A Picture-Perfect Week

Wednesday night at QTU, Angela Davis spoke to a huge, rapt audience on a range of topics, including the killing of Trayvon Martin, Americans' resistance to seeing racism as a structural problem, and the cause of prison abolition. (You can watch the whole event here.) The Moms were in the house and on the second row, which gave Moose a chance to snap this shot of the scholar-activist listening attentively to a question from the audience:

(Photo Credit: Moose, 4/18/12, College Park, MD)

Friday, as many of you know, was the day of the big gay spring carnival Moose's happy little program hosts every year on behalf of DC Queer Studies. This year's symposium was extra special, focused on honoring the life and legacy of writer/critic Samuel R. "Chip" Delany, who turned 70 on April 1. The day was drenched in sunshine, the papers were uniformly splendid, and the guest of honor was genial, generous, and wise. Moose snapped this shot of Delany getting ready to read from his new novel, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders:

(Photo Credit: Moose, 4/20/12, College Park, MD)

What's the takeaway from this long, exhausting, yet deeply gratifying week? Maybe it's something as simple as the importance of finding work that feeds the soul and keeps one focused on a world larger than oneself. Both Davis and Delany have spent their lives as writers and scholars engaged with questions of race, sex, and justice, and both seem, at 70 or on the brink of it (Davis is 68), to radiate equanimity and an optimism that seems not naive but hard-won and fiercely guarded. At breakfast with a group of faculty women the morning after her lecture, Davis amiably entertained more than 90 minutes of questions on everything from prison reform to the politics of university catering. She was thoughtful, funny, generous, and sanguine about the prospect of continued, if slow, progress toward justice. She counseled patience and emphasized the importance of building movements from the ground up. She reminded listeners that the election of Barack Obama was a victory not for him but for those who voted him into office. She feels that the Occupy Wall Street movement, whatever else it did or did not accomplish, was a sign that citizens felt empowered by Obama's election to mobilize against rising inequalities of wealth and the rise of corporate power. In reply after reply, it was clear Davis refuses despair. She sees what's happening. She grasps the underlying problems with depth and nuance. And her years in the trenches tell her that it simply means we are all going to have to spend a few -- or many -- more years in the trenches. All right, then.

Look, darlings, I know it isn't always possible to find work that feeds your soul. Indeed, sometimes, to pay the rent and stay alive, you have to take jobs that make you worry you are selling or crushing your soul. You may find yourself in the devil's company, on your knees and on his payroll, but that doesn't make you a devil. Sometimes you do what you have to do -- but you do it without losing sight of what you want to do. You'll get there, my friend. Take the long view, as Davis and Delany have clearly done in the course of their own complex, amazing journeys. Keep your eyes and your heart open. You might have to do a little more than click your heels together three times, but you will get to where you want to go, even if it isn't on any map you've ever seen. Don't ask us how we know. We just do.

We'll end with what is perhaps Moose's favorite image from this picture-perfect week, because it celebrates not only longevity but clever design that tastes as good as it looks. Here is the cake she had made to honor Mr. Delany at the party after Friday's symposium. It's decorated with the image used on publicity for the event:

(Photo Credit: Moose, 4/19/12)

We offer a virtual piece of this pretty cake to one and all, as a way of saying, "Eat, laugh, never give into despair. That's the one thing we truly can't afford." Peace out.

* * *

For Will Danger, who is working.

Now We Are Six

Moose had that book over there on the left when she was a kid struggling to understand why she had not been born in Paris, France, as the lord had clearly intended her to be. She didn't love Milne's collection of children's verses in the way she loved his more well known works of prose, but there was almost nothing she loved as much as she loved the stories of Christopher Robin and his beloved Bear of Very Little Brain. As read aloud to her every night by an adored father whose silky smooth voice was ideal for storybook reading.

We'll pause here while my typist recalls the sound of that long silenced voice, which made her delight in words like Heffalump and Expotition and helped her to believe in an enchanted place on the top of the Forest where love and play would last forever. Ah, yes.

Now we are six -- and by "we" I mean this blog and its readers, this quirky little possibly enchanted world that we have built together word by word, link by link, post by post when we should have been doing other far less pleasurable things. Thank you for being here and for making us feel that, whatever it is we are doing here, it's fun enough to go right on doing it, if not forever, at least for the next little while. We are sure of you, as Piglet was sure of Pooh, and that, by golly, is good enough for us. Happy blogiversary, darlings. See you again soon.

* * *

We'd be remiss if we failed to mention here that Moose and Goose happily celebrated the twenty-eighth anniversary of their unlicensed love on International Women's Day, March 8. The occasion was thoroughly celebrated on Facebook and out in the real world with a decadent feast in a neighborhood joint where everybody knows your name. Thanks for all the good wishes, friends. And if you're feeling bummed that we didn't get up a proper anniversary post called Twenty-Eight Years of Queer Delight, well, go read Twenty-Seven Years of Queer Delight, Twenty-Six Years of Queer Delight, Twenty-Five Years of Queer Delight, and Twenty-Four Years of Queer Delight. That's a heaping helping of queer delight. We're hoping that will hold you till next year! Peace out.

A Woman of (Less) Substance

We pause briefly to note that it was one year ago today that Moose stepped on the scales at her first Lifestyle Adjustment Program meeting. By all means click away if celebrations of such things bore you senseless. Stick around, though, if you're willing to let a middle-aged broad indulge in a virtual happy dance. Take it away, Moose.

* * *

Thanks, Rox. Wow, what a difference a year makes, huh? Pound-wise, I am three-quarters of the woman I was on January 12, 2011. Fitness-wise, I am in dramatically better shape than I was a year ago. I can run four miles comfortably (if slowly) and could hang out in plank pose for the better part of a day if I had to. (And wouldn't life be cool if a girl were called upon to hang out in plank pose for the better part of a day? I mean, srsly. Think about it.) Attitude-wise, I feel sharper, calmer, and more resilient. I feel happier, more able to cope with whatever comes at me. Losing weight doesn't make life perfect by any means, but it can make the stresses and strains easier to manage.

I've been on maintenance since mid-July, though I actually continued to lose weight through August. My weight has now stabilized smack dab in the middle of the "normal" BMI range for my height. (Insert standard qualifiers about the limitations of BMI here.) What's working? you might ask. If you've been following my adventures in middle-aged embodiment, you already know the answer to this question, because what's working now is what has been working all along: Mindful eating, moderate exercise, and a supportive social network. (Thank you, Goose. Thank you, awesome LAP at Work group. Thank you, Facebook friends. Thank you, sisters [literal and figurative] and yogis.)

Is it really that simple? I feel sheepish and a little surprised to be saying this, but, yes, for me it has been that simple. I didn't need to radically change my diet. I just needed to eat less, drink less, and move more. My life now is not about deprivation and sacrifice. My meals aren't sad little piles of lettuce covered with fake cheese and fat-free dressing, and my workouts aren't daily forced marches. Over the holidays, I feasted on all of my favorites: my grandmother's olives, pecan pie, lobster casserole, chateaubriand (!). My feasting was a little more restrained than it was in years past, however, and I was pretty careful to eat light on non-feasting days to keep things in balance. I was also willing to spend 45 minutes on a treadmill on Christmas day so that I would actually feel hungry when it came time to tuck into that chateaubriand. My rule on exercise continues to be a firm yet flexible commitment to doing what I can when I can. I try to get in two or three cardiovascular workouts a week plus a 90-minute yoga class. Keep it simple. Keep it fun. Make exercise a priority, but don't beat up on yourself if you miss a day. As noted fitness guru Scarlett O'Hara once said, "Tomorrow is another day."

So, yes, the new normal for me is about balance and moderation, but it is also about joy and pleasure. I am not exaggerating when I say that the hardest part of this whole process was stepping on that scale one year ago today. Everything I've done since then has felt easy because I knew it was contributing to  my sense of well-being. I hope I never forget the flood of relief I experienced in that moment, as I realized that I had finally formulated the intention to rework my relationships to food, movement, and body. I will do a happy dance today to celebrate this milestone, but in a way I've been happy dancing all along. Thanks to all of you for dancing with me!

