Shrinky-Dinks, Strawberry Shortcake, and ’55 Chevy Trucks

Posted on 7 January 2009 | 6 comments

Sometimes I wish I could be a shrinky-dink. Do you remember those pieces of plastic that we so painstakingly colored, put in the oven, and then spent the next 1 to 3 minutes praying for the damned thing not to curl up on itself? I mean I would love to shrink to twenty percent of my size and have for my only worry the desire not to curl up on myself.

Who was your favorite shrinky-dink? I think mine was Smurfette. I don’t really go for blondes as a rule. Generally, I prefer red heads like Strawberry Shortcake, but Smurfette was an exception. I think I loved her because she was the only woman in the village and had to put up with all those guys. I fantasized about her running away with Papa Smurf and leaving it all behind. Brainy would try to calculate a way to get her back. Vanity would stand there looking at himself in the mirror. Jokey would plant a bomb in their wedding present. Hefty would mis-build their house. But Smurfette would laugh and run her fingers through Papa’s beard. He would smile and they would open a bottle of champagne in celebration.smurfs_shrinky_dinks_unshrunk_pieces

If my favorite wasn’t Smurfette, it was Strawberry Shortcake. I think this is more accurate. I would have given anything to know someone like Strawberry Shortcake when I was little. There was a girl I knew in high school who we called Strawberry, but that was entirely different. That story should be saved for its own entry. With a parental advisory.

Anyway, they have changed Strawberry Shortcake and her friends—not for the better. All their names are different, representing more healthy lifestyle choices, and they took away Plum Pudding. Why? My opinion: Plum Pudding was smart, loved cats and owls, and was possibly a little queer (Plum Pudding started out as a boy!).

I fantasized about her running away with Strawberry Shortcake. I think they would listen to Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car or the Indigo Girls’ Power of Two as they drove away sitting close to each other in a 1955 Chevy Truck.55chevytruck2They would head down Route 66 to Los Angeles without looking back. They would wander up and down Venice Beach looking for shells. Maybe they would sleep on the beach or in the back of their truck in the parking lot under the Jim Morrison painted on the side of that building. Either way, Huckleberry Pie wasn’t part of the plan:

Now the parking lot is empty
Everyone’s gone someplace
I pick you up and in the trunk I’ve packed
A cooler and a two-day suitcase
Cause there’s a place we like to drive
Way out in the country
Five miles out of the city limit we’re singing
And your hand’s upon my knee…

6 Comments

Posted in Fat, Just for Fun, Queer

A New Year: Starting Now

Posted on 5 January 2009 | 1 comment

Most people I have talked to chose to start their New Year’s resolutions today.

Better diet? Begin on Monday. Although, I have heard statistically that Tuesday and Wednesday are the best days to start  new lifestyle trends. We seem to stick to them more if we don’t start them when we start our week. Maybe our minds trick our bodies into submission. Maybe our bodies think that we are serious if we start in the middle of the week.

More exercise? Start today. The training plans for the Indy-Mini even begin today. With a day of rest. What type of training plan begins with a day of rest? I suppose since that is my resolution, I should do what it says. I don’t mind a day of rest. I am taking today as a day of rest to get the plan and my classes entered into my calendar for the semester. I am moving the plan around so that Sunday is my long-run day. I just come home from church and take a nap anyway. Why shouldn’t I use that time to run instead?

Read the bible? Apparently, reading the bible is a pretty popular New Year’s resolution, too. I have at least three bibles that have “Read Through the Bible in a Year” plans in them, and they all begin on January first with Genesis 1:1: “When God began to create heaven and earth…” And, they all end on December 31 with Revalation 22:21: “The grace of the Lord Jesus be with God’s people. Amen.” I suppose people think what a better way to spend a year than reading the bible from cover to cover.

Some resolutions are so common that you can find lists of the top ten that Americans make each year. Amazon even has their own list, complete with items to purchase to help people achieve those goals. Amazingly, their list includes items for sale under the category: Get your finances in order. The humor in this, I think, is self-explanatory.  The lists seem to jive with the resolutions I hear my friends making. I still wonder why we find it necessary to make the same resolutions year after year. I do it, too. I am not finger pointing.

