Saturday, April 14, 2012
Friday, April 13, 2012
This, MY Body
(I wrote this back in 2007 in my old DirtyStinkySlipper Friendster blog. I lost most of my entries there but found this one just now, floating around one of my old hard drives. Even though I wrote this five years ago, I believe it still rings true now.)
Differently
Weighted. Gravitationally
Challenged. Horizontally
Challenged. Horizontally Gifted. People or Person of Mass. Person of Substance. These are politically correct terms for
that something which you’re not supposed to be or do not want to be: according
to the world’s current definition
of what kind of woman is beautiful, what is acceptable, being FAT, or being a
Person of Substance (my most favorite of those politically correct terms for
FAT) is definitely not one of them.
And since I can’t seem to fit in any of my favorite jeans right now, is
the world going to tell me that I am no longer acceptable, that I am the total
opposite of the standard (or should I say commercialized) definition of
beautiful?
I was
a skinny kid (some politically correct terms: skeletally prominent, metabolic
underachiever). In high school and
college, I was no longer skinny, just your small to medium kind of girl. After college, weight stayed the
same. I started getting bigger
when I reached the age of 29. One factor
was I did not have any exercise anymore since Ritchie (my boyfriend) and I, our
daily routine would be wake up – work –eat – work – eat – work – eat –
sleep. We didn’t need to drive or
walk to work, no physical exertion at all except during coverages. I was happiest with my weight when I
was 31. I did not eat meat for
almost 8 months, went to the gym regularly and played badminton a lot. Not eating meat was really not because
of a diet plan, it was because of a different reason altogether. But that merits another blog. Anyway, going back to our topic, since
Ritchie and I were always swamped with work, I stopped going to the gym,
stopped playing badminton and went back to eating meat because I couldn’t
afford to plan my own meals anymore, I had to eat whatever was served to
me. I know I was getting bigger,
but it really did not matter to me most of the time. One thing is I really hate depriving myself of anything that
I feel is my right to do or have or can afford, and I hate depriving my self of
good food. Heck I love to
eat. Sometimes though,
admittedly, I do have those
moments of negativity, especially
when you keep getting the “wow, you’ve gained a lot of weight” comments with
the over-exerted smiles and condescending tones but you know exactly what’s
going on in their minds: oh she’s
letting herself waste away, she’s losing it, or plain and simple, She Looks
BAD. One time, an old client,
excited and really happy to see Ritchie and me again, exclaimed real loud in
front of all her friends (they were I think eight in the group) “Oh my, wow,
you’re pregnant!” I was at first
surprised, then getting over the initial shock, laughed and said “Oh goodness,
I’m not, I just like looking like I’m pregnant” and then, thankfully, they all
laughed with me. After that
however, there was an awkward silence.
At that particular moment, I remember feeling not at all offended but
more of … embarrassed because I didn’t really honestly know what to say. I knew she thought that she might have
offended me and wanted to say something but feared that she might offend me
more, and I on the other hand did not know what to say also because if I say
it’s okay, I’m not offended, it’ll just make it sound like I’m being defensive
and was in fact really offended.
Crazy I know.
One
thing I know about myself right now is this: I do not want to obsess about my weight. Sometimes though, we really can’t help it if other people
obsess for us. Like my mom and
dad. I don’t blame them for
worrying about my weight for me, I’m sure they love me and I love them back
dearly. And I know that they are
worrying about my weight for health reasons, and not for aesthetic ones. What really angers and saddens me is
the fact that up to now, in this age of “progress and forward thinking”, there
are still women who are starving
themselves to death or doing all things detrimental to their health just so
they remain or become thin or thinner.
It saddens me that the old patriarchal “standards” of beauty are still
perpetuated by TV and print advertisements, certain magazine articles, some movies -- what’s even more upsetting is that some
of the instigators of these stereotypes are women themselves. They keep telling us that what we look
like is not okay, that the shape or color or “smoothness” they are promoting is
what we should always attempt to be in order to be “beautiful” and alluring to
the male species. I remember
really hating this ad where there was a photographer taking pictures of two
sisters: one had smooth, white,
porcelain skin, while the other
had darker skin which is actually the common natural skin color of people
living in the tropics, what we in the Philippines call kayumanggi or morena. The photographer would look at the two
women and would smile happily at the sister with porcelain skin, and would have
this perplexed-not-so-nice expression whenever he looks at the morena one. Now we all know how the commercial
ends: both of the sisters are porcelain-skinned with the photographer looking
really happy at the girl who used to be dark-complexioned, and even cements his
approval with the statement “Now you’re beautiful”. As you may have guessed, the commercial is promoting a
whitening product. A lot of this
kind of commercials still exists; wherein our minds are conditioned to think
that being black or brown is ugly and we should strive to be white, that
having a different kind of body type other than thin is bad. I applaud efforts to change this kind
of thinking, like Dove’s Campaign
for Real Beauty. Yes sure, it’s
still not that edgy and as life changing as we dream it to be (it was criticized by some for choosing
unrepresentative "real" women—ninety-six year old, described by one
marketer as: "the old lady equivalent of a super-model"; a heavily
freckled, but enviably cute, twenty-two year old, and so on.) but it’s a
START.
