#77: The body issue, part 2

Actual updates

Let me begin by saying that space is cool¹ , the moon is cool, the astronauts who went up there and flew around and tried unsuccessfully to use the toilet and then came back down safely are cool, BUT some deeply UNcool people nearly ruined that whole thing for me.

See, the thing is, there are some people who will post about space (or “space”) launches, and it’s always the stupid billionaire vanity project kind, and being interested in those is a sign of moral failings too many to list here. It’s also very embarrassing, although anyone in that group is so far past embarrassment as to not even know what it is anymore. But I saw these kinds of guys² getting excited about a space expedition, so, naturally, I rolled my eyes and kept it moving. It took a surprisingly long time for me to figure out that this was actually a good one, a real NASA one, a multinational one, a real science one. That the people on it were there for good and useful and interesting reasons, and not just for the bragging rights of saying they’d been within a frisbee throw of space. Real people with emotions beyond “number go up” or “people I don’t like got harmed.” An actual human experience. Spacebros can go suck an egg for nearly driving me to miss out on that.

God, ruining enjoyable things for other people is such a crime. I’ve had it done to me, I’ve seen it done to others, and it’s always the same: someone couldn’t imagine that other people don’t feel exactly the same way as them about the thing. It’s the same root cause whether it be cheerleading obnoxious rich douchebags (everyone agrees or else they’re stupid/going to be left behind by the future/a political criminal, and therefore not a real person) or overdosing on fandom (everyone else wants to hear about my current obsession, and furthermore, this work of fiction is very real and also belongs to me). We live in the world together. If nothing else, we live in this world together, didn’t the space photos show that? You have to be able to have a degree of perspective! Other people exist and they’re not just like you!

Got off onto a tangent there but I couldn’t leave it. Be normal about things!! Anyway, let’s get back to what I promised I would write about this month.

So, like I mentioned, I got sick, and as normal for that kind of a bug, I lost a few pounds. I took my sweet time getting back to eating normally afterwards too, so the pounds I lost didn’t leap right back onto my body as soon as I was well again. As part of this whole thing, I crossed the barrier of a round number I figured I’d never see the other side of again. And now I am trying desperately to have some equanimity about it.

The thing that might not be obvious to everyone, depending on how your body has looked during your life and what era it looked like that in, and I suppose also your degree of mental health, is that once this type of thinking gets its hooks in you, it is very difficult to get it un-hooked. The outcome of “still thinking about it all the time but not doing anything about it” is a relatively successful one, and that still sucks!

I have, not to toot my own horn or anything, come a long way. I don’t weigh myself that often. I don’t forbid myself from eating unless certain conditions have been met. I no longer have a spreadsheet. And most of the time I don’t really think about it all that much! But when something changes in either direction, the whole thing comes roaring back, and then I have to contend with it.

When I say “contend with it,” I don’t mean I’m falling back into the really bad shit; more that if I do weigh myself, and the number has gone in one direction or another, I’m trying not to feel any kind of a way about it. It doesn’t mean anything negative if it’s crept back up over that round number. It doesn’t mean anything positive if it’s decreased. It doesn’t mean anything at all. And in general I’m not unhappy with my body itself! It does what I need it to do! It has parts that I like very much and parts that I’m indifferent towards! I could not tell you the sizes of the clothing I’m wearing right now if you offered me money! But this one hangup persists.

Complicating this a bit is that I have a doctor’s appointment coming up - by the time I’ve sent this out, it will already have happened, but As Of This Writing and all that - and you know how it goes when your weight is anything over “risk of falling through storm drains” and you go to the doctor³ . Also they weigh you with all your clothes on. So in the short term, I’m trying to mitigate the psychic damage I’m sure to take there, by, uh, dealing my own to myself in the days leading up to it, I guess? And also by not eating ahead of the appointment, but I think that’s actually advised if they’re going to look at my blood. And I assume they are. They always want a bit of it. Give me my blood back, you vampires⁴ !

UPDATE: The doctor’s appointment went fine, after all. I tricked them into thinking I was normal (the test results even said “RESULTS: NORMAL” on them!) and no one insulted me or made me feel less for being more. But it’s a dice roll every time! Will it be the most demoralizing afternoon of your life, or will you be making jokes with the doctor while she’s in mid-pap-smear? Only one way to find out!

Okay. One other thing. Last month, we watched The Year of Living Dangerously, which I’m shocked and slightly embarrassed to not have watched before - it only won an Oscar and a pile of other awards and has existed for as long as I have! It’s only about a country I lived in for two whole formative years! But, nonetheless, I hadn’t, and now I have, and I’ve got thoughts. Specifically, thoughts about place and memory and how they intersect.

So, the movie takes place in Indonesia in 1965, ahead of the 30th September Movement (when the PKI attempted a coup and killed some generals, leading to absolutely massive murderous reprisals throughout the whole country) and showing the unrest that led there. It’s the waning years of the Sukarno presidency, many people are desperately poor, hunger is widespread, the economy is in the toilet, and the stress on people’s lives is starting to show. Against this background, various Western nations have diplomats, spies⁵ , and journalists there - it’s clear something major is about to happen and they all want to either have a hand in deciding what it is or the scoop on reporting it.

