is one of the things that the subconscious holds back the most often. You need to know if that meat is rotten before you bite it, but after that, the information is irrelevant. Or is it? People, women especially, can tell intimate facts about people they smell. Scent can tell a woman if a man has a lot of testosterone, whether he’s related to her, or whether a child is hers. Men can tell if a woman is ovulating though this is primarily by visual cues—enlarged lips and eyes, increased symmetery in the face, freaky weird stuff that shouldn’t be possible yet has been documented. (See the Ig noble prize for the researcher who discovered that ovulating lapdancers make significantly more tips than non-ovulating ones.) You can even, like dogs, tell if a person is angry or afraid or ill, though you may not always believe what your subconscious is telling you.

We’re hardwired to recognize each other’s smell and react emotionally to it. Babies smell good, sexy men and women smell good, family members smell good. Dead people smell bad. I’ve heard it said that while any dead flesh is unpleasant, a person knows instinctively if that rotting corpse was once of our species. Lucky for me, I have no firsthand experience with this.

Blood and other human effluvia are notorious for remaining in a building long after the crime scene investigators have come and gone, the hearse has come and gone, and the home has been scoured. Blood and other matter seeps into cracks, soaks into wood, hides in crevices. I’ve read anecdotally that even ten years after a horrible crime, the cops will still get blood residues pop out when they spray cyanoacrylic vapor.

My theory as to why some houses are “haunted” after something horrible happens in them is that people smell the dead human effluvia and react to it. Their subconscious starts whispering louder and louder until the conscious takes notice. They can’t say exactly why it feels bad. The subconscious is still just whispering. The subconscious doesn’t speak in facts, it speaks in feelings, so that’s how the conscious mind translates it. They say they sense an evil presence. Sometimes they confabulate stories, retroactively changing the details when a documented case appears, to give their story credence.

I don’t really believe that a place can be haunted by the dead. I believe that a place can be haunted by uranium ore or scabies prions, but the dead rarely harm us. Sometimes the subconscious goes awry and tells us something is good (or bad) when it’s really neither. People who are afraid to fly get a bad feeling before every flight, even those that are completely safe. Also, sadly, some people take on the persona of a “sensitive” and like the attention they get when they claim to feel and see things that others cannot.

However, many people ignore their intuition. The intuition gets a bad rap, because it’s seen as feminine. Sometimes when you get a bad feeling, it’s not just a feeling, but a thousand loosely correlated observations that would add up to a fairly compelling argument if the conscious got in on the act, but since it’s just the subconscious, it manifests as a feeling. A person sometimes will know something is true because she feels it, and she will look for data to support her argument only so that she can pretend that her conscious mind led her to the conclusion in the first place. 

But we have an intuition to keep us safe. Those slush editors can spot the trends in time to do something about it. That look, plus that loose bolt, plus that article I read last week, plus the whisky on the pilot’s breath, plus the nervous scent of the flight attendant equals I have a feeling I should stay another day in Milwaukee. Those who ignore their subconscious are the ones who climb on planes that are destined to crash, while the others gasp in shock at the wreckage of the flight they were supposed to be on.

Imagine a world that has two kinds of animals: rabbits and whales. The rabbits insist that the whales are inferior creatures. After all, whales can’t run, can’t dig, take years and years to reach adulthood, and are nearly useless at hopping around on the meadow. Of course, whales can sing and swim and travel enormous distances and siphon hundreds of gallons of water easily, but those aren’t much use in a meadow. If men are rabbits and women are whales, humanity lives in a meadow rather than an ocean.

Math is considered important and challenging because men are better at it. If women were better at it, it would be considered pointless and silly. Children are generally equal in mathematical ability until about puberty, at which point, boys can keep learning but girls generally lose interest. All sorts of reasons are given for this, usually pointing towards societal expectations and how people are taught. I think that Harvard guy is right. I think that women just aren’t as good at math.