***

In other news, Hostess Brands, makers of Wonder bread, Twinkies, and the fruit pies Moose regularly devoured over the course of her misspent Midwestern youth, filed for bankruptcy protection on Wednesday, for the second time this decade. Are we alone in thinking the world would spin just fine on its axis without Ding Dongs and Donettes? Yeah, we didn't think so.

For other posts on the emergence of Moose 2.0: A Less Portly Dyke Than She Used to Be, go here, here, here, and here.

It would be wrong to end without an actual happy dance, wouldn't it? Hells to the yeah! Let's bring in a little Beyoncé, shall we? Move your body, baby -- and love it, no matter what. Peace out.

Upward-Facing Moose

Time for an exciting round of Complete the Caption! The above photo depicts Moose:

a) working on her tennis serve, which, she insists, does not actually require a ball or racket;
b) looking good but seriously underdressed for holiday caroling in the neighborhood;
c) smiling with gratitude because the pile of ungraded papers is not quite as high as her outstretched arm.

The answer of course is d) posing for a photographer at her local yoga studio to illustrate a little piece she wrote for the Willow Street Yoga Center Newsletter. (Yeah, it ain't Critical Inquiry or glq, but she wouldn't get a merit raise if she published in those fancy venues this year anyway, so what the heck?) We've pasted in a slightly revised version of the essay below. You can access the original by clicking on this link and then opening the PDF for the winter 2012 newsletter.

This one goes out to all the readers and friends who have followed the adventures in embodiment of Moose 2.0 over the past year. Your support and interest have meant a lot, and your stories have inspired and delighted all of us in Roxie's World. The post is dedicated to Suzie Hurley, first teacher, with love and gratitude for all that her vision has brought into being.

* * *

Lessons from the Mat
by Moose

I recently lost fifty pounds, and yoga helped me do it. Indeed, if I were inclined to be entrepreneurial, I would probably be making infomercials for something I might call the Yoga Diet, or perhaps even the Willow Street Diet: LOSE WEIGHT AND INCREASE FLEXIBILITY, WHILE STANDING ON ONE LEG!

I know: Maybe it’s a good thing I’m not especially entrepreneurial. Besides, Google tells me someone has beaten me to the punch on the Yoga Diet. Bear with me, though, as I try to explain my infomercial impulse.

Yoga may not be a major fat-burning activity, but I am serious when I say it contributed significantly to my efforts to re-contour my middle-aged body. I returned to Willow Street in the winter of 2009 after several years away. I had taken classes for a couple of years early in the 2000s, mostly Level Is with Suzie Hurley, but I decided to take a break in 2003 during a ridiculously stressful period in my life. (Two words are all I need to explain a crazy time and a dubious decision: home renovation.)

By the time I got back from my “break,” I was seriously out of shape and significantly overweight, because I had given up not only yoga but also a commitment I had maintained for most of my adult life to regular, vigorous cardiovascular activity. On the brink of my fiftieth birthday, I was feeling out of sorts and starting to worry about the long-term consequences of having gotten so out of shape. In other words, I was starting to feel old, and I didn’t like the feeling.

Returning to Willow Street was a small but important step on my long road back to health and fitness. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I see now that getting back to the mat was a way of gently yet powerfully re-connecting with a world and a self I was afraid I had left behind. Ultimately, that re-connection helped me find the will to lose weight by giving me a way to think about weight and body issues that feels affirming and enabling rather than punitive and disabling, which, I think, is how much of our culture’s talk about bodies, especially female ones, tends to be.

Back on the mat – first in Joe Miller’s Level I classes and lately in the I/II class he and Natalie Miller co-teach on Friday evenings – I learned three lessons that were enormously helpful in what I would eventually (and only half-jokingly) term my Lifestyle Adjustment Program. The first was to approach yoga in a spirit of play. This is an aspect of Joe’s teaching that deeply resonated with me, perhaps because it’s something I strive to do in my own classrooms. I am an English professor at the University of Maryland. The intellectual discipline of reading literature in a serious way can be intimidating, so I have always tried to cultivate a light, relaxed atmosphere in the classroom in the hope that students will learn more by worrying less and not noticing how hard they are working. Similarly, Joe’s insistent playfulness helps to demystify the discipline he teaches – which can also be intimidating -- and allows students to enter into it in their own way and at their own level. “Thanks for playing,” he often says at the end of class. Those words never fail to bring a smile to my face, but they’ve also encouraged me to feel comfortable trying to learn new and challenging skills. Fall out of a pose? No big deal! We’re just playing! Try it again!

That spirit of play guided me toward a second and equally valuable lesson, which was to love and honor the body I have, to appreciate what it can do now, and to stop berating myself for what it can’t (yet) do. My prolonged sedentary period had left me feeling alienated from a body I didn’t like or recognize. Yoga helped me let go of self-loathing and treat myself with a compassion that had eluded me for many years. Love and compassion, not disgust, were what finally got me, in January of 2011, to go to a meeting, step on a scale, and say, “OK, I am ready to do something different.”

Finally and perhaps most importantly, yoga gave me practice in mindfulness, which proved to be invaluable as I worked to cultivate and sustain new and better habits in relation to food and activity. I realized that my weight gain had a lot to do with the fact that I had just stopped paying attention to how much I was eating and how little I was moving. Food tastes better and is more satisfying when you pay attention to every bite, no matter how simply or sensibly it’s prepared. Mindfulness has meant that I experience my new way of eating as the opposite of the deprivations we associate with dieting. I have been cooking up a storm since I started losing weight, and I’ve enjoyed every moment in the kitchen and at the table – as has my well-fed partner, by the way!

Playfulness, compassion, and mindfulness: These are three lessons I learned on the mat that have helped me transform my body and my attitude fairly dramatically in the past year. You may not see me in an infomercial, but you will definitely see me in the studio, working hard but happily and with deep gratitude to continue this extraordinary process of learning. Thanks to everyone at Willow Street for playing with me and teaching me so well.

Remembering Ruth Stone

Ruth Stone, who died November 19 at the age of 96, was a friend of ours. By friend we don't mean we spoke on the phone every day or spent summers at her charmingly decrepit Vermont farm house. Indeed, we hadn't spoken in several years before the National Book Award-winning poet passed away. The friendship we claim is rooted in the depth of our affections, not the amount of time we spent with a fine poet and a feisty woman who toiled in obscurity for decades. We loved Ruth, and she loved all the denizens of Roxie's World.

To Ruth, everything on earth was intensely alive -- full of meaning and worthy of recognition. Thus, in "Vegetables II," she says of an eggplant she contemplates eating, "We put our heads together. / You are so smooth and cool and purple, / I say. Which of us will it be?" In the early days of their friendship, when the Moms were cat lesbians, Ruth would inscribe copies of her books to them and their cats, Spike and Lily, illustrated with adorable little cat cartoons down by her signature. When I came on the scene in the mid-90s, Ruth laughed uproariously at the wild antics of my exuberant puppyhood, but, as the photo anchored to this paragraph shows, she could also calm me down enough to curl up and enjoy some poetry. (Ruth is reading a volume by another of our beloved poet-friends, Alicia Ostriker, in this picture.)

Goose first met Ruth at an epic lady poet-palooza held in May of 1986 to commemorate the centennial of Emily Dickinson's death. Upon that occasion, Ruth spoke movingly of Dickinson's astonishing originality and of the conditions in which her poetry was produced. Much of what she said of Dickinson might have been said of Ruth, too:

When I read her poems, these original, hard as steel poems, and I feel the intensity in every word, words used in new ways, bent to her will, then I think she was self-sufficient, an artist whose mind was never asleep, whose concentration recreated, made fresh all that she saw and felt, as though she saw through the ordinary barriers, not as a visionary, but as a laser beam. But when I think of how little recognition she received in her lifetime, and how devastated she must have felt, though her fierce pride concealed it, then I am angry and sad. Yes, a great artist knows and can work in almost total isolation, but it is a terrible thing to have to do. The original mind seems eccentric, even crazy sometimes. In her cryptic inventions, she broke the tiresome mold of American poetry. We still stand among those shards and splinters.