So yes, I am at my
heaviest weight now. But this is
for certain: I want to be
healthier because I want to
possess a body that will allow me to be as physically active and adventurous as
I want to be. I will try to
achieve that by continuing to still eat the way I want to eat but this time, I
will try to eat more of the “healthier” food and less of the “unhealthy” ones. I will try to exercise again and engage
in sweat-inducing sports. But if
after doing all these “healthier” options and my body still persist on adding
more bulk, my spirit will not be crushed.
I will refuse to let myself be dragged down into the path of negativity,
self-hate, self-pity. There is so
much more to life, so much more to love, so much more to explore, and my body
is my biggest ally. I will never
make it my enemy.
Here’s an excerpt from
Eve Ensler’s Preface to her play The Good Body. Read and be enlightened.
THE GOOD BODY
BY
EVE ENSLER
P r e f a c e
In the midst of a war in Iraq, in a time of escalating
global terrorism, when civil liberties are disappearing as fast as the ozone
layer, when one out of three women in the world will be beaten or raped in her
lifetime, why write a play about my stomach?
Maybe because my stomach is one thing I feel I have
control over, or maybe because I have hoped that my stomach is something I
could get control over. Maybe because I see how my stomach has come to occupy
my attention, I see how other women’s stomachs or butts or thighs or hair or
skin have come to occupy their attention, so that we have very little left for
the war in Iraq—or much else, for that matter. When a group of ethnically
diverse, economically disadvantaged women in the United States was recently asked
about the one thing they would change in their lives if they could, the
majority of these women said they would lose weight. Maybe I identify with
these women because I have bought into the idea that if my stomach were flat,
then I would be good, and I would be safe. I would be protected. I would be
accepted, admired, important, loved. Maybe because for most of my life I have
felt wrong, dirty, guilty, and bad, and my stomach is the carrier, the pouch
for all that self-hatred. Maybe because my stomach has become the repository
for my sorrow, my childhood scars, my unfulfilled ambition, my unexpressed
rage. Like a toxic dump, it is where the explosive trajectories collide—the
Judeo- Christian imperative to be good; the patriarchal mandate that women be quiet,
be less; the consumer-state imperative to be better, which is based on the
assumption that you are born wrong and bad, and that being better always
involves spending money, lots of money. Maybe because, as the world rapidly
divides into fundamentalist camps, reductive sound bites, and polarizing
platitudes, an exploration of my stomach and the life therein has the potential
to shatter these dangerous constraints….
The Good Body began with me and my
particular obsession with my “imperfect” stomach. I have charted this
self-hatred, recorded it, tried to follow it back to its source. Here, unlike
the women in The Vagina Monologues, I am my
own victim, my own perpetrator. Of course, the tools of my selfvictimization
have been made readily available. The pattern of the perfect body has been
programmed into me since birth. But whatever the cultural influences and
pressures, my preoccupation with my flab, my constant dieting, exercising,
worrying, is selfimposed. I pick up the magazines. I buy into
the ideal. I believe that blond, flat girls
have the secret. What is far more frightening than narcissism is the zeal for
self-mutilation that is spreading, infecting the world.
I have been to more than forty countries in the last
six years. I have seen the rampant and insidious poisoning: skin-lightening
creams sell as fast as tooth paste in Africa and Asia; the mothers of
eight-year-olds in America remove their daughters’ ribs so they will not have
to worry about dieting; five-year-olds in Manhattan do strict asanas so they
won’t embarrass their parents in public by being chubby; girls vomit and starve
themselves in China and Fiji and everywhere; Korean women remove Asia from
their eyelids . . . the list goes on and on.
