yeah

I just got brutally sneak-attacked twice in a row by Ms. Rivera, who is in fine fettle tonight.
Groceries on the way home from work with Z. As an experiment, not bad. Now have fixins for several more meals. If we really get snowmageddon'd (not nearly as clever a use of the word as our Arborgeddon of several years ago, a premature heavy snowfall which claimed a distressingly enormous percentage of our once-green city's trees) I'll be set. But I know we won't be, it'll just really suck to drive. We're supposed to start getting it tonight and keep getting it until Friday night, but with a total expected accumulation of under a foot, Buffalo is not particularly concerned. Just prepared to be annoyed. Especially since, like the aforementioned October storm that snapped our trees, this is going to be a 30-34 degree Fahrenheit snowstorm, meaning it's nearly melted as it falls, and is heavy and moisture-laden. If we get sporadic power outages, it's mostly just annoying. The October one left over a quarter million of us without power for a week. This one hopefully won't do even a fraction of that damage. If it does, we're prepared; we're all pros at using snow and coolers to preserve food, though the Oct one was bad since it got so warm immediately afterward. We're just not looking forward to it.
At least I've got a spare laptop battery. I'll keep plugged-in and make sure I'm set with that.

I am under 200 pounds. Not by much. I have mixed feelings. The old me is happy to be smaller at any cost. The new me is worried by that instinctive reaction-- smaller isn't better-- and is experiencing more misgivings because I fear the weight loss is caused by careless and insufficient nutrition. I have been eating like crap. No, I'm not getting thin by eating junk food; I'm just not getting enough of the good food, and I worry I'll lose strength and muscle mass as well. I also hate to feed into the idea that being thinner means you're fitter and working harder. We're under pressure, at this point in the derby season, to really show that we're putting in effort, and a lot of people substitute the shorthand of "she's lost so much weight!" to mean "she's worked so hard". Losing weight doesn't mean I'm working harder. At my most frantic workout state, I also weighed the most. (My peak weight so far ever has been 210/215, so it's not like we're talking massive amounts here. My lowest adult weight was 175 and definitely involved way too little food, though not on purpose, in my defense. People said I looked good at that point, but I also routinely got compliments on how much trimmer I looked at 205, so, it's definitely illusory. I can't take compliments from acquaintances as any sign of a true change of state; I had to go out and buy all new size 16 pants when I outgrew the 14s, and everyone cooed over how much thinner I looked. No, my pants just fit now, but thanks.)
Anyway, it all feeds into the conflicted state of being an "inbetweenie"-- too fat for regular clothes, too thin for plus clothes, spared the worst fat-hate directed at the "deathfats" (or so they're self-proclaimed, lovingly, on fatshionista-- the "morbidly obese"), but subject to truly bitingly cruel criticism from those who think maybe we don't know we're fat. It's a wicked seesaw, because you can "pass" for not-fat in the right circumstances, but f'rinstance, you can't buy anything but socks and hair accessories in the mall, and women of your size are most definitely "plumpers" in the porn world. (Discovering big-tits-fetish porn was huge for me in my mid-twenties, I'll admit it. I was Googling for my bra size and let me tell you, it was a revelation. "Hey wow my tits are bigger than hers. Hey she looks awesome in a bikini. Y'know.......")

Anyway. I've never had an eating disorder, not really. (I've eaten some fucked-up shit, but never been obsessed. Just like mental illness, I've experienced juuuust enough to know how fucking lucky I am that it hasn't been worse.) I've never had any truly self-harming behaviors. I've skirted the edge of all that shit. And it sucks to be everything; society has a special little niche of hate for whatever you are, be it rail-thin, boyish, fat, freckled, or god forbid truly weird, like not-white or not-straight or not-cisgendered or whatever. So I'm not trying to lay a claim to any particular oppression or anything. (And I know I "pass" all over the place-- I don't look as fat as I am, I'm bisexual in a monogamous LTR that happens to be hetero, etc. etc. etc.-- so don't think I'm not aware of that either.)

I'm just saying, I am absolutely helpless to explain to my coworkers why I feel so confused and weird about being under 200 pounds again. (I had never crossed that boundary in my life until after I started derby; it used to be a big psychological barrier in my mind, but by the time I crossed it I'd discovered Fat Acceptance and size-positivity and Health at Every Size and so on, and so was a bit proud of it really.) Part of it is that because I am 5' 7"ish (really somewhere between 6.75-7 inches, which fluctuates based on I don't know what, but it does), the difference between 190 and 200 pounds is the dividing line between "overweight" and "obese" on the utterly bullshit BMI chart. (Actually if I put in my shortest recorded height, 5' 6.75", and 190 pounds, I'm at 30.0, which is the dividing line itself. If I give myself back that quarter inch, I'm below the cutoff. If I add back a couple more pounds, I'm over it again. I live on boundary lines, I guess.)

It's so stupid. But I kind of like giving people the mindfuck of pointing out that I am medically obese. I suppose my scale is imprecise enough that I can still claim obesity-- I'm pretty sure I'm over 190. I can't trust the scale to be more precise than about 10 pounds. But it's far enough below 200 that I'm pretty sure I am. So that's weird.

A coworker said that he had just climbed, for the first time in his life, above 200 pounds this month. He complained that he just didn't like this weight and didn't feel healthy. He'd gained 15 pounds in about a month, since he had minor surgery last month. I pointed out that it's pretty likely that he was feeling crappy because he'd, you know, just had surgery. But a weight gain that rapid is probably not a sign of perfect normal health either. I should mention, however, that he is six feet six inches, and so 200 pounds is pretty damn normal. (Well, I just plugged him into the BMI calculator, and it says that's a BMI of 23, which is the high end of normal. Really???)

For comparison in all this, Z has a BMI of just under 17, which would get him hospitalized for anorexia if he had any of its other symptoms. (Today he ate 2.5 cups of chicken noodle soup, 2 doughnuts, a bag of potato chips, and half of a fourteen-inch corned beef on rye sub laden with oil and mayonnaise. Just for the record. I ate 1 cup of homemade pea soup, an apple, a chocolate chip muffin, and half of a 14" turkey sub on whole wheat with mustard. I gave him my sub wrapping paper to put his leftovers in because his was way too oily to re-use.)

Yeah yeah more nattering without a conclusion. I'm not really a blogger, I just keep a journal. Essays elude me. Gotta go deal with Chita's latest attempts to audition for the opera.