The original mind seems eccentric, even crazy sometimes. Oh, maybe just a little. Moose's favorite Ruth story involves an afternoon in the late-80s when Goose was at school and she and Ruth were hanging out with the cats in the apartment they lived in back then. Moose was supposed to be working on her still unfinished dissertation. Ruth was supposed to be resting to get ready for an evening reading on campus. At some point, Moose tuned in to the sound of Ruth's voice. Out in the living room, she was muttering something about death. "Oh, dammit. Oh, death," or words to that effect. When Moose ventured out to see what was happening, Ruth was sitting on the couch staring at her hands. "Ruth?" Moose shyly inquired, for she barely knew her elderly houseguest. "Everything okay?" Ruth turned to her, with her large brown eyes open wide, and declared, "Death is after me. Ever since that car accident. I knew it. Dammit." "Uh, okay, Ruth. What makes you think that?"

At that point, America's most obscure great poet held out her hands so Moose could see them. They were bleeding. Not from any visible wound, mind you -- Just bleeding. Two thoughts immediately popped into Moose's dissertation-enfeebled mind. The first was something like, Cool, stigmata -- We can turn this joint into a religious shrine and retire our grad school debts by charging the pilgrims to get a look at Ruth's hands! The second was no less selfish but a little more paranoid: Oh, great. I'll be a footnote in the next edition of the Norton Anthology of Lit by Women: Stone bled to death while Moose agonized over her paradigm-shifting analysis of Sarah Orne Jewett's "An Autumn Holiday."

Then Moose got a grip. She asked Ruth a few questions and quickly ascertained that the poet, lacking health insurance, had likely been overdosing on aspirin to treat neck pain from a recent car accident. She had also been subsisting mostly on candy bars during the long bus trip from Vermont to Maryland. Moose figured the bleeding had to be a side effect of the aspirin and the diet. She fixed Ruth a sandwich and they spent the rest of the afternoon playing with the cats. That night's reading was a spectacular success. Strange postscript to the story: The Moms had a ratty old cloth couch back in those days. Ruth's hands left a couple of blood stains on the couch that never faded. Swear to dog, kids, those stains looked as fresh and bright on the day that couch was finally hauled out to the curb as they did on a sunny afternoon when America's most obscure great poet scared the bejesus out of a befuddled grad student.

Here are Ruth and Moose on a bench outside the Folger Shakespeare Library during that same visit. They had gone there with Goose to see an amazing exhibit of Marianne Moore materials from the Rosenbach Museum and Library's Moore archive:

And here are Ruth and Goose on the same bench:

Oh, dammit. Oh, death. Oh, dammit, indeed. Damn you, death, for taking those we love from our midsts. Damn you for leaving us with nothing but echoes, shadows, fading images of nearly forgotten selves.

But thank you, Ruth, for the gift of your friendship and the consolation of your far from ordinary words. Thank you and dogspeed.

Weighty Matters, Again

Suddenly this whole body politic thing has gotten kind of literal. A couple of weeks ago, the nation's pundits briefly obsessed over whether New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was too fat to be president, for which they were roundly -- get it? -- chastised by this here. blog. Now, Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill  is getting body-policed from the other direction. McCaskill recently took off fifty pounds and used Twitter -- cleverly, in our opinion -- as part of her weight-loss plan. She announced to her nearly 60,000 followers in May what her goals were and used the social media tool as a means of holding herself publicly accountable to them. On October 8, McCaskill proudly tweeted that she had reached her goal weight. Thursday in Jezebel, Erin Gloria Ryan declares herself "happy for [McCaskill] for doing what she set out to do," but says that she finds it "depressing that the standard by which women measure our fitness is still the number on a scale." Ryan continues:

It's dismaying that we still feel like we need to announce shamefully to the world when we believe that we have become too large, and then return to proudly tell world when we become tinier, and that we reflexively feel compelled to tell other women when we've noticed that they have shrunk. Stop it, ladies. Stop it right this second.

The headline on the column is, "Can We Please Stop Setting Weight Loss Goals?"

Ryan makes a good point. "Weight alone is not an indicator of health." True. There are plenty of other numbers one ought to consider -- blood pressure, cholesterol, glucose levels -- to get an accurate picture of overall health. It's also true that the kind of public scrutiny of her body that McCaskill invited is a double-edged sword. Such scrutiny and the harsh set of judgments that goes along with it is, as Ryan notes, a major source of the pressure women feel "to become ever smaller."

As you might suspect, however, the Recently Overweight Person of Roxie's World does not find Sen. McCaskill's story of public, socially mediated weight loss depressing or troubling, no matter how much she might agree with aspects of Ryan's analysis. Moose, who at times has used this blog as an embarrassing or inspiring (po-tay-toh, po-tah-toh) public record of her own adventures in re-contouring a middle-aged body, had this to say in response to the story: "60,000 followers? Little Lord Jeebus, I'd kill for 60,000 followers! Apparently, senators are connectivity nodes, whereas English profs are just, um, nerds."

Here's the thing, kids: The number on the scale is one among many numbers you should consider when you are evaluating your health and fitness, but sometimes, you know, losing weight is a reasonable goal, no matter how steeped the culture is in misogyny and fat-shame. If you set your sights on losing weight, you should use whatever tools are available to help you do so. And if you are a woman and a public figure, your body is going to get scrutinized and analyzed and judged every day of your life no matter what you do. (See, for example, Clinton, Hillary Rodham: cankles, cleavage, hair, weight, wrinkles.) We admire Sen. McCaskill for using social media and her status as a public figure to help her achieve a goal and to frame proactively the story of her weight loss rather than soldiering along on her treadmill waiting for the inevitable questions and comments to start. Hers was a risky strategy that could easily have backfired if she hadn't succeeded or if she were less adept in the art of the Twitters. She'd have been labeled a fat old broad trying desperately to look cool. In comments to CBS News, McCaskill shows that she was well aware of the risks but also savvy about how Twitter fits into a postmodern pol's communications strategy -- and her Lifestyle Adjustment Program:

My Twitter account -- I look at it as a way for people in Missouri to see the whole picture. I tweet about my kids. Yesterday, I tweeted about how happy I was that my daughter said she had cleaned her apartment all day. I think it's important for people to see that I've got the same kind of problems and challenges that everybody else does and, obviously, for a woman in her 50s, figuring out how to stay in shape with a really hectic schedule is a big part of everybody's daily struggle in my state and, I think, all across the country.

Along the way, McCaskill posted clever tweets about her progress, including a dramatic announcement about having divorced bread and pasta, which inspired her legions of followers to weigh in, as it were, with menu suggestions, advice, and helpful reinforcement. The senator still hopes to rekindle her relationship with carbohydrates, thinking it might work out on an occasional rather than a daily basis as she shifts her focus to maintaining her weight loss.

To which the Recently Overweight Person of Roxie's World replied, in precisely 140 characters:

@clairecmc, I recently broke up w/ potatoes, but carbs, in moderation, CAN fit into a sensible diet. Meet my new pal, butternut squash. Yum!

A hearty PAWS UP to you, Sen. McCaskill. The women of Roxie's World salute your effort, your good humor, and your smart use of social media as a way of sharing your experience and crowd-sourcing the challenges of eating well and getting fit while working hard for the fortunate citizens of the Show-Me State. We wish you well in your ongoing commitment and sincerely hope that Santa brings us a treadmill to aid in our own efforts to balance health with busyness.