I have been in a dialogue with my stomach for the past
three years. I have entered my belly—the dark wet underworld—to get at the
secrets there. I have talked with women in surgical centers in Beverly Hills;
on the sensual beaches of Rio de Janeiro; in the gyms of Mumbai, New York,
Moscow; in the hectic and crowded beauty salons of Istanbul, South Africa, and
Rome. Except for a rare few, the women I met loathed at least one part of their
body. There was almost always one part that they longed to change, that they
had a medicine cabinet full of products devoted to transforming or hiding or
reducing or straightening or lightening. Just about every woman believed that
if she could just get that part right, everything else would work out. Of
course, it is an endless heartbreaking campaign.Some of the monologues in The
Good Body are based on well-known women like Helen Gurley Brown
and Isabella Rossellini. Those monologues, which grew out of a series of
conversations with each of these fascinating women, are not recorded
interviews, but interpretations of the lives they offered me. Some of the other
characters are based on real lives, real stories. Many are invented….
This play is my prayer, my attempt to analyze the
mechanisms of our imprisonment, to break free so that we may spend more time
running the world than running away from it; so that we may be consumed by the
sorrow of the world rather than consuming to avoid that sorrow and suffering.
This play is an expression of my hope, my desire, that we will all refuse to be
Barbie, that we will say no to the loss of the particular, whether it be to a
voluptuous woman in a silk sari, or a woman with defining lines of character in
her face, or a distinguishing nose, or olivetoned skin, or wild curly hair.
I am stepping off the capitalist treadmill. I am
going to take a deep breath and find a way to survive not being flat or
perfect. I am inviting you to join me, to stop trying to be anything, anyone
other than who you are. I was moved by women in Africa who lived close to the
earth and didn’t understand what it meant to not love their body. I was lifted
by older women in India who celebrated their roundness. I was inspired by
Marion Woodman, a great Jungian analyst, who gave me confidence to trust what I
know. She has said that “instead of transcending ourselves, we must move into
ourselves.” Tell the image makers and magazine sellers and the plastic surgeons
that you are not afraid. That what you fear the most is the death of
imagination and originality and metaphor and passion. Then be bold and LOVE
YOUR BODY. STOP FIXING IT. It was never broken.
Labels:
eve ensler,
feminism,
personal,
the good body,
writing
Thursday, April 12, 2012
The Riddle (Part 1 of a long draft)
Part 1: The Riddle
There was a quickening, like when birds
land
On a soft branch, and the tree tickled,
hastens a blush
Through leaves dancing suffused with the
richness of rain
A quickening, my blood feeling as if
thunder is
Caught in its current, small explosions of
a boiling so
Thick I need to hold on to a post that is
not there
My hands catching air, hot, wet, particles
from the belly
Of huge machines that huff and puff and
blow the clouds away
There was a quickening, like when you stare
at
Something so bright for so long, pain
shoots up like
A bullet, up through that tender spot in
your brain
Causing a bursting forth of colours in
psychedelic proportions
As if you’re dead but not really dead
A quickening, a precipitation of tremulous
sweat, heart-stops,
Eye-pops, soft mind-booms, rapid
fire-breath overlapping
Enfant terrible and sprite, hellion and luminary
A hastening of masks, one after the other
As if I was there, when I was not
As if I was absent, but in truth
I was
I am
Everywhere.
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
My Favorite Surrealists: Focus on Joan Miro
The Lark's Wing, Encircled with Golden Blue, Rejoins the Heart of the Poppy Sleeping on a Diamond-studded Meadow, 1967, Oil on canvas |
Dancer, 1925, Oil on cardboard |
Ladders Cross the Blue Sky in a Wheel of Fire, 1953, Oil on canvas |
The Farm, 1921-1922, Oil on canvas |
The Garden, 1925 |
http://www.joan-miro.info/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/mar/20/joan-miro-life-ladder-escape-tate
http://kateri.blog.com/2010/10/25/joan-miro-the-garden-1925-prades-the-village-1917/
http://joanmiro.com/
http://www.arthistoryguide.com/Joan_Miro.aspx
http://fundaciomiro-bcn.org/fundaciojoanmiro.php?idioma=2
Miro: Sculptor by Michal Boncza
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/news/content/view/full/117684
Whole New Dimension: Miró’s sculptures reveal how the challenge of a new medium
inspired the artist in his final years
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/a7afc2f4-7296-11e1-9be9-00144feab49a.html#axzz1rnQQ6P5P
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Excerpts from Banana Yoshimoto's N.P
From page 15, Kano's observation on Otohiko's appearance:
From page 191, Kano, looking at Otohiko again:
I have a bone-deep love for this book. It consumes me.
