Saturday, June 23, 2012
To My Latino Friends
Welcome to being a wedge this year -like the gays with marriage equality, and if you give it in a minute we'll see the old people, the sick people, kids, education, and the kitchen sink all picked up and hurled at the Republicans. Welcome to the 2012 cycle. But the next time you hear "Oh, this is election year politics" on the DREAM act - here's why it needs to be election year politics.
In 2010, when it wasn't election year politics, Republicans had no problem killing their own idea just to sick their finger in Obama's eye. The DREAM Act sailed through the House on a largely party-line vote, and then couldn't get cloture in the Senate. If the GOP wanted this to be done through the Congress, like they claim now, they could simply drop their filibuster (which is technically still ongoing), vote for cloture on this bill, and then vote to pass it as presented by the House, and it would be on Obama's desk as a permanent solution by the end of the week. They do not want that - and no matter what they say now, they do no want this policy at all. During the primaries, Texas had its own version of a DREAM act that provided for in-state tuition for children who were illegal immigrants through no fault of their own. It was signed by Rick Perry. And in the debates, the other candidates piled on him for taking this stand and for defending it. Mitt Romney took up the issue of educating children of illegal immigrants like a pair of scissors and went after Rick Perry as though he were a gay kid with queer hair. The media acts as though we haven't heard Romney's long term plan - but we have. Self-deportation, slam the borders shut, let Mexico die on our doorstep, we don't care.
For them to get that, first, the President must fail. They cheer for failure and blame it all on Obama. Every time there is bad news they set their heads alight and scream "Obama's fault! Obama's fault!" and dance around the media and Fox & Friends. But we are still in a stalled economy. We still have major social issues that must be addressed. Regardless of party, if the President fails, if the Office of the President fails in its Constitutionally-mandated mission, then by definition the whole works fails. If two years has taught us nothing, is that these particular Republicans, this Tea Party driven insurgency, are perfectly willing to not just drive us off a cliff, but to put the pedal to the metal. On Immigration, and yes the timing looks very blatantly political, especially considering the memo was brought to him in February of 2011, the President has actually accomplished something, and they are spinning like mad to make this a bad thing. "It isn't permanent!" they cry, and they're right, it's not. If Romney gets elected, or if the GOP retains effective control of the Legislature, it never will be, either. They are right, this is still not a win. This is still Democrats having to play politics with the party that started the mess and refuses - quite literally - to stop the filibustering talk and bluster, and actually do things.
They've all got to go, all the way down the ticket. This is being used in an election year to force Republicans to start answering the question of what do they want. They have to be called to account for wedging off votes, for breaking up the electorate, then digging in their heels and refusing to do anything or put forward a single idea to accomplish a single goal. If you'd like to not be a wedge issue ever again, if you'd like to see reform beyond an executive deferment (that Romney could revoke on Day 1), your best chance is to get every single person you know in every state you know them in and get them to go to the polls and vote Democrat, all the way down the ticket, from President to dog catcher. If you want to keep the laws on the books that break families with immigrants into pieces, reigns terror over school children, and effectively considers non-Whites as second class humans never mind citizens, then stay home or vote for a Republican down-ticket from the President.
Saturday, June 2, 2012
On Being Fat
Ketogenic diets have one huge drawback - when you carb load, or when you cheat, you bloat, to the tune of five grams of water weight for every gram of carbohydrate converted to glycogen. It drops off quickly enough, but it means enduring fat days.
This past Thursday I had an awful day at work. It was just awful - my stats came in destroyed for the month and fairly damaged for the year, I had an unproductive coaching conversation with my boss, and I was stressed to hell over the pending change in schedules. So I decided to hell with it, I'm eating one of the free donuts. And a kruller. And a bismarck. And the Subway cookies provided with the free lunch - but not the sub. And a bag of M&Ms, and when I got home, leftover Easter candy. Now, anyone who knows me can vouch that I don't normally eat like that. Or at least not these days I don't. There were times in my life when I ate like this de rigeur. And this encapsulated moment of badness pretty well explains how and why I used to be fat.
But let's sidetrack a minute and talk about what I mean by "fat". I still have a few pounds more body fat than I'd care to be carrying. My cut cycles to date have never gotten me down to the coveted single-digit body fat levels at which you have those longed-for six-pack abs. That's not fat, though. Fat is when I was 255 graduating high school, or 250 after transferring back to UMaine, or 235 when I was trying to kill myself with booze and take-out. This is not oh woe is me, I will always be fat. This is I have been fat. I have sat and visited with that demon, have studied him to where I can recount every nuance of his being.