Today, I am looking at spending the day reading essays and rating them based on their creativity, whatever that means. I am going to have coffee with a friend. I am going to enter my life for the semester into an electronic application called iCal. And, I am going to rest because that is what the plan says to do. I am resting.

1 Comment

Posted in Fat, Just for Fun, New Year, Personal, Reading, Religion, Running, Writing

Maude and M&Ms

Posted on 4 January 2009 | 5 comments

I have spent the better part of this day eating M&Ms and watching the first season of Maude. I am amazed at simplicity of M&Ms and the poignancy of Maude. I always loved the show, but I suppose I am just noticing the way it deals with race, women’s rights, and politics. It isn’t that I didn’t notice that sort of thing before; I think it may be that I wasn’t as invested in many of the issues the program raises as I am now.mv5bmje2mzm4mdmzn15bml5banbnxkftztywnjy3mzm2_v1_sx405_sy400_I wonder how many scholarly articles have been written about this show. I can’t imagine that there haven’t been any because the show is pretty complex while being surprisingly simplistic. Maude does more than just flip the female/male, black/white, and rich/poor dichotomies. The program actually explores the relationships between the groups of people and tries to sort out the wackiness of the early 1970s.

What frightens me about the program and the social situations it deals with is that they have changed so little since the show was created and filmed. There are three episodes that really strike me as representing problems that we still deal with today.

In one episode, Maude discovers that she is pregnant and has to decide whether or not to get an abortion. Despite the use of humor, the writers and the performers get at the heart of the decision that Maude has to make. Ultimately she decides that she and Walter are too old to have a child, so she gets an abortion. I am sure that when the episode aired, and if it aired again today, that viewers were a little unnerved that it didn’t end happily with Maude giving the child up for adoption or deciding that she and Walter were not, in fact, too old to raise a child. Well, it didn’t end happy and sometimes life doesn’t either.

In another episode, one of Maude’s friends from high school comes to visit her. When they graduated from high school, the girl, Phyllis, was known as Mousey and Maude was voted the most likely to be the first woman president. When they meet again in this episode, Phyllis has become a top executive at Avon and Maude feels sorry for her because she isn’t married. What the episode boils down to is the same problem we have in feminism today: is it better to be married with children and a happy home or to be a career woman with freedom and advancement opportunities? Maude and Phyllis decide that they both want everything. They both want to be free, bound, mothers, and executives. They each want the lives of the other.

For me, the point of feminism  is to recognize that both lifestyles or any combination thereof should be celebrated. I would like to say in my twilight years that I have celebrated the woman executive or the woman who chooses to stay home with or without children. Isn’t a good portion of feminism to support the right of women to choose?

The third episode that still rings true is one in which Maude has an identity crisis. She worries that her only identity lies in being Mrs. Walter Findlay, she contemplates her lack of monetary compensation for her work, and she feels inadequate because she doesn’t feel as if she is contributing to the financial well-being of their household. I think many women, whether they work outside the home or not, still feel those pressures. More than men, I think women wonder where their identities lay. How do we name ourselves if we are married? How do we identify if we aren’t married? Where do we find our worth? Of course, Walter does an excellent job of pointing out the specific fears of men, too. And I have to believe that my male friends struggle with the issues he raises.

I think watching a whole season of Maude has made me reconsider the progress I thought we had made with women’s issues, race issues, and questions of class. I am not sure weve made much progress, and in some cases I think we may have even digressed.

My favorite quotes:

“Maude! Sit!”

“God will get you for that, Walter!”

5 Comments

Posted in Just for Fun, Literature, PCA, Personal

New Year’s Day Just Around the Bend

Posted on 30 December 2008 | 2 comments

I am not sure why we feel compelled to right our wrongs on the first day of the new year, but it is inevitable. We do it every year. We think for some reason if we promise ourselves on the first day of the new year to change a lifetime of  behavioral formation, our lives will be better.