I remember how I felt as a young teenager when math started to become boring. Before puberty, math was slightly amusing. Not as fun as art, but much better than PE, and taught better than Social Studies. Then puberty hit, and math went from mildly amusing puzzles to the most pointless exercise ever. I began to do poorly. When you get right down to it, there’s little difference between a subject that is mind-crushingly boring and something that is impossibly difficult. Algebra textbooks became sophorics. I did very well on my math SATs as a junior and not as well on my verbal, but the very next year, the points had flip-flopped. 

I think that women do poorly after puberty because they undergo biological changes that convince them to focus on more important areas. Math is really not important. Okay, arithmetic is useful for everyone, and geometry is useful for many people, but “higher” math—trig and calculus and arrays and complex algebra, is really about as useful as being good at badminton. You need it for building complicated toys and gadgets, like cell phones and radios and rockets, and it’s helpful for building better dams and ships, but you don’t need it for 99% of human endeavors. 

Math is everywhere, but you don’t have to understand the numbers to use it. People who shoot at other people aren’t writing down numbers and drawing arcs before each shot any more than people who play pool are really good at figuring out sine and cosine in their heads. Most building, for most of human history, has been done without anything more sophisticated than arithmetic and geometry. Funny how women and men seem to be equal in those areas? 

My cat can sing. I think she could learn, anyway. She has a good range. She doesn’t want to. She’s good at chasing string because she likes chasing string, and she likes chasing string because it’s an important skill for a predator to hone. Higher mathematics are not important skills for people to know. Mathematical aptitude is a lagniappe, like having perfect pitch or a photographic memory. It’s a blessing, but it’s nonessential, and so it’s given mostly to the gender that already has the most freaks, geniuses, and retards.

Knowing how to calculate the cube root of something is not as important as knowing if your boyfriend is going to hit you. Being able to calculate the trajectory of an object given its force and its angle is not as useful as knowing which girls will let you eat lunch with them. Women are smaller than men, weaker than men, and we are more likely to have children to protect. We need to learn how to navigate interpersonal relationships, how to choose safe companions, how to negotiate alliances, and how to talk our way out of dangerous situations. We lose interest in abstract and spatial reasoning for the same reason my tabby looks at me with contempt when I try to get her to meow “do, re, mi”: because evolution steers us towards learning those skills which will keep us alive, successful, and happy. It’s as though nature said, “When you were children, you could play math with the boys, but now it’s time for you to put away childish things and learn how to live in the real world.”

When I was a child, I used to tell my mom all about my dreams. As anyone who has been in her situation knows, there are few things as dull as other peoples’ dreams. She’s a patient person, but the glazed expression in her eyes as I anxiously begged her to continue listening “Wait, wait, I haven’t got to the good part yet!” has influenced me as a storyteller. As an adult, I can go on and on for hours about my novels if I have encouragement. Real life conversations usually involve me chattering animatedly with scarcely a breath, punctuated every ten or twenty minutes by, “Am I boring you?” 

I think that the fear of being boring is why I tend to write prose that most people assume is YA even when it’s about adults shooting each other and having sex afterwards. I think I’ve run on and on to Dickens’-esque lengths of description only to add it up and realize it’s 75 words.  I just don't want to be one of those kind of people, you know, the ones who don't realize that they've pinned some victim in the corner and she's long ago stopped paying attention.  If those people have no idea that they're dull, then it's possible that I'm just as dull but I just don't realize it.

This is why I like to write letters to people. With a letter, if my friend gets bored and doesn’t read part of it, I never know. Also, letters aren’t intrusive. It’s like a present in the mail, and letters come when you decide to get the mail, not during your dinner hour or when you were just about to leave.

But these social networking sites are a new ballgame. I’m relatively new to them, having joined LJ in late 2007 and only recently joined the Facebook and Twitter bandwagons. I thought livejournal would be, you know, a live journal. I already journaled extensively, for many years in bound paper books and now in my daily emails to my brother. So I figured I’d just take my daily email and abridge it, take out the personal stuff and the inside jokes.

I found two problems with this. One: it’s no fun to write letters if you’re also journaling, because then you end up writing the same thing twice. Two: people I didn’t know actually started reading my LJ posts. 

But that’s good, right? 

