I come out of the shower to find Tulip chewing up a pair of flip flops that I’ve just bought to replace the flip flops Violet chewed up two years ago. (Yes, I have been wearing them since then.) I snatch the shoe out of her mouth and—I’m not proud of this—I throw it at her. It glances off her foot.
It is mangled. I’m so mad I flop down face-down on my bed and just breathe. It’s only a flip-flop, I say. She didn’t know any better, I say.
Eventually, I get up, but I give her the silent treatment. Though she has always followed me from room to room, she stays on my bedroom floor and looks sheepish.
I last about five minutes before I crawl up next to her and rub my forehead against her neck. She forgives me. Dogs.
Day 2
A woman who has previously adopted a CCB dog wants to meet Tulip, though she has a cat, and I think Tulip might eat a cat.
Day 3
My buddy Phil develops a plan to bomb a bunch of neighborhood listservs with an email about Tulip, including links to her Facebook page and tumblr.
I write and forward him the email, and he implements the plan.
Day 4
Due to the listserv bomb, Tulip gets lots of new Likers on Facebook. Everyone thinks she’s so funny.
She shits on the deck again. Very funny, Tulip.
Day 5
Two different prospects contact me about meeting Tulip. I send them my availability for the weekend, and we set up appointments.
It totally zoomed past without my even noticing, but August 2 was my three-year blogiversary*! That is crazy-pants!
Anyway, I thought I’d start a feature that some other bloggers have, that is, on Fridays, offer a weekly look back at a post from the same week in previous years. In other words, be able to publish without doing any work. Whee!
This entry from three years ago is not the very first Avid Bruxist post, but it’s the piece of writing—a Facebook note, actually—that made me start the blog.
Two years ago, this week, my grandma passed away. Hell of a woman.
I don’t sit on posts. I draft and publish, draft and publish. I know I shouldn’t. I know I’d have a better blog if I would let an entry cool off for a few days and then looked it over before I shot it into cyberspace. I just don’t. It’s not something I can force myself to do.
But I sat on Mostly Naked on the Internet. I drafted it last Friday and could not conjure up the courage to let people see it. I pulled it up on Saturday. No. Sunday. No.
Monday morning, I was doing a version of that scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Offwhere Cameron’s like, “He’ll keep calling me… He’ll keep calling me until I come over… OK! I’ll go, I’ll go, I’ll go, I’ll go, I’ll go, w— I’ll go. Shit. GodDAMMIT… Forget it. That’s it.”
Except mine was, “I’ll post it. I’ll post it. It’s going to bother me until I post it… No. No. No. Nope. Absolutely not.”
I waited until I was almost going to be late for work, clicked Publish, and then shut down my computer really fast, as if doing so might lock the post inside.
But it didn’t. And now I’m Mostly Naked on the Internet.
And it’s remarkably liberating. I mean, a lot of people have been complimentary of my body, which is sweet and flattering, but of course, not the point. Mostly it’s been validating to hear people use words like ‘honest’ and ‘brave’ and ‘inspirational’ and ‘totally bitchin’.
Here’s what I hope. I hope the post encourages other women to start their own Love My Body/Real Beauty campaign. I hope they’ll look at uniform femme-bots in ads and, instead of considering themselves deficient in some way, they’ll… I don’t know. Remark how odd it is that the models look like they came from a cookie cutter? Something like that.
(Don’t get me wrong: The Victoria Secret model is a totally valid version of the female body. It’s just not the only version.)
I hope women will look at their Rand-McNally stretch marks and their dimply legs and say, “This body grew another human inside it,” or “This body can deadlift 250.”
I hope when women have Bad Body Thoughts, their inner badass will perk up and say, “Cut. That shit. Out.”
I hope when their friends start saying mean things about their own bodies, their outer badass will perk up and say, “Cut. That shit. Out.”
Of course, when I say women, I’m including myself. I hope that I do these things.
(sigh) Growth. It’s hard. But good.
Now excuse me while I go clean out RiteAid’s supply of Dove products.
I once read an article that said that 86% of females feel bad about themselves within the first five minutes of picking up a “women’s magazine” like Cosmo. (There’s a standard deviation of {+/-infinity} on that statistic because I can’t actually remember what the article said. But I recall that it was a big percentage/short time.)
I identified as one of those statistical females. So I stopped reading those magazines. This was about 8 years ago, and I still don’t look at them. It has helped.
But you know, you don’t have to be flipping through Vogue to find unreasonable body standards in the world. They’re around us all the time. Movies, TV, the music industry. Shit, there are toys on the market that’ll mess with a little girl’s mind and make her not love herself because her stomach’s not concave like the doll’s or her hair is not flaxen like the doll’s or her cooter doesn’t smell like strawberry bubble gum like the doll’s.