Being fat isn't a physical condition - that's obesity. Obesity's cause is very simple - you eat more than you expend, and your body stores it away as fat. It is the most basic of metabolic processes. Being fat is an identity. It is a way of seeing the self, of taking one's own measure and seeing in the mirror naught but the undulating rolls of fat. They are repulsive. Modern American culture tells us that it's OK to be "heavy" or "plus-sized", we wage campaigns urging us all to love ourselves - because we know what we see, and must brainwash ourselves. We know this isn't true. We make peace with thighs that touch, with a little pudge around the center, but there's a tipping point. Upon each frame, only so much may be hung. That point, that limit, may be different for each, but it's there. That point is not the few pounds from holiday fruitcake. This is a point of no return.
I was predisposed to be heavy. If I track directly up my bloodline, there aren't many small people to be found. Short, broad, deep chested - this is the only archetype to be had in the cards, the one lonely gene in the entire familial pool. Growing up I was fairly isolated. Mine was a childhood spent indoors, with lots of toys, thanks to issues with allergies, chronic sinusitis, and bronchitis. I couldn't play sports - but I could play instruments, and by nine years old in the fourth grade, I was well on my way to band nerd status. I was also well on my way to 80 pounds. In time, I would also become a theater nerd, and be outed as gay, and take a part time desk job for my father - and I would eat. I would eat and eat, and there would always be food available. I usually had no one I wanted to spend time with who would spend it with me - but there was always food. Despite demonstrative proof to the contrary that there were in fact people who saw me as more than the fat pasty gay kid, this was the identity I had come to internalize. By the time these 'formative years' that were high school were done, I'd pretty well externalized that image, too, clocking in at 255.
College was Columbia, pure circumstance alone gave me an opportunity to rebrand myself as something else. For most schools, it's the "Freshman Fifteen" that you gain - but for me, I lost some 70 pounds. The school's food was terrible. Most of my disposable income went to clubbing (and thus not food). And sometimes, I'd get bored, and talk to someone on my cell phone, and just walk. Many times I would end a conversation with "Oh, I'm at the Lincoln Center..." having walked there from Columbia, and take the train back home. Without really consciously trying, the weight came off.
That's what the first error was, how I lost to the demon the first time. I never changed my own conception of myself. Sure, I was still pretty pale. But I was fairly well known and popular. I was a young blonde haired green eyed boy in the eastern Mecca of queerdom. Life was good. There were any of a number of identities that could've taken root, could've supplanted the notion of self-as-fat-boy, but none did. I still saw myself as the fat pasty gay kid from Maine, just now I was at Columbia, and me at Columbia just happened to do things that made me less fat. Not a whit of it was on purpose. When the wheels fell off at the end of '01, I moved back to Maine, and spring semester found me in the frozen cold of Maine. I now saw myself as the fat pasty gay kid from up north who had gone to Columbia, lost his marbles, and crash landed back in Maine. And unlike Columbia where there were clubs to go to and only bad food to eat, at UMaine, the food was significantly better, and it was cold. My time at Columbia became a memory, I burned that image of myself, and climbed back up to 235.
The year before I left Maine once and for all, there was a great and powerful mess, that came through my life and irrevocably changed it for the worse. It made that last year feel like trying to manage my life in a typhoon, and it became abundantly, capital red-letters clear, that I was going to have to leave Maine, or I was going to die there. And so I did. But before I did, I decided I needed to be able to compete with these gay boys out at ASU. I'd been a college boy once before, I intended to do it again, and no reason not to get back down to 'fighting weight', right? I tried to eat better, I racked countless hours on an elliptical trainer, got down to about 175-180, which in those days I had accepted as pretty good and/or good enough, and moved to Arizona.
Arizona has been, and continues to be, a bizarre chapter of my life. And within that chapter, there is a passage about just one man. I loved that man. With every fiber of my being, I loved him. He made me feel attractive. He laughed at my jokes. He marveled at how smart he thought I was. The sex was amazing, and curled up next to him, lying in that death trap of an apartment in Mesa, I felt safe, warm, and wanted. I managed to battle my weight down to the 165-175 range while I was with him, on the grounds that I felt he was physically so much more attractive than me that it was incumbent on me to 'catch up', which he found flattering, of course, but don't pin this on the man. This was on me. I wanted to be rid of the identity of fat pasty gay kid. I wanted to be this man's boy.