Yeah, except that if people are reading them, I feel an obligation to have interesting content. It’s like when you’re singing in the shower, happy and oblivious, and one day your neighbor comments on how much he likes your singing. Suddenly it’s hard to sing anymore, and when you do, it’s self-conscious. (But you can’t stop either, because you like the attention…)

I did join Facebook. Like you, I joined so I could have the pleasure of ignoring all the people who ignored me in high school. I also like to hear about the lives of writers and publishing people I’ve friended, and hope that my occasional posts will make me easier to remember when we meet in real life. I don’t post much meaningless blather there, though I seem to be the only one who abstains. My rationale is that EVERYONE is on Facebook, and the editors I submit to and the writers I admire probably don’t really care what “Simpsons” character I am. (Lisa. I don’t have to take the test, I know. I’m Lisa.)

But Twitter is different. Twitter is all about the meaningless. Twitter is “I’m making a sandwich” and “My tire is flat.” Twitter is the hundred banalities that add up to “How was your day?” That’s what the article I read said about Twitter, anyway. Sounded good. So I joined. Blandness followed. All was well. Twitter is for bland.

Other people said differently. Other people follow celebrities. Other people follow me. Does that mean I have to be interesting here too? Because if they’re following me, and they suddenly stop following me, that means that they found me boring. That hurts.

So I stopped tweeting “going to work now” and started tweeting “found a grasshopper in the squash, gave it to the hens” and then wondered if maybe I should try to make up something better, something pithy that they’d favorite and quote to their friends. Like, “Watched Bob the Builder. It’s a good thing that heavy machinery isn’t sentient in real life.” Funny and thoughtful (I think?) but wit isn’t as common as daily routine, so my posts get less and less frequent. By tweeting less, I please the random followers more (who probably follow hundreds of people, and don’t care about my sandwich), but lose the interaction with my sister, with whom lack of shallow conversation means no conversation at all. 

Am I boring you?

Maybe the solution is to make one public one and one private one. But then it’s twice as much time-wasting. Another solution would be to write posts specifically for my favorite twitter follower, and if the others don’t like it, screw them. But then I’d still feel hurt when people stopped following me. An even better solution would be to stop posting anywhere, and just go back to journals and letters. But I've been told writers need a web presence, and almost everything I do in my life right now is geared towards the goal of becoming a successful writer.

So I don’t know what the solution is. Maybe LJ can be whatever I need it to be. I can be the narcissistic, selfish one who goes on and on about her shallow problems for 800 words every day. (Do you have someone like this on your friends list? I do. Don’t worry, it’s not you.) I can write essays about sociology and medicine.  I can talk about what I’m reading. Every conversation I have in real life starts with “I read this book recently…” and with most people, immediately after that is the feeling that I’m a nerd. Isn’t LJ the nerdarium? Aren’t I at home here?

Ironically, the flip side of my fear of boredom is that the more enthusiastic I am about something, the more I fear I’m boring people. This probably stems from telling my dreams to my mom. The more I got into it, the more detail I added. The more detail I added, the longer my story went on. The longer my story went on, the more brittle her face became and the more frequent her less-than-furtive glances at the clock. I like to discuss why I made the decision to make my vampires diseased mortals instead of superheroes. I like to explain why my faeries’ culture is based on 11^th century Japanese court life and how their horrifying class structure evolved from a human culture that emigrated to a land where no one eats, sleeps, or dies. I’d like to talk about how, when you pull an arrow out of someone’s chest, you won’t save their life, you will make them immediately hemorrhage and die (and how I used this as the turning point of a 100,000 word novel.)

Am I boring you?

Cause really, I don't even know anymore.

Many years ago my father put a pull-up bar in the aperture between the kitchen and the dining room. To a twelve-year-old tomboy, this was an excellent idea. For the first few years, I had to get a running leap to be able to grab the bar at all, but after a while I was able to stand underneath and jump high enough to grab it. By the time I got to high school, I was able to do twelve pull ups underhanded, then drop and jump and do twelve more overhanded.