Last year, I resolved to become vegan, to walk or to run every day, to not cut my hair, to recycle as much as possible, and to be more focused spiritually.  I figured by radically changing my life in several different areas, I could count on at least one resolution to last for the entire year.

I cut my hair sometime in June or July. My hair was black and fluffy. It was hot. It had to go.

I stopped being vegan sometime in October thanks to the book The Raw and the Cooked by Jim Harrison. Harrison reminded about how much I love food—all of it. The secret is in not being gluttonous. I didn’t learn that last bit form Harrison, who revels in his own modern day version of Rabelais’ carnivalesque.

Sometime in February or March I lost my spiritual focus, and stopped reading the Bible every day and taking some time for myself in the form of a Sabbath every week. My spirituality always seems to be the first to waver, though it should be the last. I really need to focus on this aspect of my life, because without this grounding I feel as if I am simply floating from idea to idea and never really settling on any of them.

If I could have remained tucked safely in the closet, suffering from the delusion that God makes people who they are only to condemn them to a life of celibacy or eternal damnation, I would be an ordained Methodist pastor right now. I still believe I have been called to minister in some capacity, and I am just going to be really honest right now: I only stopped pastoring because duality is not my forte. Living two lives is not for me. Some people can do it. I could not. I needed the freedom to be honest about who I am. I needed to be able to tell people that God loves them in ways we can’t understand.

I suppose I could become UCC or Disciples of Christ and I could still pastor. Maybe one day I will look into it. Maybe after I have been teaching English at some college for a while, I can find some time to seek ordination in a more liberal denomination. Maybe by then the church I love, the UMC, will truly become the church they claim to be now: “open hearts, open minds and open doors.”

People have asked me why I don’t just become Unitarian because I could easily lead a UU congregation. My answer has to be that my spiritual life is too much about Jesus. By that I don’t mean that I could ever be too much about Jesus, but church is about Jesus for me. I think the UUs are great and I applaud their interaction with politics and their acceptance of all beliefs, but I can’t imagine church without the Eucharist. I need Jesus and his grace and his birth, death, and resurrection in my theology. I need the Apostle’s Creed. I need to meet with other people who believe some of the same things, who also rely on Jesus for salvation. Conversely, I relish the time I spend with people who don’t believe the same things, but I can do that in academics. I don’t need church to be that place; in fact, I spend much of my life in academics with people whose beliefs are vastly different from my own.

I have stayed with my commitment to recycle or reuse or whatever as much as possible. For the second year in a row my family exchanged only homemade Christmas gifts. That one simple action removes so much of the pressure from the holiday season. I don’t feel compelled to buy the biggest item I can in order to impress some member of my family who really couldn’t care less or who already has more than they need any way. Hell, most Americans already have more than we need. I gave my family recycled beer box Christmas ornaments.

Similarly, I have stayed with my commitment to walk or run every day. I was running pretty consistently, training for the Indy-Mini for May, but then I got that weird mono-ish disease I wrote about the other day and had to quit running for a month or so, but I kept walking. I walk at least three miles a day, I think. I am going to run today once it warms up a bit.

Though I think it is strange to make these promises every year. I think it is good to re-evaluate our lives. I do it pretty constantly, in case you haven’t noticed by my blog. And, yes, I do make resolutions even though they don’t last.

Here are my goals for this year:

writing_tabletWriting: I hope to write at least five days a week. I may not write every day (five times a week) on this blog, but I will write every day in some form. Whether I am writing for class or for pleasure, I will write consistently five times a week or more.bannedbooksComps: I will pass my comps in August and have a good start on my dissertation by December of 2009. I hope to have it finished so I can graduate by December 0f 2010. I would love it if I could get it done by July of 2010.

pbj-704927-main_fullPeanut Butter and Jelly: I am going to try to eat peanut butter (or soy peanut butter) and jelly every day for lunch. I suppose I could eat soup with it or something else like pretzels or whatnot, but for the most part I would like my lunch to consist of PBJ. There is no reason for this. I do love PBJ, though.

