i love love love this
did wbc hackers kill autostraddle?
actually we now know that hackers DID kill autostraddle, we had to go back to a dedicated server that could handle the “brute force attack” against us. crazy right? we can’t make it stop, we can only beef up security. it was probably somebody’s ex-girlfriend
What’s your favorite kind of blanket / quilt / cozy enveloping item?
giant down comforter and/or jersey sheets and/or girl
how do you decide which questions to post to tumblr and which to just answer on your formspring page?
tumblr are generally answers that might be relevant to everyone, formspring are answers that might be only relevant to the person who asked it or a few others. but sometimes it’s just totally random. also sometimes formspring is b/c i am insecure about my answer not being good
Are Brandy and Julie really cool in real life? or are they super bitchy and wouldn’t like me?
they are even cooler in real life, for real
So I have decided to get my life together and start eating healthy but I am terrified because I know this means I’m going to gain weight. I love my body now, but I know it’s killing me. What do I do?
1. THERAPY with an ED specialist. You need a therapist to work through this with you. I’d say a support group, but I hear mixed reviews w/r/t enabling vs. support that happens there.
2. Read Carolyn Knapp’s “Appetites” – she puts EDs in a broader sociological concept that can be comforting and feel more manageable because you’ll start to feel like an ED is letting The Man win.
3. make a list of all the ways your life will improve when you start eating healthy, such as “can comfortably have dinner with friends without arousing suspicion/concern or lying or having anxiety” or “have more energy” or “can exercise without heart failure” or “can be a part of the world instead of walking around with this secret wall in front of me.” “can have a healthy relationship” “will enjoy holidays without stressing about what i’m eating” “CHEESE” the first time you feel those things, check them off.
4. plan on gaining weight. figure out the maximum amount of weight you expect to gain and prepare for it. if you go shopping, by clothes for that weight. you need to think of it as a thing like puberty or aging – it is just an inevitable adjustment that your body is going to make and you have no control over it. i know that’s petrifying, but somehow picking a number and embracing it is a way to feel some control, even if the thing you are controlling is a thing you don’t necessarily think you want right now. say things like “i should get that bridesmaid’s dress in a 10, not a 4” in a calm voice, like saying you should get a warmer coat when it’s gonna be 32 degrees, not 40.
5. stop reading women’s magazines or fashion magazines. watch less tv. instead watch documentaries that remind you how privileged you are to have a body that works and surround yourself with imagery of healthy people of all sizes, not airbrushed people or models who only eat celery and apple cider vinegar.
6. get a friend or two to help you out who you can be honest with. make sure they know what words or ideas trigger you and ask them to help.
7. you’re lucky, you’re alive, YOU’RE BEAUTIFUL, celebrate yourself!
8. yoga
9. therapy
10. therapy
11. therapy
I am going to see Lady Gaga on Tuesday and want to look FABULOUS. what should i wear???
you guys, i love you, but you cannot ask me what to wear to things like this. here is a list of places or events where my fashion advice could be useful:
+ suburban children’s birthday parties
+ trader joe’s
+ hippie commune
+ fish fry
+ yard sale
+ my living room (also: riese’s living room)
+ farmers’ market
And here I was, waiting in an emergency room alone, and it really wasn’t fair. Was it? None of it was fair. It wasn’t fair that I’d had to wait for the proposal, that the one time I had tried to propose he told me it was “the guy’s job.” It wasn’t fair that I had waited so long, because everyone assured me “men are just that way,” they naturally feared anything that gave a woman more power or made her harder to get rid of. It wasn’t fair that I’d had to get tutorials on dressing up and wearing makeup and not scaring men off by having visible feelings, so that I could date; it wasn’t fair that I was going to pay $200 to make sure I didn’t get pregnant, and the guy who could have gotten me pregnant had paid for French toast and coffee.
It wasn’t fair that I was twenty-five years old and feeling like a failure. It wasn’t fair that I was twenty-five years old and thought my life would be over in five years. It wasn’t fair that I’d stopped writing. I’d had ambition; I’d been talented; I had stopped writing, because I was focusing on a relationship. And now the relationship was over. Because people can leave you, and writing won’t leave unless you make it, and nobody ever pointed that out to me; they were just happy I was turning out normal. Such a normal, marriage-focused, baby-focused, receptionist-desk-working type of girl. And now I had no boyfriend, and no plans for my life, and my job was answering a telephone, because I had stopped writing: This, above all things, was just not fair.
I know which site I am writing for, dear reader; I know that many of these problems are not your problems, and are in fact the result of my being a massively privileged straight lady. But I was sitting there, in a cold-ass emergency room, reading this woman Di Prima who actually got to be a writer, even back when sexism was way more overt, in the goddamned 1950s she got to do it and in 2007 I was being encouraged to get married by 30 and perfect my filing skills, and I’m telling you: It wasn’t fair. I had just started to notice how unfair it was. I had just started to think of it in gendered, and not purely personal, terms. I had just started to believe that it was essential to start writing again – not poems, I had lost any skill I’d ever had with poems, but something else. Essays, maybe. I had just started. I was sitting there in the hospital, waiting to be born.
I got to write for Autostraddle! For their poetry week! Autostraddle is a very awesome, very funny and smart site for ladies who date the ladies. (Of course, I, as mentioned above, date the gentlemen. And talk about it, just in this one specific section, and tried not to be all privilegey about it, ONE WOULD HOPE.) HOWEVER. I wrote about Diane Di Prima, who is a very important poet, and who is really just not talked about almost at all, as far as I can see. She dated both the ladies and the gentlemen, she was a radical activist, she was a single mother by choice, and the only thing people can ever think to say about her is that she was “a female Beat.” In this essay, I talk about the various ways she saved my life, and why you might not know about her, and also, I GET REAL about WHAT WRITING MEANS TO ME. I’m proud of the piece and I hope you read it. Although I am posting this to Tumblr at 9:30 PM, so what am I thinking, right? (via sadydoyle)