Radial Symmetry

I've developed a new nightly routine that I'm finding very satisfying. I make sure the kettle is filled with enough water for coffee. I measure out my oats and currants, I fill the pot with enough water to cook them. I wash the dishes so that when I come down in the morning the counters are cleared and pleasing.

You wouldn't know this from looking at my house now, but when I was a kid I used to get in so. much. trouble. for being messy. Everything in my room was everywhere, all the time.

My dad, who was an angry man and a yeller, would go on rampages every once in a while. Why was everything always on the floor? It was his house, why did we always make everything a mess? Why couldn't we put anything away?

The pattern went like this:
- Dad would ask us to clean our rooms before he got home. Not nicely.
- I would do other stuff, typically watching TV and reading.
- Mom would say "Your father will be home soon, have you cleaned your room?"
- I would run to my room and shove everything either under the bed, or in the closet, or both.

It's not like there was one time where he forgot to check the bed or the closet, so I don't know why it took me so long to figure out that wasn't going to work.

I'm not entirely sure when that changed.

My bachelor apartment in Toronto had a lot to do with it. That's when I started making my bed every day, because it depressed me and stressed me out to walk into a space where everything was all over the place and all out of sorts.

Oh.

It wasn't the apartment, was it. It was because I moved into that apartment to heal, when my depression and anxiety were at their peak. I made my bed, I folded everything, I lined up all my canned food. Neat neat neat, this here, this here. Some misguided intuition that if I could keep the outside in order, maybe things might be okay.

I wonder how much of that is inherited and how much of that I learned?

Tonight, it would be so easy not to go to yoga. To make some tea, reheat some soup, download some top chef, and start in on my current editing and writing projects.

I am out of the habit of exercise, and this is the worst part. Where you know you need to, you know it makes you feel better. Yet you have to make yourself do it, dragging your leaden feet all the way to the studio, the garage, the trail the gym the weights.

You do. And you feel better. And then you drag yourself again. And again. Until you can lay off and stop thinking, just follow your feet to the good feeling.

Looking at my house this morning, one could only assume that I'd had a very busy and very good weekend.

My favourite pair of heels had been abandonded in front of the closet, one of them tipped over after I tripped on it rushing out the next morning. The bed was pushed over about 6 inches and there was a pile of [redacted] that had ended up on top of my dressing table after being moved around in a clump from flat surface to flat surface. There were clothes hanging to dry in the spare room, there were piles of dirty clothes on the floor in every room. There were clothes hanging on the doorknob in the bathroom.

The main floor fared no better. A big pile of dishes, pepitas left in the oven after roasting. Clean clothes hanging in the bathroom. Dirty yoga clothes in a pile on the stairs. Bulk food still sitting in bags on the counter after being bought Saturday morning.

One would be right.

It was a very busy and very good, and in some ways very hard, weekend. The very good included a Sunday night friendly friend potluck, a Friday night puttering by myself (2 loads of laundry! 2 episodes of Top Chef! 1 giant bowl of soup! 2 beers!), a shit hot Saturday night with D.Jack, which can be further subdivided into three categories of overlapping fun, including live music at Raw Sugar and nice drinks and food at the Moon Room and a whole pile of [redacted] at my house.

The bulk of my days, however, was taken up with hours worth of yoga anatomy instruction. It was crazy useful (who knew the foot has three arches!) but fucking hard. It's hard for me to sit for 5 hours straight, no matter where I am or what I'm doing. Add a second-day bleeding backache to that, add a few hours in stilettos to that, add some brutally hard concentrated yoga to that, and by Sunday at 2 pm I was severely uncomfortable.

And then we started on the shoulder work.

It's hard for me to do shoulder work no matter, since my shoulders are square but not strong. But add to that a possibly sadistic teacher who had us do said shoulder work with the soles of our feet pressed together and brought as close to our crotches as we could and by about 8 minutes in I was crying, because that is what happens when I spread my legs and externally rotate my femurs.

I'm pretty down with that. I've been therapized up the yin-yang, and I'm not so sure I've got much else to say to a kind person who is listening without stake to my babbles. At some point you need to just let the fuck go of what you learned to hold onto. What I am holding onto, I am holding somewhere in my hips and hamstrings.

I'm good with doing that in yoga, I'm good at managing its public manifestations. But add to that a sore back, add to that various floods of cyclical hormones, add to that sore legs, add to that the swirls of nausea that sometimes accompany the leak of tears, add to that a room full of strangers who didn't want to partner with the weird tattooed girl with the hairy armpits and oh, oh, I was hollowed out, leaving the potluck in the first wave, crawling into sheets that still smelled like d.jack and falling hard enough asleep that the firecrackers didn't wake me up.