From page 191, Kano, looking at Otohiko again:
I have a bone-deep love for this book. It consumes me.
Labels:
banana yoshimoto,
books,
inspiration,
japanese writer,
literature
Marcos Island
Marcos Island is my favorite among the many places to explore in the Hundred Islands (Alaminos, Pangasinan). It's clean, its got a good clean white sand beach (although a bit small at around 600 sq. m), there are numerous trails you can hike, plus there's a nice cave called ... guess what ... the Imelda cave. The Hundred Islands is a good place to visit, it may not offer the stunning views of Palawan or our other more popular beaches, but it certainly has its own charms. Plus, for budget travelers like me, it's affordable and you can just go on a road trip or take the bus which is most of the time cheaper than going to places that you can only reach by plane or ship.
Here are some photos I took of my sister going up the trail that leads to the mouth of the Imelda cave:
Here are some photos I took of my sister going up the trail that leads to the mouth of the Imelda cave:
Sunday, April 08, 2012
The Return of The Walking Cliche
I'm writing a character whose moniker is The Walking Cliche. I've written something before about me being a walking cliche but, this one's not me. (Really. Erase that smirk on your face. Read and judge ... or not. You wanna die?) Here's a sample of one of her monologues:
I'm craving for the dependability & comfort of a
cliché moment. Like biting into a Magnum almond bar. Or drowning in the
sweetness of a pastel colored cupcake with an equally sugary name like Vanilla
Sunshine. Hmmm hold on there, those are all slightly expensive clichés. How so cliché bourgeois of me.
Apologies. Okay let’s go down the
‘the-best-things-in-life-are-free’ route: I want that no-bullshit honesty of a cliché moment. Like when two young girls promise they
will be best friends forever. Or when a dog asks for a belly rub and returns it
with adoration & loyalty that knows no bounds. Blue sky, emerald waters,
coconut trees white sand, really, who doesn’t want that? Walking barefoot,
taking pictures of the sunset,
waking up to see the sun rise and with it the promise of a new day. When somebody tells me to take a
hike out of annoyance, I just smile.
Take a hike? Sure, and while doing it I will still take nothing but
pictures. And I will scream the
devils away when I reach the summit (the most cathartic of all clichés). It
sure is much better than screaming into a pillow (but that would work too, if
you had no other choice). There’s nothing more real than the sturdy fixedness
of trees so go on, hug them. It’s
so true what Joyce Kilmer said anyway “I think I shall never see. A poem as lovely as a tree.” (Did I
mention to you I’m blind?) Want to learn how
to survive life? You have two
options, you either swim against the currents or go with the natural flow. Feel
down? Eat chocolate! Dance under
the rain! Do all the cliché
moments that make you feel good, anything to stop you from pulling your hair,
scratching your eyes out or worse of ‘em all, do everything you can to stop you
from eating your own shit. Or
making yourself so spiteful you make other people eat your shit. Ew. Yes, it’s a cliché moment, but still, try to do it with some
class. Like let’s say a cat that
just sits there and looks at you with so much indifference and
superiority. Heck if I had nine
lives I’d be all pompous and royal assed too. And my most favorite cliché of them all, it’s not the
cheerleader who will save the world, no not even the caped crusader or that
flying man in red briefs – love, love will save the world. Yes John Lennon, I’m singing with you,
‘all we need is love’. Yes
Bono, ‘love is a temple love a
higher law’ that even though ‘we’re not the same we get to carry each
other’. And yes Bob Marley, ‘as it
was in the beginning (one love!) so shall it be in the end (one heart!) ….
Let’s get together and feel alright.”
So go ahead. Ride that unicorn, travel on rainbows, be somebody’s
sunshine, kiss under the moonlight, hold hands, jump for joy (and make sure to
take a picture, that’s the cliché rule), catch all those lemons life throws at
you and go shoot tequila, go rock ‘en roll coz really man, punk’s not dead and
rock stars live forever and dreamers free your mind and flower children
legalized it and they were first to get it right: make love, not war. Love moves mountains, love saves, love
is the one ring that will rule us all, love love love … Love is, and will always be, the
answer.
P.S
I was munching on cheese the entire time I was writing
this.
Labels:
character study,
cliché,
monologue,
personal,
writing
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