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All responses Most smiled responses
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I know, I'm so sorry! I've been insanely busy with school, and I am still working on it.
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Formspring question of the day
asked by FormspringReading, writing, working on my PhD, teaching....so basically the things I do now.
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I am in grad school working on my third degree and some days--many days--it is difficult to keep up with the work I have for ONE program. James Franco is concurrently enrolled in several programs and he presents this front that it must be so easy to be in grad school that you can do it while you're hosting the Oscars and shooting movies and being a smirk-faced douchebag all over Hollywood. He's a horrible writer and he only got in to Yale because he's famous and my reliable sources tell me his PA goes to his classes for him and takes notes, yet people still ask me why I say getting a PhD is so hard since James Franco is doing it and has a bajillion MFA degrees. He's making a mockery out of the system and it pisses me off. I have the same wrath for anyone who doesn't take grad school seriously.
But in the grand scheme of things, James Franco does not figure in to the things I hate and that are ruining the world. It's not like I am actively hating him every minute of the day, but when I see him or someone mentions him, I think "what a poser."
Why DON'T you hate James Franco, is really, the better question. -
No, I definitely don't think education makes me better than anyone, and I fully acknowledge how privileged and fortunate I've been to have access to the education I've had. I am extremely grateful for the opportunities I've had, which I know are not opportunities readily available to everyone.
I do feel defensive sometimes, because what I do is not perceived as something hard or really any big accomplishment. People only seem to value what makes money and I'm an artist who wants to be a teacher, ands wants the opportunity to study deeply the things I love. In order to do that, I need to get a PhD and I want a PhD, but society doesn't value poets or poetry, so we are not paid well. I work extremely hard to do well as a student and teacher and writer, and when that is belittled, I get upset. When someone tells me it's easy to get a book deal because a popular blogger has gotten a book deal, I want to scream because the process is completely different for me. I'm not being hierarchical, but academic and literary publishing occupies an entirely different universe than mainstream, popular publishing. I'm not saying it's necessarily easy to be a blogger. I've never been a professional blogger, nor would I ever want to be, but I do know that it's really fucking hard to get a PhD. Unlike James Franco would have you believe, grad school is not the kind of thing that is simple and fast and can be done simultaneously. They don't give away PhDs. But success isn't measured in hard work anymore, I think it's measured in popularity or site counts or scandal.
That's fine. I don't need to be popular or any of that to consider myself successful, but I do get a bee in my bonnet when I'm told over and over again that I should be doing more, being more, faster, better, etc etc etc. Anyone who thinks academia is easy is welcome to try to live my life for a day.
None of this is to say that my education makes me BETTER than anyone else, but it does make me more qualified as a writer and a literature scholar and a teacher. No one tells a medical doctor there's something wrong with them for wanting an MD, and no one questions whether med school is hard. Well, the program I am in is far more selective than any med school or law school in the country. It is harder to get in to my PhD program than it is to get in to medical school or law school. So when people tell me that I won't be a "real" doctor (when all they mean is I won't be a medical doctor) or that I'm not as smart as a lawyer, I get pissed off. I work so fucking heard and the truth is not everyone can do what I do. That's why the program is so selective. Again, this doesn't make me BETTER than anyone, but I would like it acknowledged that it's not easy to do this and it does MEAN SOMETHING. -
James Franco. So I could punch him in the smirky face. I fucking hate that asshole. He makes it look easy to go to grad school and the truth is that his PA goes to class and takes notes for him, says my colleague who teaches at Yale. He is such a joke.
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Someone asked Marianne of The Rotund an eerily similar question on Tumblr and she rightly pointed out the false binary between eating healthy food and eating whatever you want. As if you would never WANT to eat healthy food or as though you only ever eat one kind of food.
That being said, I will answer this question.
I do try to eat food that is healthful, but I also practice intuitive eating and I don't feel guilty for eating. Ever. As a recovering anorexic (yes fat people can be anorexic), putting a lot of rules around food is triggering for me and I'd like to avoid disordered eating again. That was scary. Not that I'm ever really cured, just dealing with it much better. I usually start my day with 32 oz of green smoothie and oatmeal. When I consume those two very filling things I rarely need lunch, though will snack on something. My very favorite thing to eat is slices of havarti dill cheese on cucumber slices. But I won't pretend I don't eat potato chips and cookies sometimes, too.
Most of the time I do at least some yoga every day and I try to go to a class at least once a week.
When I go to the doctor, I am considered healthy. I am 5'7 and around 300lbs, and my blood pressure, cholesterol, sugar levels, heart rate, etc. are all within healthy levels. I have a disability I was born with, a birth defect that becomes increasingly symptomatic as I age. This does affect my activity levels, since I am in near constant pain in my feet and ankles (and was before I weighed 300 lbs, btw). I also have a chronic disease. I was diagnosed with endometriosis in June 2010. Most of the time this is managed fine, but every few months, sometimes more often, I have days when the pain is so bad I can barely make if from my bed to the bathroom across the hall.