I can't make this, but you should!

++

PARTY ON THE PICKET LINE
* * Featuring indie rap legend Jesse Dangerously and other musical guests**

Sat. Sept. 26, 6:30-8:00pm --
Outside the Museum of Civilization, 100 Laurier Street, Gatineau, QC

As you may have heard, the workers at the Museum of Civilization and War Museum are on strike.

Their boss is denying them job security and refusing to protect them against their jobs being contracted out.

Museum CEO Victor Rabinovitch makes 20% more than any other museum head in the region, and in some cases his workers make 40% less than other museum workers in the region. Many of the museums' floor staff have worked on contract for years, with no opportunity for permanence. Out of 55 museum guides, only six have permanent jobs.

Join us for a party on the picket line at the Museum of Civilization on Saturday!

FEATURING Halifax indie rap sensation Jesse Dangerously:
http://www.dangerously.ca/

Map: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=100+Laurier+Street+%2C+Gatineau%...

Facebook event: http://bit.ly/mg6tI

Follow @MuseumWorkers on Twitter: http://twitter.com/MuseumWorkers

++

There's a breathless moment that I love, right before a date.

You've prepared all you wanted to prepare:

• your house is clean (dishes done, toilets wiped down, couch vacuumed, cat hair swept);
• your self is clean (trimming, tweezing, scrubbing, bubbing, good smells applied);
• your props are assembled (the right purse, the new lube, lipbalm, keys, we're ready).

It's like fall, this feeling, or the first warm smell in March. It's possibility. It's humming anticipation.

When I first became the part-owner of a stick-shift car, one of my co-workers told me I'd love it. She said "Once you learn, you'll never go back. You'll find it boring."

You know what I want to be boring? Driving my car.

I'd always wanted to know how to drive standard. Like learning to mouse with my left hand, it was part of my Emergency Preparedness Plan. What if I have to drive someone to the hospital, and they only have a standard car? I do not want to be like our old neighbour on our doorstep, her bleeding kid across the street, querulously asking if the car she can borrow is automatic.

The big problem is that I thought I'd be pretty good at it. I'm reasonably mechanically inclined, can generally figure out how things work and how to take them apart and put them back together. I thought this might come in handy.

I'm not sure why.

Because it really doesn't matter if you understand how the clutch operates the bits of the engine it pulls apart and lets touch again if you have a hard time making your appendages do different things at the same time.

Thus, it has taken me a year to be even kind of comfortable driving my car. I'm still not great at talking while I'm trying to drive in the city, and still can't have music or the radio on because I need to be able to hear the engine.

All in all, though, I'm pretty happy about where I am. I'll never be great at driving standard, but that's alright. It was fucking hard for me to learn, and rubbed a few of my soft spots raw. It made me cry on numerous occasions, thankfully mostly in private. A few times the adrenaline of maybe not making that hill start has made my legs shake so hard I've had to pull over. I damn near gave up on several counts and occasions.

But I didn't.

As a result, you may please feel free to call me in any kind of driving emergency. As long as there are no hills between where you are and the nearest hospital.

About two weeks ago, my skin told me it was fall. Sure, all you people can go by the calendar. I go with what my rosacea says, and what it has been saying for two weeks is alternately "dry!" and "burney!"

Then too, I'm having trouble deciding tonight between a single malt and mint tea.

And what my stomach says is soup, or rice, or rice in soup.

The cinching factor? I'm downloading the first episode of the most recent season of Top Chef and wondering what to start knitting.

Back in the spring, I wrote about the end of a decade-long love affair with the Joe style of Fluevog boots. Several of you smartypantses suggested that I should contact Fluevog to see if they had any left in stock.

So I did.

They wrote me a very nice email back, and quite promptly:

Dear Megan,

I am very sorry to hear about your decade with your Joe boots coming to
a close. Sadly we haven't made that boot since 2001, and has been long long out
of stock. There is nothing left in any size in all the Fluevog stockrooms. :(

But the good news is that you can probably fix up the Joes you have
lived in quite easily. Bring them into the Toronto store, and their cobbler can restitch and
resole your shoes to give you an extra few years of world traveling in them!

Good luck, and hopefully we can get these running again. If not, there
are some awesome new Angel boots coming out this Fall, so keep an eye
out for them!

Vog On!
Greg Fluevog

While I don't think I could ever bring myself to actually vog on I was damn sorry that I'd left the boots behind.

Let this be a lesson to you: email first, trash second.

When I reach a benchmark in my weight loss and get all excited and proud, or when someone compliments me on how good I look now and I get a little self-esteem-boosting thrill, it's hard not to feel like a traitor to my feminist roots, and to the fat women who fought so hard to liberate me from the rigid and narrow social constructs of female beauty.

