That’s a lie. Obviously. Because here I am, writing about weight.
But, in general, I don’t talk about my weight. The reason for the silence, however, has changed over the years.
I grew up hearing that I was a fat child. The topic of my weight, my changing body, was a point of discussion for much of my childhood and early adolescence. Take a moment to consider how much fun that was. If you decided that was no fun at all, then, you win. Here’s a kudos to you. “When she hits puberty she’ll slim down.” “When she starts putting an interest in boys, she’ll slim down.” “She’d better lose some weight or she won’t find a man to marry her.” You get the gist.
Here’s the thing though. The picture that was put into my head was that I was a contender for fattest baby/toddler/little girl in the world. Or if not the whole world, El Salvador at least. I went from cute fat, a sign that we clearly weren’t doing too bad if the family had this fat baby/child to being a sense of embarrassment because I wasn’t thin like the other girls.
About a decade or so ago, I found a rare photo of me when I was in my early teens and was I a stick? No. I was a little chubby but not as big as I had been led to believe.
The damage, by the time I was in my mid-teens, was done. I was fat. I was always going to be fat. And nobody would ever love me. That was my lot in life. I was so embarrassed by it all that I refused to say the word fat, I never answered any of the questions posed to me, wondering when I was going to stop being lazy, eating so much, etc etc etc. I figured if I ignored it, it would all just go away. My favorite colors, if you asked me, where black and browns. Adding color meant possibly wearing navy or to be wild, light grey. This was also the mid to late 80s so it’s not as if there were a lot of options for someone not able to fit in straight sized clothes. So even if I had wanted to be a plus sized fashionista, I didn’t have the resources or stores to pull that off.
Let’s fast forward a few decades, shall we? Because you get the gist. Fat equaled ugly, unlovable, undeserving. Despite seeing evidence to the contrary out in the world, that was the narrative that played non-stop in my head.
It has taken literal decades to undo that damage. And to be perfectly honest with you, all of that damage isn’t completely undone.
At 52, I am at place, though, were I can say out loud, I am a fat woman. It’s as neutral now as me also saying, I am a short woman. I am a smart woman. Okay, I don’t say that. My usual go to is “I’m a reasonably smart person.” Because, cliched as it may be, I’m also a funny person. Fat and funny, that two Fs that always go together, no?
I’m okay with my body. Would I like it to be stronger? Sure. I’m now at a size (even if it’s still considered plus sized) where I have more clothing options available to me. Would I like to be a bit smaller just to have even more options? Yes. I no longer try to hide in dark colors. I even, gasp. wear horizontal stripes despite the “fact” (?) that they make you look larger. At one point I thought, I’m a big woman. Vertical stripes aren’t going to magically make a hundred pounds disappear.
I’m glad I’m in this head space now because I have a little girl to raise. And the image I want in her head is that she is strong and capable and that her body is meant to move and take her as far as she wants to go. The world being what it still is, will make her doubt herself. I’m hoping to give her a solid enough foundation where she can take those doubts and shove them aside to reach whatever goals she sets for herself.
And so, I don’t talk about weight. Not because I’m ashamed or embarrassed. No, I don’t talk about weight now because it doesn’t define me. It may be the first thing people notice about me. I can’t do anything about that. But it doesn’t have to be the barometer for how I value myself. I wouldn’t want a number on a scale to determine how my daughter feels about herself so why shouldn’t I want that for myself as well?
I’ve thought of myself as a details oriented person for as long as I can remember. Whenever they ask you about your strengths at work I nearly always say some version of, I can mind the details. It’s certainly something that I believe has helped me get where I am today.
Putting together this orchid from the Lego Botanical Collection has certainly tested my attention to detail. Mind you, it’s not as if I’ve ever claimed to be some organizational savant but I had more trouble than I would have expected following these directions. I suppose I should cut myself some slack since this is only the second Lego set I’ve ever completed but, still, it was humbling.
I’m not sure that assembling Lego sets is going to be a new hobby; as hobbies go, it’s an expensive one. I do like the Botanicals though. They’re certainly easier to care for than real plants - another hobby that I’m trying to pick up with varying degrees of success.