60462h_2009-header_with-date-copyWalking and Running: I will keep up this portion of my life. I will jog at least half of the Indy-Mini.buddy-jesusJesus: Something needs to happen here, but I am not sure what it will look like. I am hoping my faith will continue to grow, but I know that won’t happen without work. Sometimes I feel like I neglect this, the most important part of my life, in favor of other, lesser pursuits. I struggle with my ministry. I struggle with my lack of grace for some people.I struggle with knowing that God loves me and can use despite what most churches preach from their pulpits.

This may sound strange, but I saw the movie Yes Man yesterday and it made an oddly unexpected impact on me: it made me think theologically?!? What if Christians said yes to everything they feel God leading them to do? As I type this I am surrounded on all sides by Mormons—they send several groups of guys to BSU every year for their two years of mission work—so I am thinking about what it would look like if all churches were as diligent as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints? I am thinking about how our lives would change if we all said yes to God on a consistent basis.

What is my mission? How can I serve others? I guess these are things I will be thinking about throughout this new year. What does it look like to live my faith, my grace, God’s love? What does livign a Christ-filled like look like given someone’s sexuality, academic pursuits, worldly constraints, and daily life? I suppose these are the questions that consume me always. I am never sure if I am answering them to the best of my ability, but I try. I think God honors our persistence.

*EDIT*

One of the Mormons, who is looking at a computer near me, is showing his fellow missionary some pictures.

“Look at his shoes. Look at my brother’s shoes.”

“Yeah. They’re sweet.”

“He always has pimpin’ kicks. My brother. How does he always find such pimpin’ kicks?”

I will never forget this moment. Have you ever heard a Mormon covet his brother’s pimpin’ kicks? I doubt they look like this:custom-kicks

2 Comments

Posted in Just for Fun, Queer, Religion, Running

First Day on My New Feet

Posted on 27 December 2008 | 1 comment

Back in November sometime, I had this weird illness that we think was mono. I had a sore throat, my mouth had lesions inside it, and my tonsils were nearly touching each other.Whatever illness it was made me so sleepy I could’ve slept for ten to twelve hours a night. I didn’t have time to sleep that much, so I stopped running to conserve energy. Running just wore me out beyond belief.

Today was the first run I have been on since I got sick. I figured out that after taking a month off when you are just getting into shape to start with, I need to essentially start over with my training. I am square one. Can I share with you how much that pisses me off? Well, Rick, I’m pissed off, as Cartman would say.

I have also gained weight since then. I think I have put back on what I lost over the summer. And, yes, that pisses me off as well. I know a good fat studies scholar would not be pissed off about gaining back a mere twenty pounds, but I am no such scholar. I can see what is wrong with our cultural constructions of body size, but I know what feels right on my body, which is hovering around 200 NOT 220.

I also know that hovering lower than that feels even better, so I am running again. Maybe the weight range has nothing to do with it. Maybe I feel better because I know when I am running—or even walking a lot—I am taking care of my body. I am not letting it sit around gathering dust and fat cells, while I stuff my face with Christmas treats or while I write seminar papers and read too much.

Sometimes I think I would have made a good groundskeeper. I should have gone to Purdue and majored in turf management. I could be working at some golf course in Texas right now, riding my lawn mower, writing in my spare time, and going to the beach on the weekends. For that matter, I could have just left the US right after graduation and moved to Ireland. I could have been backpacking around Europe for the last ten or fifteen years.

Instead of doing that, though, I have been making pizzas, being a barista, teaching little kids, pastoring youth, being a graduate student, or teaching college students. Essentially, I have been a part of the rat race. I am a part of the rat race. I will remain a part of the rat race. I wonder how much of my life is consumed with thoughts of possessions or money.

On another little tangent: I think I am losing my mind. Well, at least I am losing my memory. I won’t elaborate, but if another wonderful memory loss episode happens, I promise I will share it. If I remember.

1 Comment

Posted in Christmas, Fat, Just for Fun, Reading, Running