...because Fall Out Boy comes up with better titles that I can, apparently.

I couldn't bring myself to call

I'm trying to do too many things at once here. I keep typing sentences into this box and erasing them, and then I keep working my way through the reading that I'm going to have my class tackle tomorrow, and then I get dismayed because not only am I not getting a journal entry done, I am realizing that my class had trouble handling the philosophical implications of Sim City, and that this essay deals in some depth with dialectical materialism. We're all totally fucked.

Not that class has been bad. It hasn't. But as usual, you run up against a handful of minds so tightly closed that it makes your head spin just a little, and so you go through this hopeless phase, because you are an idealistic young instructor, where you bemoan the state of the whole planet because your students are unwilling to try and wrap their brains around things. That was a convoluted sentence. Shit, so was the second sentence of this entry. Do as I say, not as I do. Apparently.

Actually, now that I think about it, I should actually be doing blogs along with my students right now. That was probably a bad move on my part, the whole "hey I'll keep up with YOU GUYS" thing, because I forget that I really have too much other crap to do to also take my own class.

I don't even know what I'm saying anymore. I'm actually pretty glad that I gave up the 365 blog thing; I had this moment of my life where I was convinced that the internet was going to be my ticket out of oppressed academic-dom, but it's not, and I'm not oppressed, and I think the more time I spend away from the internet, the better. I am such a pendulum.

Except to call it quits

So, yes. Not a whole lot else is going on, except that Daniel is back in town and Geffrey, damn him, is leaving, but I get to trade one best friend for another, and now nishmaelkimble will not have a hetero-life-partner in town and so maybe we'll hang out more. (Yes, Adam? YES. In fact I think I'm going to see you tonight. This is exciting.)

Regular poetry meetings, I think, will resume in their independent summer form at some point next week. Also terribly exciting. Because I am going to need to carry that through the whole year next year, if I can rope people into doing extra-workshop work. I think being outside of workshop is going to be about the best thing, but also harrowing, in that I am going to have to make up and KEEP my own schedule. I am bad at this, because I am, apparently, still in high school when it comes to temporal regulation. I need someone else to do it for me in neat little blocks. Alas.

Back to friends, however: am looking very much forward now that I am not traveling ANY MORE THANK YOU this summer, to really get back down to the business of hanging out regularly, kind of like the end of the semester when I was just about the happiest person alive because I could feel all these good communities solidifying around me - back at that, thank you very much.

...at least, I seem to MAKE it tiring because I care so damn much. I think next semester I am going to pare my classes WAY back, so that I remain sane. Because seriously? This is ridiculous.

I could also be saying this mostly because it's summer session and I'm teaching five days a week, with a paper due every week. That's insane. And I kind of pity my students for having to do it - especially the ones that are taking more than one class. But oh well. It is what it is, and we have to get five assignments out of the way whether they like it or not. Yaaay, University policy.

Anyway so now I have actually PLANNED for class tomorrow, as opposed to doing it while half-asleep at 7 in the morning over a cup of mint tea. Yay for sleep?

Anyways

Saw nishmaelkimble and his orchestral collection yesterday down at the Brewery, which is always a good time, especially as it means I get to see people that honestly think that it's neat that I'm going to be around next year. I probably have an ego problem (POET. CAN'T HELP IT.) but it's nice to hear that sort of thing now and again. Makes me think that I won't, in fact, become a horrible grumpy hermit by November.

Digression

Not really. It's about a million hours late (I am bad at finishing these kinds of tasks, apparently), and I'm sitting around, awake and restless, responding to student emails and seething a little. Not about my students. About other things. I guess this might make for some horrifically bad writing tomorrow. It's always good to get THAT out of the way. Makes room for stuff that's only bad, as opposed to horrifically.

I am not a fan of needlessly complicating my life. So I suppose I won't - not that I have, and/but I refuse to be convinced otherwise, either. Because good lord, yo, things are looking up. Screw what anyone else thinks. (Not entirely true. I like my friends. I care what they think. So ignore the annoyed ramble.) I'm...going to go to bed early. Because why not. Because it's simple, and I'm after simplicity, all appearances to the contrary.

I won't make the same mistake.

Today I locked myself out of my office and had to break in through a window.

(OH WHICH, for those of you who can see that entry, was actually how psycho-ex got in, we found out later - the *crash* wasn't the door, it was the now-BROKEN SCREEN. Holy hell.)

That was a fun game! I nearly sat on a dead moth in the process. I hope I don't have dead moth on my butt.

I'm dying not to hurt you.

So it's supposed to be summer over here, and I guess it is except it's kind of cold, and I kind of have about fourteen tons of work to do, and I reealllly ought to get back into this whole poetry-writing thing except PAPERS and TEACHING and I HAVE TO GET OUT OF TOWN THIS WEEKEND.

