just now i’ve been overcome with a rush of love for my parents. this is a rare occurance, which is why i thought i would record it before it slipped away.
i’ve had a complicated relationship with my parents since my teenage years. mistakes have been made on both sides, many times. but my parents have always loved me and done their best, and i think when it comes to the basic values and beliefs they imparted to me they never went wrong.
case in point- i talked to them on the phone just now and they asked what i felt about the latest developments in the democratic primary election contest. i said that the tactics of the clintons had turned me from a weak supporter of senator barack obama to a very strong supporter of senator obama. the clintons behavior has been shameful and i am disgusted, especially by the racial elements of their attacks.
my parents had come to the exact same conclusion. they’d been on the fence, maybe even leaning towards supporting hillary clinton. but the latest developments have pushed them firmly into the obama camp. they’re just completely disgusted by the racial game-playing by hillary and bill clinton.
made me smile. i guess the apple doesn’t fall to far from the tree, huh?
if i still allowed myself to have dreams this would be mine:
my first job out of college was as a staff member in a residential treatment program for teenage girls. i loved the job, excelled at it, and although there was a lot i didn’t like about the system and the administration i loved the girls i worked with and the idea of working with the toughest hardest cases of troubled adolescents for the rest of my life.
my dream is to create my own program for teenage girls with multiple problems who are in the social services or juvinille detention systems. the program would start with a committment to the highest quality services for the girls, dedicated and well paid staff and attention to each girl’s individual needs and personality. for example, at my old program our girls could never participate in any extracurricular activities that cost money, things like playing an instrument or taking gymnastics or dance were just completely out of the question. in any program i created i’d look to get charitable contributions to pay for those sorts of activities.
the other thing i would want to find funding for would be higher education. i’d want to be able to promise that any girls who succeeded in my program would be able to go to college or, alternatively, a high caliber vocational program, like a culinary school or nursing program. instead of having the girls for a while and then sending them back to poverty and abusive families or just cutting them loose at 18, i’d want to be able to say there really was something better that could be theirs if they were willing to put the work in.
i met so many bright kids who ought to have been reachable. the worst part was that for so many of them i can’t say we honestly did anything to leave them better off after they’d been through our program. in one case a girl that was at our program ran away, went back to the streets, and died a few months later. in another case i ran into one of my former clients in a treatment program for anorexia years later.
now, some people would say these girls were ultimately responsible for their own destinies. but i can’t bring myself to agree with that. if you’re going to expect someone to work hard to improve their future prospects you have to be able to look them in the eye and tell them why you believe there’s a realistic path from where they are now to that bright future. a program i created would show them that path and give them what they needed to choose to follow it.
i don’t have anything particularly to say, but i figured officially moving meant i had to write some sort of introductory post in my new home.
i hate change. i miss my blogspot already. change is bad and scary and even a slight change to where i have my blog makes me feel weird and unabalanced. or maybe feeling weird and unbalanced is just my natural state?
worth pondering.
i’ve been thinking about writing this post all day and finally decided to do it after finding myself saying aloud “stupid fat fucking disgusting FAT piece of shit” after i saw that although my weight tonight was the same as this morning and i will certainly see some additional loss tomorrow it wasn’t quite the number i was hoping for, ie, .2 or .4 pounds less than it was in the morning.
i’ve lost 70 pounds, so far, this time around. when i started i said i had about 60 pounds to lose, and my goal weight was 57 pounds less than my weight at the time. the plan, if you’ll remember, was to lose it quick and dirty, then jump back into recovery. but *shocker* here i am, 13 pounds below my original goal and i’m so upset over my percieved “fatness” that i start berating myself OUT LOUD for not losing weight quite fast enough.
this is insanity. people on my forum are congratulating me, they’re jealous of me for god’s sake… and i just feel like crying. it’s never going to be good enough, and i’ve lost everything in my life to this disease and i honestly wish i’d stayed 220+ pounds and functional, back before the very first time i lost weight, with a job and a girlfriend and a future. no, i wasn’t happy, i had low self esteem, i had problems with depression and self injury. but i wasn’t as unhappy and hopeless as i have been since my ed took over (with the brief reprise of my wonderful OA recovery experience) either.
but, look, before you say anything- i can’t go back to recovery. not today, not this week probably. i wont say beyond that, i don’t know what it would take at this point to push me over. sometimes i feel so far away, others i feel right on the edge of being able to try again. i don’t know if it will be weeks, months, or never. but i know right now it ain’t happening.
this analogy was partly inspired by rio iriri’s lovely fuel efficiency blog where she talked about cars as an analogy for people having different metabolisms.
imagine if you will, a game of musical chairs. at the beginning of the game there is only one chair less than there are children going round in a circle. an adult is playing music, and when the music stops all but one child finds a seat.
the adult berates this one left out child saying “why weren’t you faster? why weren’t you stronger? why weren’t you smarter? you are clearly the stupidest, laziest child of the whole bunch!” while the other children look on.
then the adult has the children stand up again, and plays the music, and takes away another chair, again berating the child who is left over for not being smart/strong/fast enough. and then the music starts again, and this time two or three chairs are taken away. again the children that fail to find a seat are berated for not being as smart and strong and fast as the children in the seats. at the end of the game a very small number of children are seated.
are the children seated at the end smarter, stronger, and faster on average than the ones left without chairs? it’s possible, to some extent. but the number of children with a seat is clearly dependant on how many seats there are. and if there were no seats at all it wouldn’t matter how smart or strong or fast or lucky a child was, they would be unable to find a seat.