--Greta Christina

I've written about my weight issues time and time again, so I won't bore you with the details here. Suffice it to say that my relationship to my body is about as complex as any other woman's.

Last month, I reviewed a book for Herizons called Purge: Rehab Diaries, a memoir about a woman with an eating disorder who spends three months as an inpatient trying to get well. Part of her reason for writing it was to give other people with eating disorders hope.

I really enjoyed the book, but hope? Eesh. I put that book down with a whole bunch of old unhealthy habits and thought patterns triggered.

Not that I've ever had an eating disorder, and believe me, I was checked. When you show up in a psychologist's office with all your bones poking out, they are on those bones like flies on shit.

It's true that my food intake was severely restricted, but it wasn't a conscious decision. I wasn't trying to keep myself under about 700 calories a day, I just couldn't make my body swallow enough to get past that. What made me plain ol' depressed rather than eating disordered was mainly that I had a very accurate view of how thin I was and just how big a problem it was.

And this part, I've said before, but I think it bears repeating: I don't think other women had a very accurate view of how thin I was.

My family did. They were horrified and worried sick. So much so that even now, just last weekend, my mom eyed me and said "You've lost some weight, you know?" That furrow between her eyebrows.

But other women? I'm sure that some thought the weight loss didn't suit me, I can't say. What I can say is that I got one hell of a lot of compliments on being able to lose weight, so many jealous comments telling me how lucky I was. From acquaintances, from co-workers, from strangers.

It was like not eating. I knew the comments and their self-esteem-boosting thrills were bad for me, hit home in a way that was bolstering crazy unhealthy behaviour. But I found it impossible not to store them up at the same time. To be satisfied that I was this one thing that people wanted at the same time that most of the rest of my life was an utter shambles.

When I started gaining weight again, I did not get one single compliment or any comments on how lucky I was to have some padding. Not. One.

It still infuriates me.

So this has all been on my mind lately, after Purge, after being reminded of how easy it is to get so fucked up, how much cultural support there is for that particular brand of fucked-up-edness. After spending a few days unconsciously limiting my caloric intake, after a few days of consciously not.

In the Change Room of R&W

I try on the 6s and the 4s I've brought in. They don't fit quite right. The nice sales girl gets me a 2. Parts of it fit, parts of it don't. In my underwear, I stick my head out of the change room and ask the nice sales girl can she please go get me a 0, just to check.

I turn around to face the mirror.

First thing my mind says: "How did your inner thighs get so fat? When did you get cellu-"

Second: "Shut. The fuck. Up. We just asked for a zero, jackass. You will go home and you will get on the scale and you will see that you are pretty much the same weight as you were last week."

Johns writes in Purge that fat is a feeling, and oh, is it ever. She writes that it is "code for feeling scared, angry, ashamed, hurt and sad all in one." Fat is the container in which we store all the derision aimed at us, our imperfect and ungainly bodies; the hatred sometimes too, the violence we are almost always looking out for. It is what spills off the shelf onto us when our defenses are down.

Third: "Not this. Not on my watch."

This vigilance, it is sometimes exhausting.

I had one of those grand nights last night, where everything that was feeling a little out of control started spinning a titch slower.

Mostly, this happened through getting shit done around my house. Every single pot I owned was dirty and piled up on the counter, plus one of Shelley's as well, so scrub scrub scrub and why not fill up the kettle for coffee in the morning as well. I cleaned all the rotting vegetables out of my fridge. I used the vegetables that were on the edge of rotting in a big ol' lentil salad. I managed to not overcook the lentils. I finished an arts & crafts project that had been on the list for a couple weeks. It involved the use of power tools, and that pretty much makes any evening a good one.

The good mood was a bit of a surprise, considering that my late afternoon involved extended bouts in change rooms.

I bought bras. Without crying. This, sadly, is worth noting.

How I shopped for bras in such a way so as to prevent a body-loathing meltdown in front of strangers:

• I only looked for bras that were about like what I wear most days now. When I was tempted to stray and try on pretty things, I reined my cleavage- and lace-loving self back in. New = sad.
• I did not get it fitted. Every time I get a bra fitted, I end up with a too small bra that I spill up out of. Useful in certain circumstances, not what I want for every day. The only explanation I can come up with for this is that when people are looking directly at them, my boobs shrink.
• I settled for good enough. Does this bra make my tits look weird? No? Cheque please.

But then it was interview clothes shopping time. I have to admit, I had used up my initial surge of change room fuck you in La Senza.

Part 2, coming up...