AWOL

So…I haven’t blogged in a really, really, really long time.

Most of that is because I’ve been busy with school work. On top of writing papers and tutoring, I’ve also been unofficially given an editor position for one 0f my school’s English department publications. (I will officially have the title of editor next year, but they’re kind of phasing me in this quarter, so I’ve had to take on a lot more responsibility.) Add that to my leadership positions in extracirriculars plus the fact that I’m trying to get ready to apply for grad school next year and apply for internships this summer…I’ve had a lot going on and this blog has fallen by the wayside.

I also haven’t been blogging regularly because, well, I’ve been rethinking this blog. I started it out as a way to vent my feelings about my de-conversion and to talk about fat acceptance, two movements that I joined more or less at the same time. And now, I feel like I need to vent less about de-conversion. It’s become a part of me, and it’s a part that most of the people around me have accepted. It’s also something that I’ve accepted about myself. As for fat acceptance, I think I need a break from writing about it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still great, but after having written a huge academic paper about it and now preparing to present that paper, I need a break.

What I do find myself wanting to write about, however, is English. This is probably because I’ve been researching grad schools so much. I’ve found myself wanting to blog about pop culture and books from the perspectives of various critical theories. I’ve also found myself wanting to blog about how to look for a grad school in English and what the process of applying to that school is. I also really want to defend my field from the philistines that I’ve encountered lately who see no point in examining texts or don’t understand things like postmodernism and deconstruction but then feel the need to bash them anyway. I also want to examine the connections between sociology and literature, because there are many.

So, I may be starting a new blog that deals with English studies more and less with de-conversion and fat acceptance and feminism, though I’m sure those things will indeed come up in the new blog. And I probably won’t be starting it until I have some free time, which will probably be closer to the summer. I’m not sure if I’ll continue to post here as well. I’m sure I will, but I expect that my posts will tend to be far between. 

I’ve had a good run with this blog. It’s given me a chance to explore new aspects of my identity and learn new things about the world around me. It’s been a place to explore and vent. I’m just starting to feel like I’ve outgrown it.

New Year’s Resolutions (because everyone else is doing it)

Usually, I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions. I could never keep them, and I’ve yet to meet anyone else who could. That and they never really seemed that special to me.

But this year, I am making a New Year’s resolution. I’m resolving not to think about the future any farther ahead than this summer. Beyond that, I’m not going to think about it.

This might seem like a really irresponsible resolution, but I really think that it’s for the good of my sanity. As a junior in college, I’m constantly being asked what I want to do when I graduate. Professors ask me about it all the time. My friends are always talking about looking for jobs next year or applying to graduate school. They all seem to have their lives figured out, and I really don’t, and it drives me nuts.

I could go to graduate school, and in many ways, that’s what I’d really like to do. I always feel lame when I say this, but I love learning things. I love researching. And then I love writing about what I’ve learned. Sure, it’s grueling. Sometimes it can be tedious. But in the end, it also feels very satisfying. In many ways, I could see myself as a professor somewhere teaching classes and writing books and never leaving the safe haven of a university. Of course, this is a very idealized vision of a professor’s life. In reality, I know that I’d spend a lot of my time fighting for funding and lecturing to students who really don’t give a damn about the cultural significance of literature or the meaning of poetry. I also know that a lot of what I wrote would be read by other academics…and it wouldn’t go much further than that. In the end, I sometimes wonder if I would have just amassed immense quanities of knowledge for myself without doing anything useful or beneficial with that knowledge. Still, I’ve only got one life to live, and if learning makes me happy, I might as well spend my life doing just that. After all, there are certainly worse things that I could do with my existence.

On the other hand, I’d really like financial independence. I love my family, I really do, but I’ve been mooching off them long enough, and I feel embarassed whenever I have to ask for money. If I got a job right out of college, I could (hopefully) get my own place and a car. I could also get a guinea pig. (It sounds like an absurd dream, owning a guinea pig, but I’ve had three of the little furballs ever since I was five, and my last guinea pig died about a year ago. I haven’t bothered to replace him because, being a college student, I’m not in a good position to have pets, but I’m so used to having a guinea pig that I miss my old one.) I also want to have some fun with my life, though I’m not exactly sure what that means. I guess it means not coming home and breaking out the books for the rest of the evening and spending the night curled up with some sort of Norton Anthology of Literature. I guess it means being able to go out and have a few drinks without thinking, “Shouldn’t I be drafting a paper right now?” I guess it means having time to get involved in things that aren’t related to homework. If I got a job right out of college, I could do these things. If I went to graduate school, I’d come out with mountains of debt. Of course, I’d like to get a job that I would enjoy and find meaningful too.