At some point my mom redecorated and decided that a chin-up bar didn’t match her décor. She made my dad relocate it to the upstairs hallway, where if you did a chinup bar you had the knowledge that if you swung and let go, you could fall down the stairs. It didn’t get much use here, and my ability to do pull-ups deteriorated. I got another one in college by sweet talking the RA into putting it in for me, but I hardly used it for anything except hanging up damp shirts.

Two years ago we moved into a house with the same floorplan as my parents’ house, and my dad re-installed the same chin-up bar in the same spot between the kitchen and the dining room. It’s perfect because if you’re in the dining room and have to go to the kitchen or bathroom, there’s no reason not to grab the bar and pull yourself up. I’d be sure to rebuild all the muscles that had deteriorated in the years since high school.

Except I didn’t.

Over a year passed and I’d hardly used it at all. However, my youngest daughter is pretty enthusiastic about doing pull ups. She begs for people to lift her (usually me, when I’m busy cooking) and when no one will do it, she pulls a chair over. At first she had to have help to pull herself up, but pretty soon she was cranking out pull-ups like a Navy Seal.

“Aha,” I thought. “Here’s my motivation.”   I proposed a contest. For every pull-up she did, mommy had to match it. Within a two days, she had done sixty three, and I had done two. A day after that brought her total up to over a hundred, with me at three. I made her start over, but she still cranked out several hundred in half a week. Even the revelation that she was cheating (wasn’t going down all the way) didn’t make me feel better.

I needed another plan. 

So I made a new chart, and an arbitrary number. One hundred. When I got one hundred pull-ups, I’d reward myself. Something nice, I wasn’t sure what. I thought I’d get a spa treatment. That’s what women like, right? Then I remembered that plucking eyebrows hurts, facials give me acne, and anything that involves scraping and sanding gives me the heebie-jeebies. So, maybe not a spa day.

What did I really want? 

What I really wanted was an extra writing morning instead of going to the gym and running errands. I also wanted to have lunch out with my husband instead of eating a sandwich alone in the kitchen. For added motivation, I have to do this before May 20^th, the last day of school.  

This motivation is working. My pull-ups went from a reluctant two every three days, to three a day, five a day, and now seven a day. I’m not quite as strong as a seven-year-old girl, but I’m getting there.

One of the things that most fascinates me about time travel is the idea that if I went back in time, I’d have so much more knowledge about the world than my ancestors it would appear as if I were the smartest woman alive. Ie. the silly things people believed about malaria, and that Abraham Lincoln’s mother didn’t die of a witch’s potion but of drinking milk from a cow that grazed on white snakeroot. There are so many more things we understand now that people a hundred years ago didn’t that it’s easy to think of our ancestors as being not just ignorant, but somehow simpler.

We’re just as ignorant now, but it’s going to take us a hundred years to figure it out.

Here’s an example of our ignorance: think of all the thousands of people with major food allergies. I’m talking about wheat, peanuts, and milk, specifically. Now, I’m not talking about someone of African ancestry that can’t digest gluten or someone from southeast Asia that can’t digest milk—that makes total sense to me. There’s a genetic predisposition for being able to digest gluten and lactose. 

But when people of European descent suddenly can’t digest milk and wheat, especially after eating it for their lives, that seems a little weird to me. A lot weird.

The easiest hypothesis is that it’s overdiagnosed. There might be a little of this going on. After all, back in the 80’s, ADHD was the ailment du jour, and a lot of kids got diagnosed with it when they were really just being kids. It could be that the tests are too sensitive, or inaccurate, so people with some other ailment go in for testing, to “rule out” food allergies, and find that whaddaya know, according to those tests, they’re allergic to everything but air. Of course, once an authority figure tells you that “x will make you sick” it’s going to be hard to digest “x” normally after that, whether there’s a physical reason or not. Humans are omnivorous.   If a person claims that they are allergic to more than five or six foods, I think that the problem is more psychological than physiological. I’ve heard about the ludicrous food restrictions of macrobiotics, for example, (potatoes have too much yang energy, tomatoes are from the “deadly nightshade family” and therefore bad, sugar is poison) and I’m convinced that those people have eating disorders.