I do like the way this little corner of my office is looking - I have another set to do but I’m taking a bit of a break because, while I like the result, I don’t find the act of assembling the sets to be all that relaxing. And isn’t that the point of hobbies? To help you relax? Forget about stressors for a short while at least? The act of putting this together was at times confusing and frustrating. In the end, I had to Google what to do with the small pile of brown bricks because the picture in the instruction booklet was so unhelpful. So we’ll see how I’m feeling after I put the other set of flowers together. I am sort of interested in doing the LOVE set so Lego building is probably still in my future.
Took a road I rarely use this afternoon and it reminded me of something.
At the end of junior year the French 4 AP teacher asked me if I was going to take French 5. I told her I wasn’t because I was a little burnt out on French. She encouraged me to continue on to French 5 AP lit and promised she’d make it fun. I really liked her so I said okay.
Cut to a month or so later when I get my schedule and her name is nowhere on it. I called - I think? Somehow I got in touch with a classmate to ask if she knew what the hell was going on. She tells me the teacher has retired. How do you know, I ask. She lives in the house behind me and she mentioned it in passing.
Tell me why I had the nerve to knock on this lady’s door to ask how she could retire when she’d convinced me to continue with a subject I was so done with?!?
She explained she’d thought it over and decided it was time to retire and spend more time with her partner. Points to her for even entertaining my questions. In the moment I acknowledged that someone who’d been teaching for so long should get to retire whenever they pleased.
That goodwill evaporated quickly once classes started. The teacher who was assigned to cover the class had to take a crash course over the summer on French 5 AP lit and it was obvious. At the end of the first quarter a group of us met with the principal to complain that we weren’t actually learning the material that would prepare us for the AP exam. He thanked us for the feedback and said he’d take it under consideration for the following year.
By mid-year half the class had transferred out. A few kids who couldn’t transfer were allowed to treat that period as study hall. Because of my other classes I couldn’t switch out so I had to stay for the entire year. On some level I felt bad for her because it couldn’t have been easy or felt good to have a bunch of 17 year olds bitching about you. But given that I hadn’t really wanted to be in the class to begin with and the class felt like such a waste of time I’m sure I was a pill to interact with. It didn’t help that she accused me of stealing the French dictionary I used every day. Even when I explained that I had bought it from the school when they got newer editions she wanted to take it from me. I told her there was no way I was giving her a book I’d paid for.
Yes, I still have the dictionary. I paid for it after all.
Also, whenever someone tells me I’m a lot and I want to deny it i need to remember this story. 😂😂
After a couple of years of easily surpassing my reading goal of 40 books a year I decided I’d increase the number to 50. That level of arrogance was not not to be tolerated by the universe, it seems, as I barely got to 40. Ah well. I got hyper fixated on rereading or completing several series so the bulk fo the books read were thrillers. Not terribly educational but engaging enough to keep my interest and seeing as how I don’t believe books have to always be teaching me something, I’m okay with the choices. That said, I do think I’d like 2025 to not be so heavy on the forgettable reads.
The last week of 2024 I made a concerted effort to catalogue my books and I’m happy to say I got about 95% there. This is relevant here because one of last year’s goals was to also read physical books. I failed at this miserably with, I believe, only one of my reads being something I had on my shelves. Not that my books are catalogued, and in a bit of order, I’m a bit more motivated to select something from my shelves. (The cataloguing process will be a separate entry at some point soon.)
If you’ve been keeping up with my (albeit) sporadic updates I’m sure you can guess that my third and final goal will be to finish The Brothers Karamazov. Would I be me if I didn’t include my white whale in a reading goal entry? If I ever do finish it, I don’t know what I will do with myself.
What was your favorite read of the year?
Here are the books I read in 2024. Favorites of the year are marked by **s.