What do you think, kids? Are we missing something in not being depressed or concerned by McCaskill's story, blinded by self-interest as we may be on this issue? Is Ryan fair in raining on the parade by harping on the compulsion women (and, sometimes, non-women) feel to publicly declare that they have become too large and then proudly announce that they are thinner, better, healthier people? Is there a way to acknowledge and address that problem without dissing McCaskill -- or, you know, my humble, recently overweight typist?

As always, darlings, we eagerly await and rely upon your wisdom. Meantime, someone is off for a quick run before a meeting and a trip to Baltimore to see a few thousand friends (including, at long last, Tenured Radical, with whom the Moms shall [decadently!] dine this evening). A happy Friday to you and yours. Peace out.

Better Homes?

(Photo Credit: Moose, 10/8/11, in the Land of the Moosians.)

Apologies for the prolonged radio silence, kids. It's been a ridiculously busy week in Roxie's World. It's also been a stressful, emotionally draining week for Moose in particular. She spent last weekend in her native state, working with her three siblings to get the Mother of the Moosians ready to transition from independent living in Indiana to assisted living in Michigan, close to the Little Sister of the Moosians. MOTM turned 80 this summer and outfoxed lung cancer earlier this year, but she has short-term memory impairments that make it hard for her to remember little things like when the movers are coming and bigger things like, oh, participating in the decision to move to Michigan.

We'll pause briefly while you apply your considerable brain power to imagining some of what we are not saying here about time, change, the delicate dance of family relationships, the terror in the eyes of someone increasingly trapped in an archipelago of disconnected moments. When are they coming? Who will take me? Where is my medicine? Would you like that necklace? Why are you packing the silver away? When are they coming? Who will take me . . . ?

Perhaps a longer pause is in order. My typist is weary. Her heart is full. In her head, she hears the aching tenderness of Chris Colfer's cover of "I Want to Hold Your Hand," which Glee's Kurt sang last season when his father, his only surviving parent, had a heart attack.

When are they coming?

The cookbook in the photo above transitioned, too, making its way from a shelf in MOTM's kitchen to one in Roxie's World. This was the cookbook of Moose's childhood, the battered tome that figured into a 2009 post on the culinary history of the Moms and the United States. A close look at the book's helpful guide to meal planning perhaps explains why Moose found it necessary to break up with potatoes as part of her recent Lifestyle Adjustment Program. You'll notice there ain't a lot of whole-grain variety in the list of starchy foods in that third column in from the left:

Moose has agreed to take on the role of family archivist, because that is what English profs and history geeks do in their families, being useless when it comes to things like managing finances and figuring out which asthma inhalers are full and which are empty. She came home with several recipe boxes and books, including one from her maternal grandmother that goes back to at least 1937. She also is getting custody of file boxes full of family photos, letters, and documents. She already has her parents' college yearbooks, her grandmother's high school diploma, and her father's certificate of baptism. Still to come are the scrapbooks she loved to look at as a child, mostly because they included the earliest photographs of her own tiny self, cradled in the fleshy arms of that same grandmother who graduated from high school in 1923 for "intellectual attainments and correct deportment."

Having spent part of the winter of 2010 digitizing me after my untimely demise, Moose now seems on track to digitize the entire famille Moosianne. Assuming she isn't overcome by the dust or doesn't end up lost in a labyrinth of words, images, and memories. Which is, you know, pretty likely. Stay tuned.

When are they coming? When are they coming? Soon, Mama, soon, and I promise it will be all right. I know it's scary, but we've taken care of everything. Before you know it, you'll be settled into the new place, and everything will be fine.

When . . . ?

Body Matters: Short Takes

As we ease our way back toward serious blogging, we thought we'd call your attention to a few stories that caught our attention in between ocean swims and fine meals and beach reading of books Moose emphatically decided not to include in the trans lit course she'll be teaching this term.

The Aging, Vegan Ex-Presidential Body: Bill Clinton turned 65 the other day, which prompted a spate of stories on the Big Dawg's impressive efforts to manage his heart disease through diet and exercise. The former president, who has a family history of seriously bad tickers, had a quadruple bypass in 2004 and angioplasty in 2010. Since then, working with Dr. Dean Ornish, he has dropped 20 pounds  and become mostly vegan, though he confesses to CNN's Sanjay Gupta to having a bite -- one bite, he says, with a wag of his famous finger -- of turkey at Thanksgiving. Moose liked this story because she is delighted to claim her favorite living former president as a comrade in Lifestyle Adjustment. She also thinks it's good for the country to have to reckon with seeing the nation's most famous devotee of Big Macs and Krispy Kremes as a poster boy for clean living and healthy eating. Moose imagines she would choose death over veganism, because she isn't sure she could live in a world without eggs, but she was endowed by her creator with a ridiculously healthy heart and so has never had to face that choice. Mostly, though, we like this story because it offers further proof that we just can't stop thinking about Bill Clinton's body. We need to know what he is ingesting, how he is looking -- fabulous! -- and how he is feeling (more energetic than ever!). Clinton's successor in the Oval Office also turned 65 earlier this summer, and the AP story focused on the thousands of virtual birthday greetings he received through a campaign orchestrated by his wife. No one, it seems, wants to think about Shrub's aging body or what's going into it. I know: Quelle surprise. And we sincerely apologize for putting that image into your head so early in the work week.

The Professorial Body: Duke's Cathy Davidson, who is garnering raves for her new book, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn, did a marvelous blog post a couple of weeks ago on a Pilates class that resonated with some of our musings here about yoga, bodies in middle age, and minds/bodies in techno-culture. The post advocates balance, breathing, and compulsory dance movement in schools and workplaces as a necessary counter to the seated life of the mental worker staring at the screen. It offers compelling observations about kids' relationships to their bodies and movement in an age in which bike helmets and pain avoidance constrain them in both body and soul. It even offers a couple of simple exercises to foster alignment and deep breathing. Read the post. Try the exercises. And get Davidson's book, for dog's sake, because everyone else you know is getting it and you don't want to be out of the loop. We've got Now You See It loaded up on Kindles and iPads throughout Roxie's World and can hardly wait to read what this passionate yet practical digital visionary has to say about the world in which we live, think, work, and breathe.

The Lesbian Body: Christina Santiago was 29 years old, a lesbian, a native New Yorker living in Chicago, and manager for the Lesbian Community Care Project at the Howard Brown Health Center. She was killed in a freak accident at the Indiana State Fair on August 13. Four other people died, and Santiago's partner, Alisha Brennon, was also seriously injured when a concert stage collapsed in a strong thunder storm just before the group Sugarland was to begin a show. The story caught our eye in part because the tragedy occurred in Moose's home state but also because of allegations that began circulating on the queer interwebs that the Marion County coroner's office refused to release Santiago's body to Brennon for burial because of the state's DOMA law. First reported by Bil Browning on The Bilerico Project, the charge went viral when Dan Savage wrapped it up in a fiery denunciation of how such laws "serve to torment and persecute gay people at the most trying moments of their lives."

The problem, as it turned out, is that the story wasn't true. The critically injured Brennon had not contacted the coroner's office and appears not to have been treated disrespectfully by anybody. Her partner's body was released to an aunt of Santiago's who was listed as her next of kin. Santiago's funeral and burial were in the Bronx, but those closest to Santiago and Brennon suggest matters were handled amicably and sensitively. Brennon is still hospitalized but seems to be recovering. Bil Browning posted a lengthy apology for his poor judgment and reporting, admitting that his "history of dealing with homophobic behavior by Indiana office holders" likely predisposed him to believe the story without sufficiently verifying it. In his retraction, Savage noted that, "These sorts of things have happened -- surviving gay spouses barred from bedsides, not allowed to retrieve their partner's remains, barred from funerals by hostile family-of-origin members -- but it didn't happen this time."