So, right now, I’m stuck between wanting to go to graduate school and wanting to get a job as soon as I get my B. A., and I can’t make up my mind. Most of the time, I just end up feeling worthless and depressed because, unlike my peers, I don’t seem to have any pratical and useful plan that will guide the course of my life. And this is where this summer comes in. This summer, I’d like to get some sort of writing internship. It’s a good plan either way, because it will give me some praticial experience in the job world and it will also look good on a grad school application. Also, if I spend the summer interning and find out that I like it, I’ll probably end up deciding to work right out of college. If I hate interning and spend the entire summer wishing I was back at school, then I’ll know that I’ll probably be better off going to grad school. But until then, there’s really no point in making up my mind one way or the other.

So, New Year’s Resolution: Prepare for this summer, but don’t worry about what’s going to come after it.

Off With Her Head!

This post is a response to The ‘Fat’ Female Body by Samantha Murray, which I will shortly be adding to my Book List. The book is divided into two parts. The first part discusses the history of obesity and its perception as pathological in the medical field. It also discusses the fact that doctors are not as objective as our society presents them to be and that they are just as much influenced by bias and societal values as the rest of us are. The second section of the book discusses the fat acceptance movement. I’ll be discussing that aspect of the book in a later post.

What I’d like to discuss right now is one of the central arguments in Murray’s book. In her book, she rejects the typical Western view of the mind and body, which sees the two as separate entities, for a philosophy that sees the mind and body as the same thing. I have to admit that in her final chapters, when she described this philosophy of the mind and body as one, I was a little bit confused. I found the idea appealing, but it is something so foreign to our mainstream Western way of thinking that it was a little bit difficult for me to grasp. I liked it, but I’m not yet sure if I get it.

Essentially, the Western way of thinking goes like this: the body is a house for the mind, which is the true essence of the self, the identity. Who You Are is in your mind and it has nothing to do with your body. Perhaps, one could compare the body and mind to a hermit crab’s shell. The human body is like a hermit crab’s shell–it is something that can change, it houses and protects the mind/hermit crab, but it is not truly a part of the self. There are contradictions to this way of thinking, and Murray points many of them out. For instance, even though we do not believe that the body is part of the self, we believe that the body reflects the nature of the self. And this is why we have stereotypes about fat people like, Fat people are lazy or Fat people have no self control. We make these judgements about the self based on what we see when we look at the body…and yet we don’t believe that the body is really a part of the self.

The alternative to this view that Murray offers is a view of the body and self as one. After all, we live our lives through our body. Our brain, which is really what our mind is, is part of our body. We experience the world through our body. We shape our world through our body. Instead of alienating ourselves from our bodies, we should be living in our bodies. As I said, I don’t quite understand this concept fully, but I’d like to learn more about it.

I could go into a history of Western ideologies now. I could discuss how Greek culture and philosophy, especially combined with Christianity’s distain for the material world, created this disunity between the mind and body. I could discuss how a basic human fear of death could be associated with the desire to see the self as something that is not attached to the mortal body. I could give a list of reasons why Western society has separated the mind and body.

But I’m not going to. Sorry. Instead, I’m going to discuss how I personally can relate to this distinction between mind and body. It reminds me of a line from Eve Ensler’s The Good Body: “You better work on a brain… or no man will want to fuck you.” Four years ago, when I read that line for the first time, I instantly understood it. Fat girls, ugly girls, girls whose bodies for whatever reason didn’t fit societal standards for beauty were supposed to live outside of their bodies. They were supposed to have good personalities. They were supposed to be funny or smart. They were supposed to have some sort of talent that didn’t involve using their bodies, like painting or writing. In other words, their bodies were seen as useless, but their minds still had a chance, so they were encouraged to reject their bodies and cultivate their minds.

They were also expected to use that personality to attract a significant other, but they were never to expect that someone might be interested in them physicially. I’ve heard so many girls bemoan, “If only he could see past my [insert undesirably body part here]!” In high school, I thought that it would be impossible for a guy to find me physically attractive. And this frustrated me. Despite my very low opinion of myself in my high school years, some deep part of me that knew better longed to have someone find me attractive not just for who I was but how I looked. I wanted someone who would find me beautiful mentally and physically.

But I didn’t believe that I would ever find a person who would be physically interested in me, so I spent most of my time building up my brains. I studied. I got good grades. I learned a lot. When I wasn’t studying, I was reading. When I was reading, I learned a lot. When I wasn’t reading, I was writing. I was one of the best writers in my high school. While other kids whined about trying to come up with enough to write about for a five page paper, I was cranking out thoughtful, insightful, well-researched ten page papers, on top of writing about two-thirds of a novel and filling up journals full of my random (and often angsty) thoughts and poems. Basically, I was smart. But that’s all I was.