L is for Lawless, Sue Grafton
The Last Action Heroes: The Triumphs, Flops, and Feuds of Hollywood’s Kings of Carnage, Nick de Selyen
The Surgeon (Rizzoli & Isles), Tess Gerritsen
The Apprentice (Rizzoli & Isles), Tess Gerritsen
The Sinner (Rizzoli & Isles), Tess Gerritsen
Body Double (Rizzoli & Isles), Tess Gerritsin
Vanish (Rizzoli & Isles), Tess Gerritsen
Erasure, Percival Everett
Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, Jesse Q Sutanto
Blank, Zibby Owens
One for the Money (Stephanie Plum #1), Janet Evanovich
The Mephisto Club (Rizzoli & Isles), Tess Gerritsen
The Never Game (Colter Shaw), Jeffrey Deaver
The Keepsake (Rizzoli & Isles), Tess Gerritsen
The Goodbye Man (Colter Shaw), Jeffrey Deaver
Resurrection Walk (Lincoln Lawyer), Michael Connelly
After That Night (Will Trent), Karin Slaughter
Righteous Prey (Lucas Davenport & Virgil Flowers), John Sandford
Judgment Prey (Lucan Davenport & Virgil Flowers), John Sandford
Escape Clause (Virgil Flowers), John Sandford
Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers), John Sandford
The Final Twist (Colter Shaw), Jeffrey Deaver
Holy Ghost (Virgil Flowers), John Sandford
Hunting Time (Colter Shaw), Jeffrey Deaver
The Midnight Lock (Lincoln Rhyme), Jeffrey Deaver
Good Material, Dolly Alderton
Ice Cold (Rizzoli & Isles), Tess Gerritsen
Toxic Prey, John Sandford,
The Watchmaker’s Hand (Lincoln Rhyme), Jeffrey Deaver
I’ve been trying out various book tracking/inventory apps on and off for months - truly the time period probably spanned a year or more. The desire to figure this out ebbed and flowed depending on what I had going on and how much energy I had at the end of each day. Dear readers, I rarely had energy to do more than veg out at night. The lack of order to my books was a problem but it wasn’t a crisis. After almost three years of living with the disordered books I finally decided December 2024 was going to be the month to tackle this long neglected task.
I used to use Delicious Library but that’s no longer supported so I had to go looking for something else. That’s a quick summary of a problem I attempted to solve for many months. I reinstalled the app, I tried to email app support when that didn’t work. That went nowhere, clearly, once I realized that the app developers had moved on and were no longer supporting the program.
I Googled “best book inventory apps” and found reviews for several options, ranging from free to not free and very expensive. I didn’t want to pony up to much money on something that I wasn’t sure would work so I opted to download the free options.
I eventually went with Book Buddy. Library Thing seems to do a slightly better job at identifying books which you’d think would have put it ahead. However BookBuddy automatically assigns genres and I find that more helpful in the long run.
Before I tackled the actually inventorying of the books, I moved some bookcases and storage carts around. Now all of my books will live in the living room instead of being scattered about. It’s not a big apartment so giving all the books space within one living area takes up space but there’s something quite satisfying in being able to see every book I own with a glance. I’m determined to at least scan/enter all the books before the end of the year. I’ll leave the organizing for another day. This is what passes for exciting around here and I’m okay with that.
Wearing my chucks today was a conscious choice, I said.
A coworker pointed out that I was missing the pearls.
Nah, I said. I can’t wear the pearls because I don’t wear fake pearls and since I don’t have real ones, I’ll have to do without.
Another coworker chuckled a bit and jumped in with, You just want people to know you don’t wear fake pearls.
Yes, I said, but that’s not much of a flex, is it? Since I’m also saying I’m too poor to afford real pearls. I don’t have real pearls money. So mostly I’m just admitting to a weird quirk.
I think the implication was that I was being snooty but can you be snooty while you’re also admitting you’re broke? Inquiry minds want to know.
Nothing much to say, really. I don’t usually add images to the blog posts so this is essentially a test to see how it looks.
I don’t have the energy to work up a completely new stylesheet and the stylesheet that came with the default template is so complicated that I haven’t been able to figure out how to even change the default colors. This is just a reminder, not that I really needed one, mind you, that I never went passed advanced amateur skill level when it came to my coding. Even being generous, I maybe got to beginning intermediate and that was more than a decade ago when I was still spending time learning things.
I am one of those people who still watch Grey’s Anatomy. Hi, nice to meet you. You can now say you know someone who still watches that show because despite the consistent ratings few people will admit to watching. I can’t even tell you I watch it ironically or for shits and giggles. Don’t get me wrong, I also won’t ever suggest anyone watch it or will tell you I love it. And year to year I remember maybe less than 10 character names. But here we are, the show and I, still together for 21 years.