Our stupid culture has told me for a long time my body’s wrong, and despite being educated and of fair-to-middling intelligence, I’ve believed it every single step of the way. My ass is too big; my thighs are too dimply; my arms are squishy; my belly pooches out; I have cankles; my stretch marks look like the Rand-McNally of the Washington, D.C. environs; my boobs don’t defy gravity; my chin has a chin.
Cut to the end of last week when this photo started popping up in my Facebook feed:
You seen it?
Look how thin and taut and angular and boob-y and shiny the women in the Victoria’s Secret ad are. Silky tresses for daaaayyyys. Exact same height. Skin colors like on the townhouse exteriors in The Promenades at Spryngdale neighborhood, or whatever homogeneous enclave is two miles from your house.
And, to a woman, they are identical from the neck down.
I don’t know a goddamn soul who looks like that in real life. All the women I know look like the ones in the Dove ad (WHO I THINK ARE GORGEOUS): tall ones, short ones, busty ones, flat ones, curvy ones, straight ones, ones shaped like blueberries, ones shaped like pencils, and ones shaped like Coke bottles. Some carry their weight between shoulders and waist, and others from the hips down [raises hand]. Long hair, short hair. Skin of every color on the palette.
And this ad, or maybe this juxtaposition of ads (because I never would’ve noticed the total freaky-deakiness of the VS ad without the other), made me feel so much better about myself. I mean, I know Dove is a business, and businesses are in the business of making money, and this whole Social Mission blah-di-blah is probably just a really slick marketing ploy. I hope not. But even if it is, I don’t care because I feel so much better about myself after seeing this ad.
I. Look. Like. Them.
In fact—am I really going to do this?
…
Yes, yes I am. Fuck it. Hey, look at me, mostly naked on the internet (that’s a bathing suit… I just couldn’t do undies):
I look at these photos, and while none of the Dove models is quite the chubster I am, my shape would totally fit in their ad. Because they’re all different shapes. And heights. And hair colors. And skin colors.
I’m sick of hating my body. I’m going to be 37 next month; this needs to end. The fact of the matter is, that roll of back fat you see up there and those stacked marshmallows I’ve got for arms and that hip-to-knee cellulite (which you can’t really see well in the photos but it’s totally there—high-five, iPhone camera!… Note to self: Buy Apple stock)? That fat and those marshmallows and that cellulite are my body, and that body carts this gal around and provides a venue for this blog to germinate and gives me orgasms and lifts heavy things. I am that body. That body is me.
Here are the parts I need to remember:
(1) There is no “normal woman”; we’re all different;
(2) yelling at myself about my body has never succeeded in effecting change;
(3) there will be people who look at me in these photos and go, Ew; I don’t have to be one of them; and
(4) somebody out there is going to like this body exactly the way it is.
But only when I do it first.
So this is my Love My Body/Real Beauty campaign. This is me. I am this. STFU, Amy, and stop being mean to yourself.
It’s only 89 degrees at 4:00pm. There’s a pretty good cloud cover and a tiny breeze. We do the long loop, and it’s actually not terrible. Halfway through, the sun comes out. And it’s terrible.
Day 2
I’m tired and depressed, and I have been for a while. Maybe I need to adjust my amino acids? Or maybe I should just stop drinking my feelings, which is what I’ve done six times in the last month. (That’s a lot for me. I usually drink two or three times a year.)
Nonetheless, the stress of the crate-and-rotate routine is wearing on me. I email the organization asking for strategies to get Tulip adopted.
Day 3
I wake up bleary-eyed from not going to bed on time again. At the same moment I reach down to grab Tulip’s bowl, she jumps up to say good morning and cracks my chin with her skull. I come very close to hitting my foster dog. But I don’t. Then she pees on the deck. And I still don’t hit her. Good thing she’s fucking adorable.
The org emails me and suggests, amongst other things, I make a Facebook page for her. So I do. (Like it! Share it!)
Late-night 2.5 miles. Gorgeous.
Day 4
Another 2.5 miles after sundown. Less than 90 degrees is so much better than more than 90 degrees.
Day 5
Friends come over! Tulip does The Tulip Dance, and it goes a little something like this:
Smooch,snuggle,loving gaze,wag yourselfin half!I love you.
Love makes Tulip smile.
Day 6
Redford and Violet register their displeasure at the level of affection being given them with an early-morning intervention.
Day 7
Tulip registers her displeasure at the distribution of peanut butter with an impassioned speech.