Savage is right, of course. Such things do happen, and we need to work hard to reduce the likelihood of their happening by securing full legal equality for LGBT relationships. That will require overturning the federal Defense of Marriage Act and every mini-DOMA on the books in states from sea to shining sea. Bil Browning is to be commended for his thorough and thoughtful self-criticism, but we can also learn something from his mistake, from his -- and our -- willingness to believe that a low-level functionary in a coroner's office would see it as his or her job to enforce a state DOMA in such a cruel fashion. (Since Santiago and Brennon were residents of neighboring Illinois, Brennon could presumably have claimed her partner's body under that state's domestic partnership law.)

Again: Such things do happen, but that doesn't mean we can assume they've happened without fully and fairly investigating the claim. Browning didn't try to speak with Brennon because she was still in intensive care and "it seemed crass to call her for a statement." Fair enough, but shouldn't the fact that Brennon was in intensive care have made him doubt that she was in a position to call the coroner's office to try to claim Santiago's body? That it apparently didn't is powerful evidence of how strongly inclined he was to believe what he was hearing without fully corroborating the charge. Yes, Indiana is full of homophobes in high places and lacks the most basic protections for LGBT citizens and relationships, but that doesn't justify jumping to conclusions and circulating falsehoods about particular offices or officeholders. Such mistakes don't serve the cause of advancing LGBT rights, as Browning knows. They also don't honor the memory of Christina Santiago or comfort her grieving partner, family, and friends.

Attention, please: This brief rant has been brought to you by Moose, who feels bad for circulating Savage's post about the Marion County coroner's office on her Facebook page without independently checking out the story. You heard it here first, folks: Not everything you read on the interwebs is true. Be skeptical. Be fair. Be thorough.

RIP Christina Santiago. Your memory will endure, and your vital work will go on. Our condolences to those who loved you and healing thoughts to Alisha Brennon for a full and swift recovery.

Peace out.

Daring to Eat a Peach (Cobbler)

(Photo Credit, Food Prep, and Point Calculation: Moose, 8/2/11)

Longtime readers know how much we love the peach cobbler recipe from The Silver Palate Cookbook. You might -- or might not -- have been wondering how we were going to get through peach season without indulging in a treat so delicious Moose says it produces a response similar to Meg Ryan's famous scene in When Harry Met Sally. The first few weeks of the season, Moose had been experimenting with LAP-approved crisp recipes that were delicious and happy-making, if not quite, well, orgasmic. What can I say, people? Quaker oats and agave nectar are super cute but not, you know, sexy.

This past Sunday, though, the peaches were so stupendously beautiful that Moose began to dream about her old flame, peach cobbler, the one with two-thirds of a cup of actual sugar, not to mention white flour and vegetable shortening! And -- here's the truly orgasmic part -- topped off with whipped cream (right there!) spiked with peach (oooooh!) brandy (yes!). Goose seemed to be thinking about it, too, and got a little misty-eyed when Moose indicated it might not fit into the household's new food plan. "Oh," Goose said, "OK." [Translation: I have been with you for 27 years and know I need to express support for your ludicrous position while also conveying the slightest bit of disappointment. That way, when your position shifts -- and I know it will --, I get points for being willing to forego pleasure for your sake -- and I get the cobbler, too!]

Goose got her cobbler -- and several relationship points for epic forbearance over the course of the past six months. She's been a trooper, but how, you may or may not be wondering, did Moose come around to the idea of making -- and eating -- a dish that contains all those sinfully delicious ingredients? Is the virtue binge over? Has she fallen off the wagon and returned to the kind of mindless, decadent eating that got her into her middle-aged funk?

Hardly, darlings. Moose woke up Tuesday morning, stepped on the scale, and saw that she was still losing weight rather than merely maintaining it, which is the goal now. This whole clean living thing can get a little addictive, you know, especially for a girl who finds it hard to believe that what she sees in the mirror is real. Anyhoo, she came downstairs, used her LAP's recipe builder to calculate the points per serving for the glorious peach cobbler, and sent Goose to the store to get heavy cream. "I love you, honey," she said, "and there is room in my life for an 11-point treat. Get asparagus, too. We won't be having carbs at dinner tonight."

So, see, it wasn't a lapse or a sin or an instance of being bad. It was a conscious choice, an instance of eating mindfully and well. Resulting in a happy little food orgasm and a week's worth of motivation to keep racking up activity points. Step aside, kid. That is MY treadmill for the next 45 minutes. I've got a date with the sweetest cobbler on dog's earth, and you're in my way!

Feel free to weigh in, as it were, with your own summer food delights. What are the treats that get you, um, going?

By the way, if you missed it, WaPo had a couple of good pieces on aging well in yesterday's "Health and Science" section. Here's one on a 62-year-old guy who has stayed remarkably young looking just by being consistent in his commitment to a pretty sane and simple set of health and fitness habits. One expert quoted in the story estimates that after 50 how you age is about 30% a matter of genetics and 70% a matter of lifestyle and behavior. The good news here is that moderation works. You don't have to work out seven days a week and forego booze and, you know, peach cobbler in order to live long and well. Moderate exercise and a diet low in saturated fats will do the trick. Oh, and not smoking, of course, but you knew that. Here's another article on older athletes that focuses on injuries and how to avoid them. Also helpful.

In other news, the United States narrowly avoided fiscal disaster yesterday, but no one seems too happy with how things worked out. Gosh, kids, do you think this deal would taste better if we could throw a dollop of whipped cream spiked with peach brandy on it? Yeah, me neither.

Peace out, my pretties, and may your day be sweet as an August peach.

Blogger Babes Bare All!

Apparently, it's Show-and-Tell Day in the academic feminist blogosphere. Missed the memo? Consider this your invitation to participate!

Our dear friend Historiann, whom we have never met in the dimension commonly referred to as Real Life, posted photographs this morning of herself and her husband frolicking in the Colorado wilderness. These are, as far as we know, the first images Historiann's readers have ever seen of the Real People behind the blog. To our surprise and considerable disappointment, Historiann is not wearing chaps or brandishing a lasso in the picture. On the other hand, the head-and-shoulders shot proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that our favorite tenured cowgirl has a very fine neck and a regal way of looking at a camera, which somehow does not surprise us. Think Audrey Hepburn, only outdoorsy-er.

Not to be outdone by our blog pal's sudden penchant for self-revelation, the Beach Blanket Bingo players of Roxie's World are pleased to offer this bodacious image of Moose last week in South Haven, MI, looking for all the world as if she is ready for the swimsuit competition in next year's Ms. Blogosphere pageant:

(Photo Credit: Little Sister of the Moosians, 7/4/11)

Yes, as a matter of fact, we have lost our minds. It could be the heat has gotten to us. It's hot as heck here in the national capital area today. We thought this photo might help local readers cool off. Also, we thought you'd get a kick out of seeing the reading glasses placed strategically in front of the giant sunglasses, not to mention the kind of high-octane reading material Moose takes with her to the beach. (Look, she had her Kindle with her, too, and actually read a screen or two of Sherry Turkle's Alone Together before nodding off in the sun!) We also felt it was important to immortalize the ridiculous floral bathing suit Moose was forced to buy out in New Mexico when she showed up at a hot springs spa that used to be sex-segregated and clothing-optional. That she is still wearing the suit nearly two years later proves that cheapness triumphs over vanity in la famillle Moosianne.

Mostly, though, we offer this shockingly revealing image as a way of commemorating the six-month anniversary of Moose's Lifestyle Adjustment Program. It's true. Six months ago today she walked into a meeting, stepped on a scale, and made a commitment to eating less, moving more, and feeling better. Tomorrow, she will walk back into a meeting, step on that same scale, and declare herself on maintenance. An important part of the journey will be over. A victory will be (sensibly) celebrated, and a new stage, more challenging in many ways for Moose than the effort to take off weight, will begin. To mark that transition, we offer a photograph, not to brag, shame, or even necessarily inspire, but simply to acknowledge and to remember: For one feisty middle-aged broad, this is what feeling better looks like.

Peace out, darlings. Be well.