Off to New York, recharging the ol' batteries on a healthy diet of the most heartily pulsing city on the planet. Ought to do a body good.

After that, I have to walk down an aisle with a ridiculous hat on, and then I start teaching which is the point at which I think I'm going to actually have a normal schedule here, because wtf. I'll get up at 7, teach from 9:30-11, then head back to my office and GET SHIT DONE, y'all. Writing three days a week, freelancing three days, one day to studiously do absolutely nothing but read and sit around outside. I can handle that.

In our dreams, we can be complete.

So I saw Star Trek. And I was VASTLY entertained by it, even though I am by no means an actual, real-life Star Trek fan. There were a couple of ST in-jokes that I had to be informed of as they were happening, but other than that, I got it.

OH EXCEPT. Here is a question: does anyone ELSE think that the scene with the giant red THING on Delta-whatever-planet was a parody of the Shelob scene from LOTR? I mean, it was practically the SAME FREAKING THING. Including scaring the thing off with a light source! And then Spock's all Gandalfy at the end...I dunno. I mean, it was just tooooo similar. Maybe I'm crazy. But I was laughing kind of inappropriately through the whole thing because I was like "...they can't be serious about this. This has absolutely, positively got to be a gigantic cinematic rib-jab."

But yes. Overall excellent. I assume that the interwebs is already populated with really creepy Spock/Kirk now-that-they're-hot slash. Great.

Again.

Okay. Must go prepare for cooking/wine times with Daniel, as I owe him major face time. Off I go.

Good LORD, slow day. Thursday's drag like...like something that drags. A drag show? No, the opposite of that. Anyway.

The Internet Is Also Boring

I can always tell when I should probably be doing something else when I have thoroughly exhausted all my usual internet options. We all have this, right? The 4 or so sites that you immediately open up when you open FF or whatever other program buoys you along the sea of the tubes, and while I *could* actually read the news, or caption animal pictures, I don't really want to, and so then I just get IMPOSSIBLY BORED with the entire world wide web.

I ALSO *could* be doing a couple of, like, real things, like finishing up my revision portfolio for shop, but really that's like 99.9% done. So!

Let Me Fill You In

Or rather, let me dump a whole bunch of shit here that's really only for my purposes. Scroll on by, now.

So it looks like I'm loved around here and I get what I want because of it - the department gave me a reduced teaching load (with less money, but the hysterical thing is that when you do the math, they're actually paying me 25% MORE given the amount of work they're asking from me. Working the system? I CAN HAS.) and on top of it, I will get to teach more poetry and possibly a course of my own making. This is all terribly exciting.

I got honorably mentioned for RHINO's Editor's Prize, which is cool, comes with dinner money, and means that HEY that publication is finally coming out. BUY IT. We need all the help we can get.

Next year is lookin' a little like the following:

SUMMER
Teach comp
Complete Teaching w/ Technology certification
Redo Ashbery article
Figure out this whole PhD application business (DISSERTATION IDEAS I NEED THEM)
Start work on Developing Ecological Consciousness, 2nd ed (? I hope)
Go canoeing!
Travel: New York, Lehigh Valley, Colorado (in that order, I think)
Submit poems
Submit manuscript
Compile Bethlehem Steel chapbook (yikes, that's like 15 more poems)
Begin drafting ideas for next book


FALL
Teach comp and poetry
Apply for PhD programs (WTF)
Finish Ashbery article, send off
Begin redoing one of three articles: Williams, wikis, or David Mitchell
Send off Bethlehem Steel chapbook
Begin work on second manuscript
Continue work on DEC

SPRING
Teach comp and POSSIBLY food ecology course
Finish whichever article I've tackled, send off
Send off poems
Continue work on second manuscript
Finish work on DEC


Man. I have my work cut out for me, I guess I do. That's probably a good thing. Beats having shit-all to do but wait tables. After spring? Oh, I have my ideas if the PhD thing doesn't work out. But if it does, I suppose, RINSE. REPEAT. x4. Ho-lee-crap.

I'm so tired I am going to make tea and then watch Deadwood until I pass out

No really. I'm stopping at 11:45 even if I'm in the middle of a damn sentence.

Today was beautiful. I had mood swings accordingly.

I received an award for a poem, and the undergraduates who also received awards at the ceremony, um, a few of them had poems that were far and away better than mine. I am both happy for them and sad for myself. I'm not envious though. This is improvement!

Bad idea: coming home late at night and then putting on Iron & Wine. Do not recommend unless you want to blubber into your cup of tea.

I got a summer teaching appointment. Moolah. Problem, though - now I have to make up a syllabus, and the book that I was all psyched to use is actually kind of crappy (Norton! Why must you betray me so!). So now I have to figure out - develop a new syllabus, or just use the old summer one I have lying around? I am bored of my 15 syllabus, but I am not sure if I am bored enough of it yet to redo it. I am unsure actually if this is non-boredom or just laziness. Probably both.