Still, I am, and my medical chart states (I've looked) that I am a healthy obese person. (We DO exist!) -
I come from messy people. My dad is very old school and his mother was literally a 50s housewife who did everything for them in terms of cleaning the house, and they lived on a farm, so his chores were, well, chores--taking care of the animals. He has never in his life had to clean. My mother just kind of took over all the duties since she is also a housewife. When my parents were growing up, they both had to work so hard--my dad with chores on the farm, my mom caring for her four younger brothers and such--that they decided they didn't want to make us work so hard when we were kids, so we never really had chores. It was a contant battle to clean up my room, and though I was made to clean my room myself, it just was never something I was good at. My mom also hates cleaning and so our house was most often messy, and even though I swore I'd never be like that when I was an adult, I am a messy person. It is definitely not something I really love about myself, but I decided long ago not to let guilt and feelings of inadequacy rule my life.
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This is such a good question, I'm working on a big long post about it. Thanks for asking!
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AUGH! Thanks for letting me know about this. I used Google Adsense to try and make a few bucks from the website, and lately I've been getting weightloss ads. I am working on fixing it, but I might just have to take them down altogether. My understanding is that Google uses contextual ads, meaning it takes words from your blog and finds ads it thinks will go with that. As you can imagine, it's really frustrating for me to have weighloss ads on the blog. I'm sorry they are there.
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Thank you! I'm so glad you like the blog.
I like some board games, but I was sort of traumatized by them as a child, so I have to be in the right setting, with the right people. I like trivia games and Scene It and less-competitive games like Apples to Apples or something. -
My ex and I considered ourselves already married. We were planning our legal wedding, but we''d already exchanged private vows and called each other wife and the experience of breaking up the relationship feels much more like a divorce than a mere broken engagement. If we had been allowed to be legally married in the US, we would've gone down to the courthouse and gotten legally hitched, but we still wanted the wedding and chance for us to declare our love before our family and friends, even though we were married in our hearts, for all intents and purposes.
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asked by Lowbelly
I get mean questions like "Why are you so fat" or "don't you know fat is unhealthy" and shit like that, but I consider them spam and delete them. The first time I tried this, I was flooded with weird questions about my ex, and I've decided it's best to just skip the irrelevant stuff.
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I think it's ridiculous to feel like we have to hide our bodies. I got a really nasty comment about how "showing off your curves" didn't mean showing off your rolls of fat. Well, I'm strongly opposed to the idea that fashion for fat women must mean trying to dress in a way that "hides" or "minimizes" our real bodies. I am super self-conscious about my belly, but I have dresses that fit perfect in every way but are tighter around the belly. I could wear uncomfortable spanx and rock the dress....or I could just rock the dress. I'm still working on loving my belly fat...or at least accepting it, but I think it's perfectly fine to wear clothes that don't hide it.
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I'd be fine with it. As with anyone, it would just depend on the person. I can imagine it working well with some guys and not with others. My friends who have transitioned mostly identify as gay men now, so obviously that wouldn't work too well.
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I had two boyfriends in high school and what that amounted to at that time was nothing beyond holding hands and kissing occasionally. I was a very strict Baptist girl who believed in abstinence and I didn't feel tempted by sex at all since the only sex I could conceive of was heterosexual. I came out at 18, six months before I left for college. The crowd I ran with in HS...well, we didn't have sex. I know 1 friend who did and it was this huge shocking thing. We were all very strong Christians and I don't think most of us were ready. When I went to college, I was ready, but by then I knew I liked women, so it wasn't an issue.
I've never wanted to sleep with a man, so I've never done it. -
I'm an introvert and I really hate living with other people. It'd be different if I was with a partner, but I never really liked having roommates. I'm so solitary. But there are many times when I wish I had friends who lived in my apartment building. I loved college when my friends all lived so close; next door or down the hall or across the quad. Because it does get lonely. I hate cooking for one person, I hate being responsible for all the chores and shopping and such. But what choice do I have?
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I'm against guilt. Banish it. It's interesting, though because part of me still misses the wedding blogging world. It was a big part of my life for a long time, and when people talk about weddings and don't know how involved in that world I was, I feel like I lost a bit of my identity. And it's been 2 years since my breakup, so I feel awkward mentioning my relationship, but I also hate having my opinion discounted because either 1) I'm gay so people assume I don't know or care anything about weddings and/or 2) they don't know I was married and planning a legal wedding, so they assume I know nothing about weddings. It's frustrating. I plan great weddings.
And the shit part of it is, I really, really want to be married. I want to finally get that real wedding and I want a wife. So it's hard to still participate in the wedding blogosphere because it's painful, but those are my people.
Sigh. -
Well, they're in HS, so I thought about what I was like in HS. I was kind of crazy, though most people didn't know it. I was suicidal and had very disordered eating and I was a cutter and it seemed like everything was shit for me. Of course I was really lucky in lots of ways. I come from a privileged background, but that didn't help my mental health. I really identify with Cassie.
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My ex-girlfriend came to visit me when I lived in Paris because she was looking at grad schools and it was basically a 10-day booty call. It sounds pretty awesome, but the sex wasn't that great. She was quite the pillow princess.
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Loading...Ms Loaf’s Bio
Blogger, poet, grad student, interested in the intersection of the sartorial & literary.
