| New locks, plus lengthy screed on self-hater in Self magazine |
[Dec. 20th, 2009|11:37 am] |
Yesterday, my boyfriend and I bought new doorknobs and deadbolts for the front and back doors. The old hardware was original to the house when it was built 30 years ago, we believe. One of the past owners of the house replaced some of the original hardware and fixtures in the house with brushed nickel while leaving the faded, flaking, and filthy dark brassy-colored metal in a lot of other places, including the front and back doors. Now that we've done the front and back doors, we regret not having replaced them sooner. They look really nice, the latches catch much more easily, it's easier to shut and lock the doors without a fight from the lock, the dogs can no longer let themselves in or out the back door by jumping on the handle, and the new bolts are not key-operated-only. I feel safer having a working lock on the back door again. Ahh, the illusion of safety, as though someone couldn't just bust the window if they wanted in.
I got the new Self magazine in the mail yesterday morning. Reading it is a mixed bag these days. I remember enjoying it a lot more 4 years ago when a coworker introduced me to it. I participated in its annual fitness program, the SELF Challenge, and it started my interest in improving my fitness and health. Now, it's got a lot of fitness, but also the regular women's magazine crap of beauty products, sex tips, and celebrity profile fluff. I'm sure they had some of it back then, but it seemed as though the focus was more on the fitness and wellness angle; I may be mistaken, but I think I remember pages of recipes. This issue, there were pilates moves in the tear-out exercise of the month pages and a workout routine that looks like it would kill me. Hehe.
The major downer, the thing that made me regret my renewed subscription, was a story by a woman who was 172 pounds and completely miserable and self-hating. I'm shorter than her, I'm more overweight than she was at her professed heaviest, but shit, at least I like myself. This woman is still dealing with issues related to her father and food-as-comfort, and she's aimed a lot of loathing onto herself for, on the surface, being fat. Which is understandable, except it takes on a transitive property and distributes that hatred of fat to every other woman reading that article who's supposed to tsk-tsk at those poor fatties being so fat, or the women who are supposed to sob along with her as she throws a box of snack cakes out the car window to prevent herself from eating them. I am not ashamed of who I am because of what my body looks like, and I feel alienated from this article, since its audience is a person who has such shame as a core part of their self view.
I understand that people who don't like themselves tend to criticize themselves very harshly, but her attitude toward her weight bordered on toxic - and was a little capricious for me to believe she will be happy with mere weight loss. She went from completely self-loathing to hopeful that she could be beautiful and sexy after several months, and then dismissive of a friend described as newly overweight, doubting, and catty, all in a matter of 27 pounds. Her struggle to lose the weight was not very inspirational - if anything, I felt completely discouraged by her attitude - and I didn't empathize with her at all. I may be overweight, but my self worth is not fucking tied to the scale, as it seemed to have been for her, and my judgment of other people is not similarly tied to how large they are. I mean, how much sheer self-loathing she had for her fat self was most glaringly evident from her word choice, describing pants as being like sausage casing, gobbling and slurping things down her gullet. Those are dismissive, primal verbs that you assign to animals. Because fat people aren't people. Perhaps for her, she gained weight and felt disgusted by herself through eating snack cakes in her car by the box, but it's not so for a lot of us fatties, and it bothered me that she chose to highlight those conspicuous, cliched forms of shame rather than the slow build of fried, fatty foods and snack foods, poor food choices over time, that do in the weight of so many people in this country.
I am sorry she had such a bad time with her family and issues with eating and food. I just wish she didn't have to distribute so much haterade on her journey to her happier place. I hope she finds peace with herself and her family issues and changes that attitude of hers. I just don't want to read any more of her shit until she gets there. |
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