Now, one of my first criticisms is that one of these journalists - indeed the protagonist of the movie - is played by Mel Gibson, who is repugnant as a person. So this movie has the crucial flaw of having to look at his face for two hours or however long it is (I’ve already closed that tab, so it’s dead to me). And honestly, I understand if that is too high of a barrier to watch the movie! But I stuck it out, and if that knocks me down a bit in your moral estimation, I get it and I accept the consequences.

Outside of the political goings-on discussed by the characters, one thing that stood out to me is that nothing about the movie really shows that it’s in 1965, or any year in particular, until one scene at a party full of white people. Some women at the party have beehive hairdos, and some of the dresses are of their era. But outside of that? The locals are wearing either traditional dress like a kain and kebaya, which might be a little bit auntie today⁶ but they’re not like, Little House on the Prairie level of old-fashionedness - or they’ve got office jobs and they’re wearing the same short-sleeved button-up shirts they wore 20 years later and even when I was back visiting 20 years after that, and maybe today. I guess I could have dated it based on the cars? But it’s not a Car Movie, it doesn’t spend a lot of time ogling the cars, and they aren’t distinctively 60s cars. They’re just ordinary kind of cruddy cars, and that’s not particularly identifying! And they try to show a bit of the way the infrastructure is crumbling or that there’s a big disconnect between the fancy embassies and gated homes of the wealthy versus the way the regular people live, but that remained true when I was there, and to some degree even still in 2000, which was the last time I was back.

But I recognized things. Not just places, although definitely that - there’s this or that building or monument or street (it must have been very annoying when I exclaimed “that’s Jalan Thamrin!!”) - but also dishes, situations, ways of talking. Although to be fair the pronunciations throughout were very hit-or-miss. And so I was thinking about what homesickness means. That is not my home. I am not from there. I lived there for two years as a kid, and I’ve been back a few times, and I learned (or “learned”) more than my toddler-level Bahasa on Duolingo more recently, and so I have more of a connection to the place than most of my peer group these days, but it isn’t my home. So how was I feeling homesick for a place that isn’t my home?

I have not been back, like I said, since 2000. It was a different place then and I was a different person then, so even what I remember and identify and feel comfortable about has probably changed in real life. How much of this is just a feeling of missing? You can miss a place without being homesick for it, surely. You can remember small details that hold meaning for you without being homesick. How much of this is just memory, with that added filter of having been a child or barely on the verge of exiting childhood at the time the memories were made? Where’s the line between a memory of a place you miss and a homesickness?

I don’t have an answer to this. Maybe it’s too close to call. Maybe other languages do this sentiment justice. Maybe I’ve just spent too much of my life in a state of perpetual missing, perpetual memory, perpetual homesickness, and it’s fried my circuits.

What am I reading

I’ve been enjoying Where the Axe Is Buried, by Ray Nayler, although if I’m enjoying it that much (which I am!!), then why haven’t I opened it the last few days? “Oh I’m busy” shut the hell up. Make time.

Ok, now that I’ve told myself off in front of you for not reading enough, let’s talk about the book!

It’s set in a near-future Europe where countries are all now run by AI “PMs” which have made a lot of helpful, or “helpful,” changes, which came hand in hand with a lot of surveillance. But in most places it’s tolerable. Not so in one unnamed little country, where its PM has gone off the rails and started doubling the price of energy every few minutes. Is this the beginning of dominos falling? Is it a momentary blip - the kind of whoopsie daisy we’re all being conditioned to accept - and it will be corrected and evened out? And what’s that correction likely to be like, because it started off PRETTY hard.

Meanwhile, in Russia, they’re ruled by a person, but this person is on about his fourth body and it’s not going well. And by that I mean it’s not going well for the people, but it’s also not going well for him.

Against this backdrop, we have some people trying to subvert or overthrow this order, and I’m only far enough for them to be embroiled in situations. One of them might be dead, but I’m sure more of them will be by the end. If you’re going up against a massive, advanced surveillance apparatus in the service of an autocracy - or even in the service of a largely benign computerized dictatorship - you’re not going in expecting to win. But you have to, you know? If you stand for anything, you have to. One of the people involved is a dissident who wrote a book, banned in her home country, that makes exactly this point - and she’s living it over and over again.

Anyway! It’s fun to read something like this again; it used to be a moderately sizeable proportion of the types of books I read, and that has changed - probably for the better - but I’m glad I’m back at this table. Tell me about a bad future! I want to read about the evil computer! Also, I love an alluded-to-but-not-fully-described disaster in the past, and we’ve got at least one of those already.

Some links

Sickening twist at the end. I Went to Greenland and Saw a Warning for Canada

GRAPHS!! But also, some interesting insights that put paid to common misconceptions about the root cause of this problem, as well as (finally) taking seriously the “vibes” of the economy being in rough shape even if it’s doing ok on paper. Plus, one very VERY interesting thought: some things have gotten more expensive for the middle class, who have been used to underpaying for them by a lot. If America’s So Rich, How’d It Get So Sad?