There have been years where I’ve said I would stop because the show infuriated me so much. Meredith Grey has got to be one of the most selfish, ridiculous characters ever written. The storylines, good grief. So I let week after week go by without ever tuning in and then I’d binge watch half a season or a full season and be done with it. It’s like asking your aunt about that messy cousin and getting the low down on all, well, the messiness.
I think I mostly watch it out of habit. I am a person that craves consistency and connections. Minus a writer’s strike here and there, the show has consistently been in my life for 7-8 months of my life for 20 years. There’s history there; sure, one sided but you take what you can get. Because connections with people are not easy. You’re either too much or not enough for them. And they, they are never enough for me. I can imagine that’s exhausting for folks - trying to match my level of need. Though to say neediness makes me squirm but there is a need let’s be honest.
I watch the show and just as quickly as the credits roll I’ve probably forgotten more than half of what I just watched. I don’t know that I laugh much, but once in a while I cry. Like today, as Dr. Webber (Richard if were were closer but we are not so-) was talking with an intern about dealing with a family member who has cancer. The tears rolled as forgotten layers of guilt coursed through me. Guilt and familiarity. For slightly over a month I walked through my life thinking about the cancer that was inside my body. It was likely contained, the doctor said, but she worried it wouldn’t stay that way for long. Of course, she wouldn’t know for sure until after the surgery and she’d had a chance to check the lymph nodes.
Why the guilt? Because a surgery fixed the problem. I didn’t have to suffer through chemo treatments, no losing of the hair, nausea, exhaustion. So when others talk about the toll their cancer took on them I don’t feel able to join in on the conversation. Which I know is silly. Cancer took things from me as well and they are things I rarely talk about because they too seem wrong. A coworker tells me her faith in God was strengthened through her cancer experience. Another tells me she has this renewed sense of wonder about life. It’s hard to explain - of course I’m glad to be alive but something is missing. Pre-cancer I loved my birthdays, even if I had nothing planned (I rarely had anything planned), I was in countdown mode as soon as February hit. Before the kiddo could understand birthdays I more often than not forgot it was even coming up. Now I mark them because she has that childlike enthusiasm for birthdays.
For a month, the idea that I could be gone soon was present in my mind. For five years, each time I went to the oncologist I wondered if that would be the day I was told it had come back. Now? I don’t think about it much. I took a selfie in the hospital bed the day of the surgery (pics or it didn’t happen!) and the kiddo came upon it recently. She asked me about it and then asked where she was when it happened. I love that about kids, that incomprehension of time. I didn’t want to scare her so when she kissed my forehead and asked me if I’m all better I said of course.
But then a scene from a silly silly show has me in tears for hours and I’m reminded there’s a break inside. Well, one of many so you’d think I’d be used to the sensation. Breaks don’t disappear though, we know this. They can mend with care and that’s the bitch of it all, isn’t it? The care part. Because if I knew how to really do that then there wouldn’t be so many breaks to begin with.
When I was in my teens, looking younger was annoying.
When I was in my 20s and 30s it didn’t matter.
When I was in my 40s I used to get a kick out of being told I didn’t look it.
Now that I’m in my 50s (albeit early 50s) I don’t hear it anymore.
I blame the kid. She’s cute & I love her to pieces but 5 yrs of sleep deprivation, especially in your late 40s, takes a toll.
Writober - what’s the word to convey deeply looking forward to something but also fearing it a little? That’s Writober for me. It’s a joy and then it’s a blinking cursor on a blank page that might as well be saying, “well? well? well? well? well? well? ...”
I heard this question on a podcast on the way home and the brain decided it wanted to do something with it. And this isn’t quite right but it’s something. And writing something is the name of the game so here we go.
How are you learning to be wild?
In between the sitting downs and being quiet,
learning to be polite and smile,
being seen and not heard,
how are you learning to be wild?
To laugh deeply
To love fully
To trust without reservations?
How are you learning to be wild?
In between respectfully I disagrees
I’m sorry buts
Biting your tongue to keep the peace
How are you learning to be wild?
To push back when it feels wrong
To push away when they’re too close
To scream because you want to
not because you have to
How are you learning to be wild?
To feel any way you want, whenever you want
To choose you sometimes
Not even all the time
Just
Sometimes
How are you choosing to be wild?
Oh, you’re not?
Yeah, I get that.
If you figure it out
Will you tell me?
Please