Physically, in high school, I didn’t pay too much attention to how I looked. I dressed to make myself invisible–lots of plain t-shirts and jeans, lots of black. I wore my hair long so that it fell in my eyes, as though I was trying to hide my face. I never wore short skirts or shorts. I was terrified of showing my legs to anyone. During summer marching band practices, when the weather was 80 or 90 degrees, I would wear jeans and baggy t-shirts. I wanted to hide my body as much as possible. In gym class, when we had to wear shorts, I wanted to disappear completely. I wanted to disappear even more when we had to do things–running tests, sit up tests, jump rope tests…I always did worse on these tests than everyone else in the class, and I felt humiliated when I saw the tight, smooth legs of the cheerleaders running ahead of me and I felt my own jiggling thighs. In gym class especially my body felt like something worthless to me. I wanted to divorce myself from my body.

My experiences that centered around my body and around my mind were completely different. Whenever I had to do something that required me to use my body, I felt ashamed. I felt like a failure. Whenever I had to do something that required me to use my mind, I felt proud. I felt like a success. My body felt incompetent, but my mind felt competent and capable. To me, my body and mind were opposite poles, disengaged entities. I loved my mind and hated my body. I saw them as two separate things. My body was this fat, flabby, ugly Thing that housed my mind, and my mind was what was really Me.

I often felt like a floating head, because all of the things about me that were important were in my mind. My body was just a machine that kept my mind functioning. My body served the will of my mind. My fingers typed or wrote down my thoughts. My hands held my clarinet in band while my mind read and interpreted the music. My arms carried loads of books from the library, and these books were, of course, meant only for the education or entertainment of my mind.

…Except my body had needs and desires of its own, and it often refused to let my mind ignore them. While I was playing the clarinet, my stomach would be so hungry that I felt like a little person inside my belly was sticking my stomach with pins. (I would skip lunch to go to band.) Sometimes, while I was reading a book about Christian theology or a textbook, I would gradually become aware of warm, tingling sensations between my legs, and those feelings were especially bad. (Eating was okay, but wanting sex was a sin.) There would be days when I would come home from school determined to finish my homework in just a couple hours so that I could spend the rest of the evening working on my novel, but my body would be so exhausted that I would fall asleep, sometimes for hours. (I didn’t sleep well in high school.) My body was always wanting things, always needing things, and my body’s wants and needs almost always seemed to conflict with the wants and needs of my mind.

But then, in college, something in my thinking started to change. I started learning more about feminist theory, which said that the body wasn’t so bad, which encouraged women to get back into their bodies. I discovered the Fat Acceptance movement, which told women to listen to their bodies and stop fighting what their bodies wanted and needed. I started questioning Christianity and learned that this idea of the body as material and therefore sinful was a cultural construction and not an absolute. I also learned a lot of things about myself. I danced for the first time in my life. Also for the first time in my life, I was in a romantic relationship. I started to see my body as a good thing. I started listening to my body and trying not to begrudge it the things that it wanted and needed. I also found myself in a position where, instead of contradicting and opposing each other, my mind and body were complimenting each other. My mind was learning things, things about societal constructs and feminism, that didn’t tell me to alienate my body and see myself as just a floating head. I was also learning things through my body itself, which was a new experience for me.

But, obviously, even that experience hasn’t completely harmonized my mind and body. I’ve spent so much time living through my mind at the expense of my body, that sometimes it’s hard to see myself as a body. It’s hard for me to experience my sense of self through my body. Also, in an academic setting, it’s often easy for me to focus just on my mind and neglect my body. After all, the majority of my experiences in college involve me relating to people on a mental level. My professors care about my mind; not my body. And while I do a lot of physical activities with my friends, we spend most of our time talking, usually about ideas that stem from classes (yes, I’m a nerd). Most of the time, I feel like my mind is more important than my body and the only thing people really care about is my mind. Especially lately, I’ve begun feeling like a floating head again.

And I’ve been wondering about ways that I can begin living through my body again. Some of these are simple, like dressing in ways that are more, well, feminine and that show off my body. However, whenever I dress up, even a little bit, I tend to feel more self-conscious than confident because looking nice is just so different compared to how I normally dress. Other ways that I’ve thought about living through my body again are by starting to exercise more often, although this is also complicated (in ways that I’ll discuss in my next post).

However, from the way Murray seems to discuss living through our bodies (if I’m reading her book correctly), living through our bodies is something that we already do. We are our bodies. We are what our bodies do and what our bodies are. We aren’t disembodied minds that hover inside of our bodies and must somehow merge with the bodies that surround them. We already are our bodies. So, maybe all I have to do is just become more aware of the fact that I am my body and my body is me. I am not a disembodied head.

Long Time, No Blogging

Wow! I can’t believe how long it’s been since I last posted. I blame my disappearance on an insanely busy quarter, in which I had to write several rather long papers (one of which is about women’s body image. I may be posting that one in installments). However, this quarter appears to be less busy, and I’m hoping to get back to posting on a somewhat regular basis. I’m also taking a nonfiction writing class, which I’m hoping will motivate me to post more often.