The Party's Over

(Photo Credit: Moose, 7/10/11)

We don't usually title Moose's humble photographic efforts, to which this blog's loyal readers are regularly subjected, but The Party's Over seems an apt name for this lucky shot of Ms. Ruby mesmerized by the balloons left over from the 80th birthday bash thrown for the Mother of the Moosians on Saturday. Ruby bounded out of her mobile home on Sunday morning and went straight to the festive bunch of slowly sinking balloons in the living room. She watched them for awhile, then entertained herself and assorted caffeinating Moosians by experimenting with various ways of attacking them, including pouncing, swatting, and snapping at them. Eventually, some sensible person intervened to put the balloons out of reach, concerned that the embodied dog of Roxie's World might injure herself if one of them popped and forced her to ingest an inordinate amount of helium. Just in case the video below, which by some strange coinkydink Moose had stumbled across late Saturday night, is not an accurate depiction of what happens when a cute little fox terrier is forced to ingest an inordinate amount of helium (trigger warning for extreme ridiculousness and [we hope] possible fakery):



Ruby and the Moms tore themselves away from the balloons and the family and hit the road at high noon yesterday. They made it back to Roxie's World shortly after 10 PM, just in time to unpack, nuke a couple of low-fat frozen dinners, and accidentally catch the last few minutes of The Marriage Ref. Moose's verdict on the show? If the Defense of Marriage Act can't protect us from this bizarre monstrosity, what freakin' good is it? Srsly, people, if this is what civilization has come to, I think we should demand a do-over.

So, the pack is back. The trip was in every way delightful. Moose worried about gaining weight simply because she crossed the threshold of an ice cream parlor at one point and stood down wind of a heaping vat of mac 'n cheese at another. She ended up losing a couple of pounds, of course, and so is eagerly anticipating an official transition to maintenance later this week. Stay tuned for the further adventures of Moose 2.0: A Less Portly Dyke Than She Used to Be!

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the blogosphere, a smart young whippersnapper calling himself Will Danger went to see Next to Normal at KenCen and wrote a fine long post exploring what the show has to say about the affective trajectory of grief. And Historiann asks some timely questions about whether Skype interviews will eventually (or soon?) replace the meat markets centralized forums for academic interviewing that the conventions of the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association have become in recent decades. Go read them, darlings, while we knock the sand out of our shoes and try to remember what exactly it was we intended to accomplish this summer. Oh, and if you really need to hear the song our post title put into your sensitive little head, click here and let Doris Day soothe your disappointed, dissipated, party-loving soul. Peace out.

Breaking Up With Potatoes

The incredible shrinking typist of Roxie's World was disappointed but not surprised to read the news last week from a Harvard School of Public Health study suggesting that what you eat matters as much as how much you eat when it comes to maintaining a healthy weight over the long haul. That concern looms large for Moose as she gets close to the magical moment in her Lifestyle Adjustment Program when she shifts her focus from trying to take off weight to trying to keep it off. Forever. (For those of you who have been following the progress of our very own Biggest Loser, Moose has dropped 43 pounds since January. Of 2011. Yes, she is proud. And feeling really, really good.)

Anyhoo, the Harvard study analyzed "data collected over 20 years from more than 120,000 U.S. men and women in their 30s, 40s and 50s" and came to the conclusion that the mantra Moose has been repeating to herself over and over for the past five and a half months -- Eat less, move more, and you will lose weight -- is kinda true but also kinda simplistic. Yes, calories are important, so paying attention to how many you consume and how many you burn still matters. The study shows, however, that "some foods clearly cause people to put on more weight than others, perhaps because of their chemical makeup and how our bodies process them."

“All foods are not equal, and just eating in moderation is not enough," said Dariush Mozaffarian of the Harvard School of Public Health, who led the study published in last week's’s edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

The leading culprit among foods in terms of the slow, incremental weight gains that so often add up to middle-aged girth? Poor Mr. Potato, of course. Rob Stein explains the sad news in his report on the study in WaPo:

Every additional serving of potatoes people added to their regular diet each day made them gain about a pound over four years. It was no surprise that french fries and potato chips are especially fattening. But the study found that even mashed, baked or boiled potatoes were unexpectedly plumping, perhaps because of their effect on the hormone insulin.

Stein's next paragraph focuses on the better news from the study about particular foods that seem to help keep weight off, should that happen to be your goal:

[W]hile it was no shock that every added serving of fruits and vegetables prevented between a quarter- and a half-pound gain, other foods were strikingly good at helping people stay slim. Every extra serving of nuts, for example, prevented more than a half-pound of weight gain. And perhaps the biggest surprise was yogurt, every serving of which kept off nearly a pound over four years.

Moose's first reaction to the study was to get a little wistful about her lifelong relationship with the lowly, lovely spud. Oh, potatoes, she might have said, if she were in the habit of speaking to vegetables, which, we are pleased to report, she is not, I love you so, from the bottom of my German-American heart. I remember every french fry I ate with every single Big Boy sandwich of my misspent Midwestern youth. I remember every barrel of Charles Chips I ever curled up with in front of the TV for long hours of Dark Shadows and The Secret Storm. I remember every hour I spent in the kitchen with my mother, grating piles of you to be turned into hash browns, nestled on a plate next to giant sausages. You were the faithful companions of my peripatetic childhood, the ones who whispered in my ear that food was my friend and overeating my birthright as a middle-class American kid. You were the cheap staple of grad-school vegetarianism, and later, the glorious gratin dauphinois the lord clearly meant to accompany Julia Child's beef bourguignon. Oh, potatoes, I can't even say that I wish I could quit you. It appears, however, that I should.

Her second reaction was to look around the kitchen and get a grip, realizing she had already quit potatoes, mostly, months ago, and was getting along quite well without them. Oh, nuts! Oh, yogurt! Oh, couscous! she rhapsodized. You are my new best friends, and you are better to me than potatoes ever were. With you I feel light and strong and full of energy. I have no cravings, no hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. As dog is my witness, with your help, I swear, I'll never eat potatoes again!

Well, it's possible she didn't entirely have her grip, but you know how Moose is. In any case, kids, the results of the Harvard study are worth pondering, even if you aren't prepared to go all nutri-Nazi in an effort to reach or maintain a healthy weight. The study's release follows by just a couple of weeks the launch of the USDA's latest effort to encourage healthier eating, the MyPlate campaign, which replaces the dopey food pyramid that no one ever understood or used. A WaPo story on the MyPlate rollout is here. A nice history of government nutrition guidelines, first issued in 1916, is here.

It's interesting to note that one of the government's earliest food-related initiatives was the Clean Plate Club, launched in 1917 to encourage citizens not to waste food due to limited supply during World War I. The Clean Plate Club was terminated after the war but was restarted in 1947, when food was again scarce at the end of the Depression and World War II. Moose swears there was a Clean Plate Club in her elementary school in the mid-60s in southern Indiana and blames it entirely for her inability to leave a morsel of food on her plate, ever. Goose says there was no such program in her school -- and feels no compunction at all about leaving the table with half a meal left on her plate, which may or may not prove Moose's point. Note, too, on the poster for the Clean Plate Club anchored to this paragraph that potatoes are prominent on the list of foods citizens are encouraged to eat more of as part of the war effort. Moose insists that potato-eating was still considered patriotic in southern Indiana in the 60s. Goose cannot explain why Texas appears not to have been on board with the program.

Consider this an open invitation to share stories about food, family, ideology, and your own adventures in embodiment. Was there a Clean Plate Club in your school growing up? Do you have vivid memories of being kept at the table until you had consumed everything on your plate? Have you broken up with potatoes -- or made peace with them or some other food you have loved too much? Do you think the Tea Party will manage to demonize MyPlate.gov as yet another nanny-government overreach that interferes with Americans' god-given right to have fries with that, dagnabbit? Is this blog successfully avoiding fat-shaming as we search for ways to write about these issues? We sincerely hope so, but let us know what you think.

Have at it, darlings. My skinny-a$$ed typist has to get up off it and go for a little run. Peace out, and have a healthy tomorrow. ;-)

Act Your Age

Lede of the Day: She is 74 years old, and she is ripped.