So when he left, I was destroyed - literally. He moved out on a Tuesday. I came home, came around the entryway, and took one step into an emptied living room. My TV was there, and the stand, and my computer. Everything else was gone, and so was he. I collapsed on the floor, right there at the entry way, and sobbed. I ended up drinking myself into oblivion that night, and it started a trend. I would come home, drink, smoke cigarettes, eat food, and watch TV or play video games. This was the second time I lost the game. I had managed to see myself other than the fat pasty gay kid, but this time, I had built an image far less durable. When it was destroyed, I only had the one to go back to, and so I did. I ballooned back up to 235 pounds, and ruined my health in the process.
But in the ruination of my health, something crazy happened. After chasing one specialist after another, it turned out that a great deal of my trials and tribulations of dizziness and disorientation were driven by my sinuses - one of those early problems, one that had actually been diagnosed but back in the late 80s required massive risky surgery. In 2010, it was an outpatient procedure with a week of down time. It worked. It was a piece of my original ancient identity that had, at long last, been chipped off. The fat pasty gay kid mold was not indestructible after all, that did not need to be me, and I resolved to be rid of it. This was a conscious effort. I was simply not going to be the fat kid anymore. And if that meant becoming something of a health nut or a gym rat instead, well then, that's what I would do. This is the fittest I've ever been. I am not at my goal, but then I had set my goal time-wise for 32, and I'm not there yet.
That goal was to be built like a tank by the time I was 32. If I was going to deal with this accursed frame that seemed to need to carry a good 170 pounds on it, then let it be muscle and not fat. It would require discipline - and so I made myself get up and work out six times a day. It would require research and new knowledge - so I tried and failed at many things, many times, until I found something that worked for me, a ketogenic diet and a whole lot of lifting. It was something I could make myself into that could not exist alongside the fat pasty gay kid identity, and that is why I embrace the craziness of that whole endeavor. The planning meals and counting macros, the body-wrecking workouts, the magic potion before the gym, all of it fall under the header of "things this identity does", as well as under "things fat pasty gay kid identity wouldn't do".
Remember, ketogenic diets have one huge drawback - the inevitable fat days. And after Thursday's binge, did I ever (and do I ever) feel fat. It is critically important, I feel, that this identity die, that I stop seeing myself in the mirror as fat and assigning that identity to myself. I have mirrors in every room of the house now. Completely without thinking, after spending most of my adult life in apartments that had the bathroom medicine cabinet mirror and that was it, I moved into a three bedroom house with giant mirrored doors on each closet. For the first time this weekend somewhere in the process of climbing up and down ladders, fighting with painter's tape, and rolling out three rooms, I caught myself shirtless in the mirror, just out of the corner of my eye, and didn't see myself as fat. It was a tiny little triumph of the new over the old, as I stopped, turned, and looked at myself in the mirror in a pair of boxer shorts with red paint spattered on me. I was not fat. Thick, yes. A little bloated, yes. But I was not fat. If you're reading this, and you're fat, please, feel free to borrow this moment from me. I looked myself over, saw the folds and curves that were parts of my body now, not just rolls of fat. There was a decidedly male build and composition, not the genderless corpulence. Never did I ever the whole time I was fat think I could look at myself and see anything else, but it's possible - and it's even possible on a fat day. We do not need to whitewash fat as an acceptable identity. We can get rid of that identity, and grow a new one in its place.
This new not-fat identity is still, at best, tenuous. There are still days like Thursday. There are still setbacks. There are still times I do see the fat pasty white kid in the mirror. There is also no going back to that. This is my why. Why I'm not 'on a diet', why I don't stop doing all this, why I'll call myself too sick to work before I'll decide I'm too sick to work out. I fully expect this new identity will take a while to replace the one that has been in place for the better part thirty years, but I will not go back. I will not be fat again.
This past Thursday I had an awful day at work. It was just awful - my stats came in destroyed for the month and fairly damaged for the year, I had an unproductive coaching conversation with my boss, and I was stressed to hell over the pending change in schedules. So I decided to hell with it, I'm eating one of the free donuts. And a kruller. And a bismarck. And the Subway cookies provided with the free lunch - but not the sub. And a bag of M&Ms, and when I got home, leftover Easter candy. Now, anyone who knows me can vouch that I don't normally eat like that. Or at least not these days I don't. There were times in my life when I ate like this de rigeur. And this encapsulated moment of badness pretty well explains how and why I used to be fat.
