"whoopee cushion"
"Youngstown" + "blog"
"Catholicism" + "weird"
"stoopie" + "grocery"
"Caccati in mano e prenditi a schiaffi!"
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2004-12-05 - 9:37 a.m.
They call pants for short people "petite" even at Lard Bucket.
Last night I finally watched Super Size Me. I have a lot of mixed feelings about it.
For one thing, I don't know that miles and miles of stock footage showing fatties in ill-fitting casuals is necessary to convey the extent of the obesity problem in this country.
I do know that anyone advocating daily P.E. in the public schools has never been spent a day being fat or klutzy. P.E. was torture for me. My parents knew it was going to be so and the fact that I would maybe have it once a week was part of the reason they sent me to Catholic school in the first place. I have them to thank for never having had to climb a rope.
Daily phys ed in ninth grade, where you actually had to dress out most of the time, was a complete and utter horror. (Except for badminton. I actually liked that.) In some respects I was lucky because the coach was excellent. Unfortuately, because she took it seriously, we did a health unit in which we had to get a partner and apply calipers to each other in order to calculate our percentage of body fat. I don't remember the number but I do remember it put me in the "obese" category. I also remember that somehow I was paired with this teeny tiny person, easily the smallest girl in the class. If there was anything on her to grip with the calipers, my clumsy fingers couldn't find it. My arms were bigger than her legs. And this was ninth grade, during which I could actually shop at regular stores. I was fat but it wasn't anything like nowadays.
Back in Chicago, before I had given up on bike riding, I went through a phase of trying to learn, and it was unspeakable, but I had to explain to someone that I simply didn't learn how as a kid. "Was it a matter of will, or what?" Yeah, asshole. Because the concept of volition applies to seven-year-olds. Jesus.
Which brings me around to the tone of crushing personal failure the director appears to ascribe to fatness, to half the country. Well, you know, fatness used to indicate luxury. More than ever it's associated with being poor. You have to buy the time to exercise from other essential life functions. Access to nutrition counseling assumes access to healthcare. And healthier, less processed food is more expensive, yet paradoxically more trouble to prepare. Plus you have to take into consideration what's available to buy in neighborhoods where poor people live. Then factor in that a lot of kids are eating two, even three meals a day from the school foodservice programs featured in the film. The only--the only--hint of the poverty correlation is in a bonus clip featuring a discussion with a grocery marketing expert, who points out that crap food is cheaper than healthy stuff.
Kids in this country grow up learning that smoking is bad for you. This gets translated into the notion that smokers are bad people. This already seems to be happening with fat. People talk about having just been to the gym as if they just spent a few hours at a soup kitchen, or building Habitat houses, or at church. There was a study not long ago blaming fatties for the exorbitant costs of air travel. Southwest Airlines' policy is most definitely bitch-worthy, but those who do risk being accused of playing the political correctness violin. I don't know how it fails to occur to people to wonder what it is like for the fattie to sit down next to someone on a subway or a plane or a bus.
If you have three days to spare on travel, Amtrak is fantastically spacious, even in coach class. If there's not a space on either side of me, or if I can't get a bench seat by myself, I am very reluctant to sit down on a subway or a bus. The problem of my bigness is compounded by the fact that I am almost always lugging a large, heavy backpack. The effect is that you just want to make yourself as small as possible. You want to disappear. This is not a problem that seems to occur to gigantic muscular men. On the bus I usually take home from school, it doesn't get crowded until passing through a cluster of labs and hospitals. Usually people would rather stand than sit next to me, even though I always move my bag from the extra seat to my lap, to indicate that yes, should you deign to take it, this seat by me is available. Standing up might allow more people to sit, but would also aggravate that desperate need to feel smaller, to take up less space. Besides, hanging onto a handrail for dear life is just plain dangerous on a bus or Green Line trolley.You wish you had money for cabs, or time to take Amtrak somewhere other than New York. You scold yourself for knowing better than to take the Green Line anywhere from September to June. Most of all you feel rotten for imposing on other people. If you get to your seat on the plane and someone is already sitting next to you, your instinct is say not hello but "I'm sorry." I'm sorry you have to sit by me. I'm sure you'd rather be next to a lithe young mother, no matter how loudly her little brat screams at takeoff and landing. I'm sorry I am going to make this flight not easy for you. Which is bullshit, because no one is comfortable on an airplane, unless they have been drinking Dewar's in first class and are floating somewhere near the overhead bins. If I were pregnant I'd have an excuse--and hell, maybe people do think I'm pregnant. Barring that, the only reason to take up that much space is failure. That is my failure pushing against you and making you feel cramped. If it's any consolation, I feel ten times more uncomfortable than you do.