the well off conservative is a child in the seats. she says “i don’t see the problem, i worked hard and i found a seat. the people without seats are just whiners, they’re jealous, they don’t deserve a seat. oh, another chair for my feet? thank you soooo much, that’s lovely. as i was saying, i don’t see why they should have one of my two seats, or the seat i have my laptop resting on, or the seats i’ve reserved for my children…”
the poor or working class conservative is a child who doesn’t have a seat. he says “i just wasn’t good enough. oh, a footstool? for me? thank you sooooo much!”
the liberal is generally a child in the seats. she says “um… do you think we might stop taking seats away now? because, well, my seat might be next. and, er, the people who don’t have any seats look awfully angry…”
the radical may be seated or unseated. he says “give us back our fucking SEATS! oh, is that too angry? i meant to say, PLEASE give us back our fucking SEATS!!!”
and a communist or anarchist also may be seated or unseated, but is someone who says not only should we have enough seats for everyone, but the table we sit around should be round and no one should have a better seat or position at the table than anyone else.
now, i’m willing to admit there may not be enough seats to have one for absolutely everyone, and maybe it would never be possible to have a completely round table. but i think the government and the corporations should please give us back our fucking seats.
dude, i’m once again pissed off at mamavision. if you’ve read her latest, a 16 year old wrote in saying he’d been picked up by a modelling agency that told him to lose weight from a healthy weight to a much lower and unhealthy one and put him on a 200 calorie a day starvation diet, he had passed out a few times already, and was wondering what to do.
mamaV’s caring response? oh, it’s your choice, there’s good and bad in both ways. far be it from me to tell someone not to model.
what is THAT? i mean, i don’t think people should be storming fashion shows prothseletyzing to the models that they leave the business, or kidnapping models to deprogram them. but if someone actually asks your honest opinion is it too much to say “don’t do it”???
i mean, i never talk about the fashion industry because it’s never really interested me. i tend to comment less when mamaV talks about fashion for the same reason (hint to heather: want to get rid of me? talk about nothing but the eeeevil fashion industry and what they’ve done lately). but when it comes to a young man who is at a crossroads asking, should i do what they tell me and starve and risk all my health and happiness or should i pull out now? it just seems so abundantly obvious to me that you say “don’t do it!” or if you must you could add the redundant “its your decision, but” obviously it’s his decision, he asked your advice, give him some!
so, i’ve come to the conclusion that mamaV is way way more pro-ana than i am. look at the facts! she won’t tell someone asking for advice not to starve themselves, despite their having passed out a bunch of times. me? happily tell them starving isn’t a smart idea, don’t do it. she posts pictures of “thinsperation” on her site practically once a week and is many people’s only exposure to thinspo, while i don’t like it, look for it, or see it apart from on her site. and in her desire to expose the eeevils of pro-ana she will inevitably end up adding to its strength.
mamaV? she’s a proana. definitely. even fits her own criteria since she never had a real eating disorder, just was looking for attention by modelling.
(edit: “zoe” who i assumed to be a she, turned out to be the male “zach”. doesn’t change anything about my opinion, but i did go back and change my gender pronouns from hers to hims)
chapter one, so far so good. i’m able to follow Euclid, at least, and understand the proof of the pythagorean theorem.
when i was in high school we were definitely taught the pythagorean theorem, but i don’t think we were taught the proof of that theorem. i wish we had been! i had the problem too often in math class that i wanted to understand why something was true, to really understand how it worked and why it applied as a rule to all situations not just the example in the texbook, but i was only taught what the rule was and how to apply it. as an adult i think, no wonder i hated math! they didn’t actually teach me mathematics, they just taught how to solve certain problems and pass their tests.
i think the most interesting story in the chapter was about pythagoras and hippasus. the story goes like this:
pythagoras is at the head of a school of philosophy that holds that all things in the universe can be expressed through integers. this is something that seems beautiful and right to them, a proper ordering of the universe. but then hippasus discovers that the square root of 2 cannot be expressed by any ratio of two integers- it is what’s called an irrational number. the pythagoreans can’t accept that their religious views are wrong, so they react by throwing hippasus off a boat.
now, before you go and scoff at those greeks for this behavior, think about your own life. for instance, with my eating disorder i have often had the experience of having had something proven to me conclusively (for instance, how my perceptions are distorted causing me to think i’m fatter than i really am) that i couldn’t or wouldn’t accept. sometimes i even get angry at the person bringing these things to my attention. and don’t think eating disorders are a special case! everyone has beliefs that they hold so dear that it is only with great difficulty that they can give them up, regardless of the level of proof that is offered.
what beliefs do you cling to even after seeing evidence against them?
One of my favorite christmas gifts this year was a book, edited by Stephen Hawking, entitled God Created the Integers. This book is about the big ideas in mathematics that enabled our current understanding of the world, and it collects excerpts from important works in the history of mathematics.
I never got as far as calculus in high school and in college my math requirement was satisfied by a statistics course I found quite unchallenging (although I probably don’t remember a thing from it). Since leaving school I’ve often wished to have more of an understanding of mathematics, particularly where it applies to physics. I’m fascinated by quantum physics, relativity, and cosmology, and I read everything i can get my hands on that is written with the lay person in mind, but when it comes to the actual mathematics I’m left completely behind. So for me this book will hopefully provide the kind of window into mathematical thought I feel I’ve been missing out on.
I think I’ll try posting my thoughts as I read, since one of the things I find most helpful in understanding something is to try and explain it to other people. It’s a really big, long, equation heavy book and I don’t really do “resolutions” but I figured that reading it is the type of overly ambitious project people choose to make resolutions about and while I hope I won’t fail at reading it I thought it fit the whole spirit of the new year to declare my intentions vis a vis this uite intimidating book on the first day of the year, 2008.
happy new year, everyone.
