Some things

I shaved my legs.  Felt like it.  I re-dyed my hair the other day which necessitated an extra shower.  Usually I just have one in the morning, and cannot be bothered shaving then – if I even remember!  But I was primping, and I felt like it, so I did.  I think when I re-dye my hair is about the right length of time, actually, between shaves.  And I also think that that is hopefully the last the internet will hear about my body hair!  No promises, though… Thanks for sharing your own experiences, it was really interesting to hear about other people’s ‘normality’.

These photos are from a walk from my work into town.  I’ve done it a few times, and it’s a lovely way to end the day.  I have to catch a bus in to town and back out again.  Which is fine if I catch the first bus, but if I miss it (and it’s usually early, so I usually do) I spend 15 minutes waiting at work, and then miss my connection in town and so spend another 15 waiting there.  Walking takes me about an hour (I dawdle) and I find I don’t get home much later at all.  Plus, I am feeling very slothlike at the moment.  Not much movement going on, and I feel lumpy and ungainly.  I know this is a recurrent theme – I don’t blog about it when I’m active and enjoying it!  Just when I’m lazy and lumpy.  I’ve been getting more migraines too, which I think is mostly because I need new glasses badly, but also because of my inactivity.

Anyway, it’s a nice walk form work to town.  Through old suburbs, but not posh ones.  So lots of old cottages and semi-detached houses, and rambling gardens.  I wish I could photograph the serenity and overall sense of life humming along that exists along those back streets.

I had two 21sts on the weekend.  One was in North Adelaide, and I walked with friends from the pub to my bus, a couple of blocks away.  The houses.  Were MENTAL.  There were libraries and grand pianoes and crazy columns.  I mean, obviously I knew some people lived like that.  But in Adelaide?  I don’t know why there shouldn’t be showy rich people in Adelaide.  It just seemed so alien and weird and… unreal.  I had to wonder about the people who live in those houses. What are their lives like?  Do they pick up their own underwear?  Who cleans the toilet and picks up discarded magazines from the floors?

The other 21st was my cousin’s – the one whose mother just died.  I knit her two shawls.  We had it at my childless Aunt and Uncles.  Their house is luxurious in a less crazy way (although, the BATHROOM!).  Uncle D was heard to worry about his white carpet with the crazy kids.  He needn’t have worried.  The only damage to the carpet was my wretched aunt.  She got SLAUGHTERED and trod chocolate cake into the carpet, as well as having the same conversation with me about six times.  The party was nautical themed.  S wen’t as a pirate, and was generally very well recieved by those members of the family who hadn’t met him.  I also went for a swim – it was down near the beach where I used to live.  It was absolutely freezing, and it was glorious.  My mother came as a porthole and was a general downer.

I had a run in with a workmate about Fat Acceptance.  She commented on something over at Fat Lot of Good, and then we had a ‘discussion’ about it.  It was all very polite – although we both got quite red faced about it.  Thank goodness we are white and repressed and can pretend to be nice to each other!  Anyway, I was proud of myself for actually having the discussion, but it also left a sour taste in my mouth.  She pulled many of the classic cards – costing the health system, for example.  I just didn’t know how to argue well if we disagreed with two main points: 1) fat is not the same as unhealthy; unhealthy people are not all fat; all fat people are not unhealthy; you can be healthy and fat and 2) other people’s health and decisions are NONE OF YOUR FUCKING BUSINESS.  I am trying to remember, because I know that not that long ago I hadn’t processed the thought that it was ok to choose to be fat.  I can’t remember what that feels like. 

I know better, but I still get surprised when my real life world is not as nice and caring as my internet world.  It sounds funny to say so, considering what most of the internet is like.  But my corner of the internet is lovely.  It has all of you in it!  And we share stories and are polite and generally validate each other and are nice, even if we don’t understand each other’s take on things.  And the places I go regularly, like Tiger Beatdown and Kate Harding’s site (Shapely Prose, you are missed) are generally accepting, even when they are angry.  I spent last Friday afternoon watching ‘it gets better’ videos (I recommend the Dan Savage and Tim Gunn ones), and found Ivan E. Coyote and devoured her videos.  What a fantastic storyteller!  What a lovely world, where people are people, just themselves, whatever that looks like.  And then I went out into the real world, where people were making gay jokes and generally being dickheads.  It was a rude shock, I tell you!  No wonder I am an introvert.

However!  Craft camp is this weekend!  I need a holiday, some sleepins and some days spent luxuriously making things in company of my Tribe.  I am looking forward to everything about it, but when I think about the people… well.  I am excited, that is all.  I can’t wait to see my crafty friends.  Christmas was never this exciting, I swear!

This is a main road in Adelaide

At peak hour.  On a weekday.

I’m not even joking.

Seriously?

People seriously think it’s ok to compare food, which WE NEED TO LIVE, to drugs?

Ok, McDonalds isn’t exactly the fountain of youth.  We all know this.  And don’t even get me started on the many conflated ideas in the slogan ‘Childhood Obesity: Break the Habit’.  (Being fat is just a habit, you guys, if I were just more organised, I’d remember where I put that Thin I know I had just a minute ago… wait, let me check behind the couch.)  And don’t get me started EVEN MORE on the classist assumptions buried in this.  If you are cash or time poor, fast food is actually a pretty good option, sometimes.

Look, I’m not saying we should be encouraging junk food.  But basically this ad is saying that junk food is bad because it makes you fat.  So it’s ok for thin people to eat junk food, is that right?  Just so we’re clear?  It’s only REALLY bad for you and dangerous, and might kill your children in a creepy, forcing it on them way, if they are hideous and FAT.  No?