But let's sidetrack a minute and talk about what I mean by "fat". I still have a few pounds more body fat than I'd care to be carrying. My cut cycles to date have never gotten me down to the coveted single-digit body fat levels at which you have those longed-for six-pack abs. That's not fat, though. Fat is when I was 255 graduating high school, or 250 after transferring back to UMaine, or 235 when I was trying to kill myself with booze and take-out. This is not oh woe is me, I will always be fat. This is I have been fat. I have sat and visited with that demon, have studied him to where I can recount every nuance of his being.
Being fat isn't a physical condition - that's obesity. Obesity's cause is very simple - you eat more than you expend, and your body stores it away as fat. It is the most basic of metabolic processes. Being fat is an identity. It is a way of seeing the self, of taking one's own measure and seeing in the mirror naught but the undulating rolls of fat. They are repulsive. Modern American culture tells us that it's OK to be "heavy" or "plus-sized", we wage campaigns urging us all to love ourselves - because we know what we see, and must brainwash ourselves. We know this isn't true. We make peace with thighs that touch, with a little pudge around the center, but there's a tipping point. Upon each frame, only so much may be hung. That point, that limit, may be different for each, but it's there. That point is not the few pounds from holiday fruitcake. This is a point of no return.
I was predisposed to be heavy. If I track directly up my bloodline, there aren't many small people to be found. Short, broad, deep chested - this is the only archetype to be had in the cards, the one lonely gene in the entire familial pool. Growing up I was fairly isolated. Mine was a childhood spent indoors, with lots of toys, thanks to issues with allergies, chronic sinusitis, and bronchitis. I couldn't play sports - but I could play instruments, and by nine years old in the fourth grade, I was well on my way to band nerd status. I was also well on my way to 80 pounds. In time, I would also become a theater nerd, and be outed as gay, and take a part time desk job for my father - and I would eat. I would eat and eat, and there would always be food available. I usually had no one I wanted to spend time with who would spend it with me - but there was always food. Despite demonstrative proof to the contrary that there were in fact people who saw me as more than the fat pasty gay kid, this was the identity I had come to internalize. By the time these 'formative years' that were high school were done, I'd pretty well externalized that image, too, clocking in at 255.
College was Columbia, pure circumstance alone gave me an opportunity to rebrand myself as something else. For most schools, it's the "Freshman Fifteen" that you gain - but for me, I lost some 70 pounds. The school's food was terrible. Most of my disposable income went to clubbing (and thus not food). And sometimes, I'd get bored, and talk to someone on my cell phone, and just walk. Many times I would end a conversation with "Oh, I'm at the Lincoln Center..." having walked there from Columbia, and take the train back home. Without really consciously trying, the weight came off.
That's what the first error was, how I lost to the demon the first time. I never changed my own conception of myself. Sure, I was still pretty pale. But I was fairly well known and popular. I was a young blonde haired green eyed boy in the eastern Mecca of queerdom. Life was good. There were any of a number of identities that could've taken root, could've supplanted the notion of self-as-fat-boy, but none did. I still saw myself as the fat pasty gay kid from Maine, just now I was at Columbia, and me at Columbia just happened to do things that made me less fat. Not a whit of it was on purpose. When the wheels fell off at the end of '01, I moved back to Maine, and spring semester found me in the frozen cold of Maine. I now saw myself as the fat pasty gay kid from up north who had gone to Columbia, lost his marbles, and crash landed back in Maine. And unlike Columbia where there were clubs to go to and only bad food to eat, at UMaine, the food was significantly better, and it was cold. My time at Columbia became a memory, I burned that image of myself, and climbed back up to 235.
The year before I left Maine once and for all, there was a great and powerful mess, that came through my life and irrevocably changed it for the worse. It made that last year feel like trying to manage my life in a typhoon, and it became abundantly, capital red-letters clear, that I was going to have to leave Maine, or I was going to die there. And so I did. But before I did, I decided I needed to be able to compete with these gay boys out at ASU. I'd been a college boy once before, I intended to do it again, and no reason not to get back down to 'fighting weight', right? I tried to eat better, I racked countless hours on an elliptical trainer, got down to about 175-180, which in those days I had accepted as pretty good and/or good enough, and moved to Arizona.