But a lot of people with gluten and lactose intolerance are really getting sick. And if these people (as they so often are) are descended from cultures that raised cattle and goats and have the phrase “daily bread,” I think the problem is not in the people, but in the food. It’s not “gluten” and “lactose” intolerance, but “American industrial farm wheat” and “American factory-cattle milk” that people can’t digest.

Potatoes that have been bred for blight-resistance often have too much blight-killing toxins and become also toxic to humans. Wheat has been bred into a few very-productive strains, but in my (completely unsupported) opinion, something about these breeds of wheat makes them hard on the stomach. It could be, also that the hormones and antibiotics they give cows (or the fact that they feed them corn when they should be eating grass) is what’s making our milk supply undigestible to so many people.

The friend who suggested the wheat-strain theory to me also suggested that it’s deliberate. She thinks it’s a giant conspiracy where the wheat farmers are making money off the drugs that suppress gluten intolerance. I’ll give my opinion on conspiracy theories in another essay.

I am one-in-a-million: I am the only person I know who admits she’s a below-average driver. Chances are pretty good (1 in 2) that you’re a below-average driver too. 

I just read an interesting book called Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What it Says About Us, by Tom Vanderbilt. It talked about congestion, and about how we drive under which conditions, and about what makes us safer or less safe drivers. It’s a fascinating read, and I recommend the book. Among other things, it made me change my opinion on speed limits in school zones (the chance of pedestrian death at 35mph is something like three times what it is at 25mph). And of course it brought up the true statement that “everyone thinks he/she drives better than average.”

What makes a good driver?  That’s one thing the author didn’t really touch on, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot since I finished the book. I think there are four different elements.

Reaction time: Younger people and those who are well rested and unimpaired.

Experience/ability: How long have you been driving a car?

Aggression: How often do you speed, cut people off, and otherwise drive more aggressively than you need to?

Distraction: What else is diverting your attention?

You can’t do a whole lot about the first one except not drink and get enough sleep. Reaction time is mainly a function of being young, awake, and sober. Old people have less reaction time, which is why they often drive slower to make up for it. People who have had a couple of beers often drive slower, which makes up for it, but not as much as they think.

The second one, also, you can’t do much about. I have less in this area than most, because I managed to avoid driving for 7 years, and even now I avoid it when I can. I hate driving. Some people are going to be better at driving either naturally (no, guys, you don’t ALL fall into this category) or because they drive a lot (taxi drivers, race car drivers).

Of course, a lot of the most experienced/skilled drivers (and people who think they are) do poorly on the third category, aggression. This is one aspect he talked about. People who think their cars are better tend to push the margins of safety (I’m looking at you, Mr. Two-ton pickup tailgating me on the freeway!) And people think their reaction time is better than it is (Hey Miss drives 45mph in a school zone!) Some of it is just being impatient/stupid. (Just because the two people in line ahead of you made a left on red arrow, do you really need to do the same thing?)

And the last one is distractability. Talking distracts you. Talking on the phone is worse. Dialing or texting is the worst of all. Honestly, if you can’t go more than twenty minutes without engaging in some texting or chatting, you should be taking the bus to work. Most people are in huge denial about how distracted they are. “Yeah, it’s just driving. I do it every day.” The way I see it is: “You are operating several tons of steel at speeds that are two or three times as fast as a human was ever meant to go.” Leave a little earlier, drive a little safer. Like I told my brother “you may be immortal, but I’m not.” (He replied: “Clutching at the dash and pounding the floorboards with your foot will not make me a better driver.”)

Don’t be a dick. Speeding really does kill people, and even if you were the best driver in the world, it wouldn’t change the fact that you’re driving on roads with people who can’t read your mind. And perhaps more importantly, hang up the damn phone. I freely admit that I can’t talk, type, read, eat, apply make-up, or look at passengers without seriously compromising my driving ability. It’s time that y’all freely admitted it too.

And the day when cars drive themselves will not come soon enough for me.