Or maybe the reason people are sad is stuff like this. Guilt by Solidarity

Or this. “Kansas Was Going to Be the First Domino That Fell”: Red States Are Making Lists of Trans People As Surveillance Ramps Up

I imagine you’ve read the Cocaine Salmon story already, but just in case you haven’t, here it is! Also, mentioned in here is that animals that had ingested anti-anxiety drugs got caught by predators more, and, you know, exactly! While it doesn’t really lend itself to going about your day at your laptop job, anxiety was a useful tool for prey animals! (also, very funny to me that I just happened to be listening to a song called Anxiety Attacks while writing this) These Salmon Got High on Cocaine. That Wasn’t the Craziest Part

Just an idea, but maybe the point shouldn’t be how hard it was on you that you had met this guy and didn’t know it. How I Found Out I Knew a Serial Killer

Just like with everything that sucks, you can ultimately trace this back to Reagan. But it’s gotten so, so, so much worse in recent months, and I’m pretty sure you know why! The Chaotic Timeline That Led to America’s Great Airport Meltdown

Oh my god! Adulterated maple syrup! It’s a national scandal!! Alleged Maple Syrup Scam in Quebec Uncovered by Canadian Broadcaster

Parrots (well, keas, actually, let’s not do Bird Erasure) making disability accomodations for themselves! Also, his name being Bruce is a terrific example of my firmly-held belief that you should name your pets aunt and uncle names. I know he isn’t anybody’s pet, he’s a free bird⁷ who answers to no one, but somebody named him and they named him an uncle name. How Bruce the Parrot Landed Atop the Pecking Order, Without a Beak

I talk a lot of shit on LA but this part is legitimately very cool. Two things of note: one, this article buries the lede a bit because the most exciting thing here is about learning what caused a big swath of extinctions, and two, the park surrounding the actual tar pit and museum is the site of some of the most charming and memorable photos I’ve ever taken, involving, for instance, an air guitar friend being lovingly cradled by a statue of a prehistoric animal. The La Brea Tar Pits Have Been Sucking In Visitors for Millenia. Paleontologists Are Still Finding Out What Lies Within the Ooze

Now, it would seem to me that hotels needing a detective on staff already meant that you expected crimes to happen in your establishment, but it was absolutely the standard thing! Also, if you click through, you’ll get to eyeball some saucy pulp covers. Ooh! Hot ladies in their underwear perpetrating scams! The Bygone Era of the Hotel Detective

The title isn’t inaccurate, but this is really about people - not just this one man - dying while trying to climb into or out of those clothing-donation bins you see in parking lots everywhere, and what can be done about it. The Death of a Superman

Not now, Ship Goo! (Actually, yes now. This is cool) Mysterious “Ship Goo” Contains New Life Forms

Tunes I’ve been listening to lately

The best thing about this song, other than the song itself, is that my kid knows every word.

This song sprang suddenly into my mind while we were on a walk the other day - no discernible reason why. But, nonetheless, if anyone says to me “what’s your cell phone numbah?” I will to the end of my days respond with “650-3428”, at least inside my brain.

This song’s been coming up for me a bunch on various playlists and I really like the way the singer enunciates. Never got into this band in their heyday (2000ish) but now they have my attention.[this may not make them feel much better considering that one of them has since died]

This month’s top 5: Best things about space

• As mentioned above, someone let me publish a story about it! (and then promptly went out of business [this was probably not my fault {as far as I know}])

• The way stars are classified involves a graph where one line DOUBLES BACK ON ITSELF. Look. Look!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_evolution#Main_sequence_stellar_mass_objects

• If you tell me your favorite planet, i will tell you a fact about it (this is my party trick but I don’t go to that many parties nowadays)

• Lagrange points sound made up but aren’t!

• And, best of all, it could kill me!!!

Well, back to simultaneously working and looking for work (Vancouver work, that is) - there are some promising options out there, so I’m not too panicked about whether I’ll find something. That being said, if you’re one of my handful of readers out there, or you’re not out there specifically but your company hires remotely in Canada, and you like where you work, give your ol’ pal the good word! Maybe you could get a referral bonus off of me!

1  i even wrote a story set there once! unfortunately the magazine it was published in appears to have gone defunct

2  always

3  if you’re not familiar with this, what happens is that anything wrong with you is blamed on your weight (“hello doc i’ve just been in a car crash and i think my leg is broken” “hmm have you considered losing weight?”), and if nothing’s wrong with you, they still think it’s a good idea just in case

4  i actually don’t care about blood draws. well, other than the time i had to carry my already-extracted blood from one office to another, which was pretty strange

5  fun(?) fact: when we lived there, my dad was working for the Harvard Institute of International Development and he and his fellow academics would all have theories on who the spy was in the office because they knew there had to be at least one - and this was about 20 years later than the events depicted in the movie

6  or maybe not? idk! i haven’t been back in 25 years and also i myself am a little bit auntie by now

7  nope. not doing it