Arizona has been, and continues to be, a bizarre chapter of my life. And within that chapter, there is a passage about just one man. I loved that man. With every fiber of my being, I loved him. He made me feel attractive. He laughed at my jokes. He marveled at how smart he thought I was. The sex was amazing, and curled up next to him, lying in that death trap of an apartment in Mesa, I felt safe, warm, and wanted. I managed to battle my weight down to the 165-175 range while I was with him, on the grounds that I felt he was physically so much more attractive than me that it was incumbent on me to 'catch up', which he found flattering, of course, but don't pin this on the man. This was on me. I wanted to be rid of the identity of fat pasty gay kid. I wanted to be this man's boy.
So when he left, I was destroyed - literally. He moved out on a Tuesday. I came home, came around the entryway, and took one step into an emptied living room. My TV was there, and the stand, and my computer. Everything else was gone, and so was he. I collapsed on the floor, right there at the entry way, and sobbed. I ended up drinking myself into oblivion that night, and it started a trend. I would come home, drink, smoke cigarettes, eat food, and watch TV or play video games. This was the second time I lost the game. I had managed to see myself other than the fat pasty gay kid, but this time, I had built an image far less durable. When it was destroyed, I only had the one to go back to, and so I did. I ballooned back up to 235 pounds, and ruined my health in the process.
But in the ruination of my health, something crazy happened. After chasing one specialist after another, it turned out that a great deal of my trials and tribulations of dizziness and disorientation were driven by my sinuses - one of those early problems, one that had actually been diagnosed but back in the late 80s required massive risky surgery. In 2010, it was an outpatient procedure with a week of down time. It worked. It was a piece of my original ancient identity that had, at long last, been chipped off. The fat pasty gay kid mold was not indestructible after all, that did not need to be me, and I resolved to be rid of it. This was a conscious effort. I was simply not going to be the fat kid anymore. And if that meant becoming something of a health nut or a gym rat instead, well then, that's what I would do. This is the fittest I've ever been. I am not at my goal, but then I had set my goal time-wise for 32, and I'm not there yet.
That goal was to be built like a tank by the time I was 32. If I was going to deal with this accursed frame that seemed to need to carry a good 170 pounds on it, then let it be muscle and not fat. It would require discipline - and so I made myself get up and work out six times a day. It would require research and new knowledge - so I tried and failed at many things, many times, until I found something that worked for me, a ketogenic diet and a whole lot of lifting. It was something I could make myself into that could not exist alongside the fat pasty gay kid identity, and that is why I embrace the craziness of that whole endeavor. The planning meals and counting macros, the body-wrecking workouts, the magic potion before the gym, all of it fall under the header of "things this identity does", as well as under "things fat pasty gay kid identity wouldn't do".
Remember, ketogenic diets have one huge drawback - the inevitable fat days. And after Thursday's binge, did I ever (and do I ever) feel fat. It is critically important, I feel, that this identity die, that I stop seeing myself in the mirror as fat and assigning that identity to myself. I have mirrors in every room of the house now. Completely without thinking, after spending most of my adult life in apartments that had the bathroom medicine cabinet mirror and that was it, I moved into a three bedroom house with giant mirrored doors on each closet. For the first time this weekend somewhere in the process of climbing up and down ladders, fighting with painter's tape, and rolling out three rooms, I caught myself shirtless in the mirror, just out of the corner of my eye, and didn't see myself as fat. It was a tiny little triumph of the new over the old, as I stopped, turned, and looked at myself in the mirror in a pair of boxer shorts with red paint spattered on me. I was not fat. Thick, yes. A little bloated, yes. But I was not fat. If you're reading this, and you're fat, please, feel free to borrow this moment from me. I looked myself over, saw the folds and curves that were parts of my body now, not just rolls of fat. There was a decidedly male build and composition, not the genderless corpulence. Never did I ever the whole time I was fat think I could look at myself and see anything else, but it's possible - and it's even possible on a fat day. We do not need to whitewash fat as an acceptable identity. We can get rid of that identity, and grow a new one in its place.
This new not-fat identity is still, at best, tenuous. There are still days like Thursday. There are still setbacks. There are still times I do see the fat pasty white kid in the mirror. There is also no going back to that. This is my why. Why I'm not 'on a diet', why I don't stop doing all this, why I'll call myself too sick to work before I'll decide I'm too sick to work out. I fully expect this new identity will take a while to replace the one that has been in place for the better part thirty years, but I will not go back. I will not be fat again.
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