Photo of the Day (Or, Visual Proof that the Lede of the Day Is Fully Justified):

(Photo Credit: Marvin Joseph, Washington Post. Wa Po caption: [Ernestine] Shepherd instructs a body-building class in Baltimore. 5/29/11. Full photo gallery here.)

Tomorrow's Wa Po magazine has a cluster of features on women and aging, including DeNeen Brown's profile of Ernestine Shepherd, who was a self-described couch potato into her mid-50s, when she and her late sister Mildred started working out together in response to weight gain. Twenty years later, Shepherd holds the Guinness World Record as the oldest female bodybuilder in the world and tells classes full of huffing and puffing students decades younger than she is that, "Age is nothing but a number." Point taken, girlfriend.

Read the story before you tuck into that vat of Memorial Day potato salad you're planning to devour this weekend. It's mostly feel-good, female-affirmational stuff, but a) what's wrong with that? and b) the story also has the poignant subtext of the relationship between the two sisters. Of the other pieces in the cluster, the commentaries on aging while female by four women of different ages (the youngest being 33) are a little too full of lines like "Groomed eyebrows are an absolute key" to be worth our time, but, hey, wevs, wimmin. Naomi Wolf weighs in with an essay aimed at demolishing the myth that women experience aging as a process of existential loss tied to changes in physical appearance by asserting that she and the women she admires are doing just fine and the men in her social set who bring much younger trophy chicks to dinner parties are looked upon with pity rather than envy these days. 'K, Naomi, thanks for clearing that up for us.

Ernestine Shepherd, we do hereby declare you our Feisty Old Broad of the Holiday Weekend. Thank you for your chiseled abs and your sweaty persistence and your dedication to the dream you shared with your beloved sister. Long may you run -- and lift and squat and sculpt and teach. PAWS UP to you from the hard-working, lifestyle-adjusting middle-aged broads of Roxie's World.

(Photo Credit: Marvin Joseph, Washington Post. Wa Po caption: [Ernestine Shepherd] runs at least 10 miles every day in Druid Hill Park in Baltimore.)

Peace out, darlings. Wherever you go and whatever you do, may the official start of your summer be sun-drenched and pleasure-filled.

Love, Virtually

Today is Goose's birthday. She is spending it, as people tend to do these days, sitting at her computer being swept up in a tidal wave of greetings and good wishes from friends all over the planet by way of Facebook. It's an amazing thing, really. Every time you look at the screen, someone else has tapped out a quick huzzah, a kind thought, a slightly bawdy bon mot -- pals, colleagues, students, nephews, long-lost classmates still deep in the heart of Texas. You bask in it. You respond as you can, happily wearing your fingers out in the effort to acknowledge acknowledgment.

Meanwhile, in Nebraska, a friend has euthanized a beloved dog today, which we also learned through Facebook. Moose paused in the birthday doings to tap out a brief but heartfelt condolence message, knowing how much such messages have meant to her on certain difficult days in the recent past. Birth, death, love, loss, celebration, sorrow: The meaningful moments and events of our real lives are now habitually shared and extended into the virtual spaces of Facebook, Twitter, Blogger (when it's working), and other social networks. Is this a good thing, a bad thing, or just a thing -- a fact of life, like weather and furloughs?

So much of the analysis of the social effects of new media technologies seems to fall on an emotional continuum from mild alarm to flat-out panic. As in: Uh oh, kids like robots. What if they start preferring them to the company of humans? Or: OMG, the computers are taking over! Someday soon, there'll be no need for humans at all! And of course: Holy crap! We are all going to be unemployable because eventually every single one of us will have been photographed drunk in a pirate costume and we will never -- NEVER! -- be able to get those photos down off the Intertoobz!

Meanwhile, down in Durham, geek gal (and Facebook friend) Cathy Davidson went to the farmer's market this morning, took a photo of a garden shed being turned into a tea house, posted the photo to Facebook -- and then wrote a lovely little blog post that inspired the thoughts in this here little post. Davidson muses on the question of whether life has a become a reality show, what with all this techno-mediated sharing, all this instant narrativization, the steady -- incessant! -- stream of call and response. Davidson decides that, on the whole, the sociality of Facebook, despite valid concerns about privacy and the marketing of data, is a good rather than a bad thing, a satisfying and genuine way of connecting. She relishes the snippets she gets of friends' lives and the opportunities to share emotions and experiences across distance. We love that, too -- the ranting and the raving, the silliness and the sorrow, the photos of animals and food and parties and trips and kids and projects and flowers and funny signs and departed loved ones. It's crazy, yes, but it is also glorious, and we love it as Clarissa Dalloway loved "the triumph and the jingle" of a busy London street on a fresh morning in June.

That may seem an extravagant comparison, but what the heck. It's a holiday in Roxie's World, so extravagance is the order of the day. Have a spectacular weekend, actually and virtually. And here, for the Facebook haters among you, is a photograph, already shared via FB, of the astonishing cake Goose's students made to honor her birthday. Yep, that is a chocolate cake in the shape of a Lady Terp, and the number 21 suggests it's forward Tianna Hawkins, though we are not sure the cake makers were aware of that. Wevs, kids -- I'd have to say this ranks as one of the more impressive efforts at paper-writing avoidance in the history of grad school, dontcha think?

Happy birthday, Goose! And remember, lovelies: For every drunken pirate photo floating around in cyberspace, there is at least one tea house-in-the-making and one truly astonishing cake. Don't let the odd ugly tree blind you to the beauty of the forest. Peace out.

The Art of Losing: Take Two

Or, The Case of the Incredible Shrinking Typist

(For our more somber first take on the art of losing, go here. Trigger warning for heartbreak and existential angst.)

Can a queer, feminist, middle-aged, middle-class broad write about weight loss without subjecting herself or others to fat-shaming? That is the question. Let's see if Moose can come up with an answer as she updates my readers on the progress of the Lifestyle Adjustment Program she recently began. Take it away, Moose!

* * *

Bodies are different, and people's experiences of their bodies are different -- from person to person and within individual persons over time. This story is about part of my experience of my body in (what I hope ends up being) the middle of my life.

After years of complaining about my increasing weight and decreasing fitness, I began a Lifestyle Adjustment Program in mid-January that has resulted so far in a loss of nearly 27 pounds. Yes, I have been surprised at how quickly I have been losing. My Lifestyle Adjustment Plan is evidently concerned about my success. A couple of weeks ago, I was awarded with a key chain for reaching a particular milestone in my weight-loss journey. (You are forgiven if phrases such as "weight-loss journey" create a mild burning sensation in the back of your throat. I feel it, too.) This week, when I recorded my results in the convenient online weight tracker, along with the "Congratulations, you lost weight this week!" message, I got a little lecture about the risks of losing more than two pounds a week as well as a recommendation that I slow down my rate of loss. I rolled my eyes at how seamlessly the technology of affirmation got blended with the technology of nagging in this instance, a blend that clearly has more to do with protecting my LAP from liability than with protecting my health. Indeed, I am cynical enough to think my LAP would just as soon slow down my rate of loss in order to prolong my membership in the program, but that is another story.

What is the story, you may be wondering? I am not writing this post because I want to turn Roxie's World into another technology of affirmation, committed as we are 'round here to a glass-half-full practice of optimism in life and politics. You don't need to feel obliged to congratulate me on my weight loss, though I would likely grin and say "Thank you!" if you felt moved to do so. I am also, I swear to dog, not writing it to turn the blog into a technology of nagging or shaming that might make anyone feel bad about her or his own weight or body or fitness or health. Lord knows there is plenty of body fascism in the world and in American culture and history. I have no desire to add fuel to that nasty fire, but lately I've noticed that my food choices can make other people uncomfortable about their food choices, that my visibly thinner body makes them feel self-conscious about their bodies. I laugh when friends tell me they have signed up for my LAP because my success has inspired them, but the truth is I feel a little uncomfortable in that role. Holy crap! I want to say, Do you not realize that I am one Cheeto and a dry martini away from being in the same mess I was in two and a half months ago? That's a slight exaggeration, of course, but my point is serious: I am no expert, and I have a considerable way to go on my weight-loss journey. My weight is not yet in the healthy range for my height on the Body Mass Index scale. (Yes, darlings, I know that BMI isn't perfect and "healthy" is a tricky devil of a term, but it's a helpful gauge and I am using it. Keep reading.)

