thinking-about-weightloss
losing weight.
July 30, 2014
8.15.2014
Internet Inspiration – August 15, 2014
August 15, 2014

Internet Inspiration – August 1, 2014

Seriously? August?

Elizabeth Gilbert, what you read, I’ll read.

This I meant to post weeks ago, but I didn’t save the link and the power went out and it took me awhile to find it again.

What else do I know about this?

It doesn’t cost anything. It doesn’t require anything other than getting quiet and remembering.

And yet at the same time, it is the hardest practice. The simplest, and the hardest.

It asks that I get quiet, peaceful, that I practice legitimacy, that I forgive myself.

And thank you again, Havi, for this piece on Who Is A Writer. (or a Whatever Title You Claim.)

We forget about truth, and this is dangerous. We hurt ourselves with un-truth.

We set up traps for ourselves: “I’m not a real X, because I’m not doing Y.” Or: “I’ll never be able to Y until I pass all these external standards.”

No. You are a writer if you grapple with these questions. You are a writer if you doubt. You are a writer if you care, even if sometimes you care so much that your tangled relationship with not-writing keeps you in bed crying. You are a writer if you yearn for something and don’t have the words to describe it yet.

There are many ways to know you are a writer, and doubting it is something writers go through, so let’s drop this pain-heavy rule that you must be writing now in order to claim that lost part of you.

And speaking of writing, here are 9 unconventional writers’ residencies.

9 Language Boy Meets 6 Language Girl. Essentially, my dream.

If you don’t already know this about me, let me tell you: I pretty much always want to be eating flowers. So I extra love lavender lemonade.

Really enjoyed this video where cocoa bean farmers got to taste chocolate for the first time.

As someone who craves solitude, I really appreciated this article on the power of lonely.

Perhaps this explains why seeing a movie alone feels so radically different than seeing it with friends: Sitting there in the theater with nobody next to you, you’re not wondering what anyone else thinks of it; you’re not anticipating the discussion that you’ll be having about it on the way home. All your mental energy can be directed at what’s happening on the screen. According to Greg Feist, an associate professor of psychology at the San Jose State University who has written about the connection between creativity and solitude, some version of that principle may also be at work when we simply let our minds wander: When we let our focus shift away from the people and things around us, we are better able to engage in what’s called meta-cognition, or the process of thinking critically and reflectively about our own thoughts.

After reading my posts about dancing, my acupuncturist sent me this article by a friend of hers, on why she dances Argentine tango (and she moved to Argentina to dance and study more. Swoon!). This post is magnificent, and I could hardly choose just one excerpt, so make sure you read the whole thing.

You are not responsible for the other person’s experience, only your own. This is a biggie. If everyone could practice this in their intimate relationships, we’d all be enlightened. Most of us normal people care a lot about how other people feel, although certainly some more than others. And so leaders might try to impress their followers, or followers might dance with partners they don’t enjoy so as not to hurt their feelings. But is it worth the expense of compromising your own experience? Liberation: saying no. It’s OK. It’s built into the dance that it is OK to say no. We will hurt feelings, yes. And you will get your feelings hurt too. No one owes you a dance no matter how many years you have danced or if you have studied with so-and-so. Maybe they just don’t like the way you smell, or you are too tall for them, or they are not in the mood, or they would rather dance with someone they know. One need not explain.

I’m always trying to give you guys the most important information I can find. In case you wondered where you’d end up if you could swim absolutely straight across the ocean, I’ve got you covered.

I agree 100% with this analysis of why Melissa McCarthy’s movie disappointed me so much.

In interviews, McCarthy speaks candidly about the “strange epidemic of body image and body dysmorphia” and how she serves as a buffer against it for her two young daughters; she dismisses a particularly vicious critic who turned his review of Identity Thief into a schoolyard diatribe about her “tractor-size” body by describing him as “swimming in hate” and flouting a home life rich in love and a professional success larger than a full fleet of tractor trailers. She bristles when that success is qualified with epithets like “plus-size sweetheart:” “It’s like I’m managing to achieve all this success in spite of my affliction … would you ever do that to a male comedian considered overweight?”

She calls out the fashion elite for failing to court her and clothe her the way they would any other Emmy-award-winning and Oscar-nominated actress. And, in a recent People magazine cover spread to promote her latest film Tammy, she calls out the fashion industry as a whole for failing to court and clothe the legions of women who look just like her: “ Just because I’m a different size doesn’t mean I … turned off a desire for anything current or modern, or a desire to look good and feel good … I was like ‘Where is a cool T-shirt? Where is a great sweater that’s not built like a tent?” That same spread is refreshingly void of any diet or exercise talk, any attempts to position herself as “a good fatty” (a term coined by Dances With Fat blogger Ragen Chastain to describe “a fat person who is viewed … as taking ‘appropriate steps’ to lose weight, or, at the very least, ‘struggling’ with their weight, thereby earning a modicum of very contingent respect from someone who would otherwise be a fat hater). Indeed, she decapitates the “good fatty” narrative with the roundhouse kick and katana strike of a rhetorical question and four blunt words: “My weight? It is what it is.”

But in McCarthy’s film roles, especially in Tammy, hardly take such a revolutionarily blasé approach to her weight. McCarthy’s size is always implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, the brunt of the joke.

And I think this is a really compelling article highlighting why feminism keeps losing while gay equality wins.

The first [hypothesis] is that Justice Anthony Kennedy likes gay rights more than women’s rights. The second is that feminism, as insidiously framed by the Christian right, is all about sex—while LGBTQ equality has become a battle not for sex, but for dignity.