There’s a book I talk about a lot. It’s called What You Can Change and What You Can’t by Martin E. Seligman. http://www.amazon.com/What-You-Change-Cant-Self-Improvement/dp/1400078407/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1237415694&sr=1-1

It tells you what you can improve or cure and what can’t, on a scale of most easily curable (panic attacks) to the downright incurable (sexual orientation). One of the arguments he makes is that being overweight is almost never curable.

"You too can lose the weight (and keep it off!)" Who’s telling you that? One of the 341,871 diet books available on Amazon? We’re one of the fattest nations in the world. We’re also one of the most obsessed with dieting. What if the correlation implies a negative causation? What if dieting makes you fat?

You eat less. Your body decides food is scarce. Your body becomes thrifty and stores more calories as fat.

You know this. We all saw Oprah slim down, and we all saw her balloon up again. We’ve seen the same thing happen to ourselves, our friends. Somewhere in the back of your mind is that BS about the “ideal weight” or what a good BMI is, and you compare yourself to that. (There’s a strong correlation between dieting and depression. What could be more depressing than trying to cure the incurable?)

What if the Venus of Willendorf is what an ideal woman should look like? Most women aren’t that fat. The ancient little fertility fetish is an example of the top 5% of the spectrum. But you know what? Most actresses and models are at the bottom 5% of the spectrum. We see those underfed aberrations on television, airbrushed and starved until their abdomens are concave and their ribs are visible even from the front, and the lie is that we can have that too. Yeah, anorexics manage to starve themselves skinny and you know what? Anorexics DIE. (Anorexia is one of the most fatal mental illnesses.)

And sure, it’s easy to blame a person’s heaviness on themselves. If every meal involves opening a plastic wrapper, and most breakfasts consist of a liter of soda, you’re not likely to be at your slimmest.* But your slimmest isn’t as slim as society and the media thinks you ought to be. (It’s not all men’s fault either. After all, most men like boobs, and if you show me a skinny girl with big boobs, 90% of the time I can show you silicone.) There are plenty of “fat” women who eat just as little as thin women, and who exercise as much as or more. I know women who weigh half again as much as I do who can run marathons.

I’m a big fan of exercise. It helps me be happier, have fewer PMS symptoms, and gives me muscle aches which I can complain about on Twitter (I love complaining.) But exercise will not make you thin. I’m a big fan of healthy eating too. Low-fat, sugar-free makes me gag, and I avoid anything shelf-stable. But you know what? Sumo wrestlers get big on rice, fish, and seaweed. You can eat right, exercise well, and still be “chubby.” 

You will never get rid of that last ten pounds, because that last ten pounds belongs with you. Chances are good you are already at your perfect weight.**  You aren't changing because you are already perfect.  If you diet it away, it will come back and bring friends. You need that ten pounds. That ten pounds is your safety net.  I had a friend who underwent a serious illness. She lost 10 dress sizes in two months. If she hadn’t had a little extra weight, she would probably have died. Having a little extra flab is like having money in your bank account. 

I’m willing to concede that certain types of weight are probably losable. Sometimes weight gain is for a specific reason (thyroid conditions, eg.). I lost my pregnancy weight easily (hooray for breastfeeding!), and most people who get glandular problems fixed find that they settle down to a lighter weight without much trouble. But if a person is eating right and getting exercise, she’s likely at the weight she’s supposed to be, even if that weight is more than three Hollywood starlets stacked together. 

What we all need to do, thin and thick alike, is stop blaming people for their size. This is hard, very hard, because cognitive dissonance wants us to believe that fat people deserve their abuse. Thin people want to think that they have their size because of some virtue, and not because of a fluke of gentetics.  But once you get into the mind view that A PERSON CANNOT CONTROL HER SIZE then treating overweight people as being to blame for their own condition is inhuman. We need to tell the diet industry to stop lying to us, and we need to accept that people come in all shapes and sizes.

But if you don’t believe me, and you really think you should slim down to supermodel-svelte, you can always try prayer. I hear that works real well for all those gay people who managed to convert to straight.

 
*(Then again, I knew a rail-thin girl who ate nothing but Lucky Charms and soda.)

**(Your friends think you're hot.)