Like a lot of women and a fair number of non-women, I have struggled for most of my life with weight and body issues. From childhood, I've been tall, which meant I was always heavier than most of the girls in my peer group. As a kid, I felt self-conscious about my size, which perhaps explains why you don't see a smile on the face of that girl with the pigtails, third in from the right on the back row, standing with all the other tall kids in my second-grade class portrait:

The messages I got from the culture and my family of origin intensified the anxieties I had about my body, the feeling that there was simply, always too much of me. I wasn't particularly physically active as a child, in part because I wasn't skilled in games that required a lot of eye-hand coordination or the pixie-girl elasticity of a gymnast. I was an endurance athlete, but it took me twenty years to figure that out. My mother sought to reassure me about my weight by telling me it was "just baby fat," but she also put me on diets when I was as young as 8 or 9. As adolescence approached, my father weighed in, as it were, with words that I am sure he hoped would inspire rather than wound me: "You are so beautiful, honey. Boys would be flocking around here if you would just take off some of that weight." Oh, Papa, I know you meant well.

Our bodies are not ours alone. They are enmeshed in familial and cultural history, histories in which gender, race, class, and sexuality play powerful, shaping roles. We inhabit them, but we do not fully own them in weird yet fundamental ways.

Nonetheless, as 2010 wound down and I found myself weighing nearly twenty pounds over my previous record-high weight (a weight that had sent me into another Lifestyle Adjustment Program in the fall of 1989), I knew that a moment of truth was approaching and that, come the new year, I would find myself among the legions of resolution makers determined to shed pounds in 2011. I spent the first week of 2011 in Los Angeles, at the MLA convention, eating and drinking with giddy abandon. Goose and I flew home the day before my first weigh-in. I was the one who suggested we order a pizza when we got home. We ate most of it along with a nice bottle, or two, of wine. I warmed up the last slice of pizza for breakfast the next morning and then headed off for my reckoning. What the hell, I thought, no point in having a poached egg now.

I have a lot of questions about what I did leading up to that moment and what I am doing now, but I am not prepared to ask and answer most of them here. What I can say is that by early January I had come to a place of feeling miserable in my body and was willing to do anything to get out of that place. People have told me they admire my discipline. Thank you, but please understand that for me the hard part was getting my a$$ on the scale for that first weigh-in. Everything since -- and I do mean everything -- has been easy. Once I have made up my mind to do something like this, temptation is not an issue. I am a rock. You cannot move me. Give me a rule, I will follow it. Give me a Cheeto, I will eat a banana. Tell me to exercise, and I will get a new dog to inspire me to hit the trail.

You see, I am as good at losing weight as I am at gaining it -- and that is part of the problem. I tend to be all-or-nothing, black-or-white, feast-or-famine in these matters. My goal this time around is to find a happy medium, something I can sustain over the long haul. (The last time I lost a substantial amount of weight, I actually succeeded in keeping most of it off for many years, but I was a lot younger then. My metabolism, never a fast one, is even slower now, so I am trying to be realistic about my goals.) I don't have a magic, target number in mind. I don't want to be rail thin, and I don't aspire to run (another) marathon. I want to feel fit, comfortable, able to do the things I want to do: a 4-mile run, Adho Mukha Vrksasana, a walking tour of Portugal or Scotland or Norway with my beloved queer pack. I am on board with the idea that our culture should be far more accepting of bodily diversity than it is and that healthy bodies come in all shapes and sizes. All I'm saying is that the body I was in two and a half months ago wasn't feeling healthy or pleasant to me, so I decided to change it in an effort to feel better.

Here are a few questions I am willing to answer for those who might be interested to know what has worked for one middle-aged broad looking to get a little less broad. (With apologies to Goose, who hates my fondness for the word broad.)

1. Are you going to meetings? Why or why not? Yes, I am going to meetings. I like the accountability of weigh-ins and the camaraderie of hanging out with folks with a similar commitment to losing weight. I also really groove on the kind of non-expert wisdom you pick up at gatherings of this kind. As academics, we tend to over-think things and make them vastly more complicated than they sometimes need to be. I go to a meeting and the leader says, "You know, it isn't rocket science. Eat less, move more, and you will lose weight," or "The thing about this program is, if you kinda work it, it kinda works, but if you really work it, it really works." I walk away thinking, "Holy rice cake! It really is that simple, isn't it? I can so flipping do this!"

2. Are you tracking points? Do you like this whole PointsPlus thing? Yes, I am tracking points, though somewhat less diligently than I was in the beginning when I was learning the system. PointsPlus -- or, as I like to call it, the All the Bananas You Can Eat Diet -- has obviously worked well for me, but I have nothing to compare it to, never having used the old system. Still, I love the idea that all fruits and most vegetables are zero points. That quickly trained me to reach for a piece of fruit whenever I felt hungry. (If you're curious, here's an article that mentions the PointsPlus system in connection with new research on calories, nutrition, and metabolism.)

3. Have you given up alcohol altogether? No. Remember: This is a Lifestyle Adjustment Plan, not a d-i-e-t. Nothing is forbidden. That said, I have cut my alcohol intake considerably and in the early weeks of the plan had none at all. See previous comment about my always slow and getting slower metabolism. I lose weight better when I don't drink, and it's easy for me to go without it, contrary to the impression that all the booze jokes on this blog might have created. I did, however, have half a bottle of really nice champagne to celebrate my birthday last week -- and still lost two pounds!

4. What's working for you food-wise? Short answer: Boneless, skinless chicken thighs. You can do a million things with them really quickly, and they are unbelievably satisfying. Longer answer: I've been keeping breakfast and lunch pretty simple and saving up points and ingenuity for dinners that are varied, delicious, and decadent enough to satisfy our foodiest friends. My favorite magazine, Food Porn for the Conscientious, has been enormously helpful in this regard. I'm fortunate in that I've never been a big snacker or lover of sweets, so it works for me to hold onto about 15 points for a substantial dinner. Believe me, I have never gone to bed hungry on this routine. Oh, and my go-to lunch for days when I'm stuck in the office and dying for something hot and healthy? Amy's Bowls, especially the (7-point) Brown Rice and Vegetables. I'm tellin' ya, kids, it's why dog invented microwaves.

5. Are you exercising? Yes, but not as much as I thought I'd have to in order to lose weight. That was one of the things that made me reluctant to commit to any LAP. I was convinced I would be sentencing myself to a lifetime of small salads and torturously long workouts. As with food, though, I have tried to make activity adjustments that felt realistic and manageable. That has meant doing what I can when I can, which so far has been a mix of yoga, stationary biking, and walking with interludes of jogging out on the trail. So far, so bueno, and I am secretly hoping that the jogging becomes running by mid-summer, if my lumpy, achy feet will cooperate.

6. Are you sure you aren't going to turn this blog into a technology of affirmation or, worse, a fricking diet blog? Because, you know, a lot of us would really, truly hate that. Also, please don't cut out the booze jokes. We like imagining that Moose and Goose are a couple of boozed-up, big-shouldered broads taking on the patriarchy one martini at a time. I know, darlings, and fear not. Your fantasies are safe. We'll always have Ishmael's, the seedy yet cozy bar around the corner from the global headquarters of RW Enterprises, LLC, and there will always be a frosty beverage and a fat-packed mozzarella stick out on the bar just waiting for you.

Peace out, my pretties, and remember: In Roxie's World, we love you just the way you are. Sing it, Piano Man.