I don’t think I can emphasise this enough.  WE NEED FOOD TO LIVE.

Presentation and performing

One of the phrases that is used alot in the feminist blogosphere is ‘performing femininity’.  Or gender, or sexuality, or anything. It’s one of those phrases that can start to sound pat and meaningless, but it’s one that sticks with me, that I think about all the time.  Performing rather than experiencing.  When is performing good and fun, and when are we obliged to do it for society’s sake, making it often tiring and oppressive?

Don’t get me wrong.  I love to femme it up.  And butch it up, frankly, as my weekend’s experience with power tools showed.  It’s just that, more often than not, I cannot be bothered.  I do not naturally fit the modern day requirements for femininity – as most people don’t.  Well, I have shapely eyebrows that don’t require plucking.  But that’s about it.  I have dark hair, I have a shadow moustache and my legs look prickly an hour after I shave, my hair is naturally limp and uninteresting and if I wear eyeshadow my eyelids itch and I rub it all over my fave in ten minutes anyway.  And while I am enjoying longer hair and the opportunity to do interesting things with it, I am also constantly cheesed off with it – at how much time and effort it is to make it do what I want it to.  And then I can’t, like… move my head quickly or whatever.  Which is boring.  So it does, more often than not, end up in a ponytail.  That’s a compromise I’m happy with.  I now own both a hair dryer and a curling iron, although I have admitted that they will be used once a month at most.  When I want to perform.  Which is not every day.  I think that’s part of the reason I like having blue hair – it always looks like I’ve put some effort in, however minimal.  And it takes me out of one performance category and into another.

I haven’t shaved my legs in about a month, though.  Today I am wearing knee socks, and you can see my heairy knees peeking over the top.  I wore shorts all weekend (with birkenstocks, no less, hello new stereotype).  I didn’t do this on purpose – it was winter and I couldn’t be bothered, and then I got some eczema on my legs so I thought I’d better not.  And before I got around to doing anything about it, I read this post from definatalie.  And I started to think about it.  Why do I shave my legs?  Lots of reasons.  I think I have decided not to shave my armpits or nair off my moustache anymore.  But the legs?  It’s confronting.

The week after I read Definatalie’s post, I said to S ‘I think I might stop shaving my legs’.  He said ‘ok’.  Like you might say if someone told you they thought their favourite colour was now blue instead of green.  I mean, that was pretty much the reaction I expected, and I don’t need permission anyway.  But it’s nice to be validated, I guess.  His response, when pressed was ‘well, you’re  a mammal’.  Which I think is an excellent phrase that I might need stitched onto a cushion.  (You’re a mammal.  Get over it.)  His other contribution, when I said I wasn’t sure if this was a Thing for me, was that I don’t have to decide.  I mean, obviously.  But I feel like I have to.  Like I am required to pick which team I belong to, or something.  But I am not sure, yet, whether this is a ‘I NEVER shave my legs’ stance, or a ‘I don’t, unless I have a reason to do so’ or even ‘I do it whenever I feel like it’.  Fine distinctions, maybe.  But somehow I feel like they’re important.

I think it’s because I feel like people make certain assumptions, if your legs are not shaved.  Not all of those assumptions would be wrong about me, but I am not sure I wish to place myself so heavily in whatever camp that puts me in.  On the other hand, who cares?  They’re legs, I’m a mammal, people can either get to know me and work out which assumptions are right and wrong, or not.  It’s not like I’m not going to get a job because I have hairy legs, or people will refurse to serve me at shops.  And, anyway, I already have blue hair.  I am CLEARLY a freak (I love my blue hair).  Then again, and this is more relevant, I feel a bit… ungroomed.  Scruffy.  I pretty much live in skirts, although not recently since I got too fat for them – but then my jeans have all worn out in the thighs, so I am back to skirts.  And skirt mean exposed legs.  And to me, exposed legs mean smooth, clean shaven legs.  I have yet to work out if this is because that is what I have been taught, or because it’s what I like, for myself. I almost shaved this weekend, when I knew it was going to be warm and I’d be in shorts.  And then I decided to wait and see.  Because maybe I am just unused to looking at it.

I feel a bit daft, writing an angsty post about my leg hair.  Like, welcome to the party, young one.  Also, get over yourself.  But I think it’s not too frivolous (almost, though) because my main sticking point is what it makes me look like.  To others, and also to myself.  I’m waiting to figure out what that is, and how I feel about it.  Meanwhile, my temperature is better regulated, and I have more time in the mornings, so I’m sort of happy with that.  Also, no stubble!  That bit is great.

In a semi-related note, you should go read Frances’ post about her bikini.  And look  at her fabulous, kick arse photos.  I want to give her a big hug because of that last photo.  Fabulous! I am determined to buy myself a bikini this summer.  I have a sensible swimming one piece, that is thick proper material and holds all the bits in appropriate places.  But I was a bikini so I can go to the beach and just hang out.  S burns in about 30 seconds (seriously, we went out yesteray and I could SMELL his head burning.  It was pretty gross), so I forsee many twilight swimming sessions.  So I’m not worried about skin exposure and cancer, in my bikini.  And I REFUSE to have any body hang ups about this.  So there.  Do you hear me?  REFUSE. The last time I had a two piece (actually, the first time, too) I would have been 13.  And about five adults told me ‘well, good for YOU’.  Which I found confusing, because I hadn’t realised it was a Thing, yet.  Anyway.  The point is, I am going to get my belly out this summer. I just have to deal with the expense.  Oh, nice things.  Why do you cost so much, always?