If I get to stay here next year in the department, I may well get to teach another poetry workshop. This makes me do this: !!!!!! and also this ARRRRGH because I know for SURE that I'm going to have to redo that syllabus to make the course suck way less. Intro poetry workshop is a hard fucking class to teach well, y'all.

Ooop. Five minutes are up. Off to go freak out about something else for a while (sleeping? Hooody harrrdy harr hooo)

In Soviet Russia, LIVEJOURNAL BLOGS ON YOU!
(Yes, because there won't be enough of THOSE jokes coming in the next few months.)

This is Not a Good Indicator of My Future Crankiness Levels

Folks, I am diiiiiisgruntled. Yup. My gruntle has just up and flown the proverbial coop.
I am sure you are fascinated! So. Here is the deal. I love technology, mostly. To this end, I integrate it into my classes in several ways. The most pervasive of these ways is that I have my students keep a running blog, in crazy little clusters, throughout the semester. Mostly, these things are both fantastically entertaining and a good way to have people just get some words down on a page every other day or so. I think that even if it's random blog writing, every little bit of practice helps. Am I right? I do not know! I like to think that I am. So anyway, on occasion I will get the random offensive 'I hate English' blog, which is both terrifyingly honest and terrifically stupid/ironic - I can't tell whether or not I should bless the kid for her/his unwavering devotion to baldfacedness, or kick him/her in the pants for having ZERO tact and/or willingness to at least see the forest for the trees. Perhaps a degree of both would be in order, but really, I have no idea how to do that.
Okay, so, as a 'helpful teacher' thing that I do for this bloggy thing, I write prompts. Usually these prompts are fairly innocuous; stuff that you might see on the front page of LJ (although granted, some of those are lame-o). Because I was feeling either magnanimous, whimsical, retarded, or all three, I threw in the prompt 'why doesn't anyone read any more?' into this week's prompt stew.

Holy MOLEY, kids these days.

I guess being a bookworm might well be a genetic trait. I dunno, my mom likes to read, anyway. And my dad certainly doesn't ABHOR it, like apparently most 18 year olds do. This, to me, is not only offensive (I know, I KNOW, I shouldn't take it personally, I could assign the damned tabloids and they'd still hate it), but really saddening. And I'm not about to go off on a Bloom-esque rant about how society is going down the drain because no one reads Milton, but seriously, something is really starting to piss me the fuck off about the phrase 'but reading is so BORING.'
Okay. So reading sometimes can be boring. I, in fact, am bored to tears sometimes by the stuff I have to slog through. But only to the worst pieces of drivel will I say 'who cares?'. Someone put this in print because they cared, and it is part of my job, as a reader, to try and figure out what's worth caring about. Key word: TRY. Try, goddammit! Stop being so...self-absorbed! Does everything have to relate to YOU? Do you have to be TOLD everything flat out, in shiny letters and moving pictars? Good Christ!
*later*
Annnnnd...my initial flash of indignation has cooled to a slow, steady burn. Alas. I did that on purpose; I went and looked at a bunch of pictures of hamsters and now I am not so concerned that much of the youth of America isn't willing to put in the effort to have an original thought about something that isn't immediately accessible. Also now I want a hamster; I will name him HamFam, after the Hamilton Family Diner, which, alas, is no longer in business. He will be HamFam Memorial McHammypants. And I will love him, and feed him gouda.
(No, I do not need more rodents.)
But God. The superficiality! The sheeposity! Baaaaaaaa. Mooo. Baaaaaaa. Let's all just herd along now. Do what the Big Man on The TV does. *grumbles, curmudgeon-like, in the corner.*

Okay. For reals now, I am going to go do something that I am supposed to be doing. And maybe back up my LJ. Before the Russians eat it! (That's awful and I don't mean it, but it is kooky that LJ is now owned by a Russian corporation. Ze wacky, it will not stop!)

Apparently, the month of September was NO BLOG MONTH.
I hereby resolve to be more like heebie_geebie and try my damndest to write something, ANYTHING, about once a day. If I make my students blog, dammit, I better well do it too. Nothing like being a hypocrite.This was also prompted by a note from fort_kanji and also from my own thoughts about starting a personal website for (ack) job stuff later down the ol' road.


( thoughts on that. )

In Other News...


Teacher Bans the Use of the Phrase "Throughout History"

Because, really, what the everloving hell are you going to put after a phrase like that? I can think of a few things - "people have existed," "stuff has happened," "there have been emotions," "popsicles have been loved by society," - all of which make for fantastically terrible sentences. Unless you're Dave Barry. Then, somehow, they're kinda funny. But that's probably because he does it ON PURPOSE. So I banned it, which goes against all the pedagogical theory that I read every day that blathers on about how our students should be more authoritative than we are. At this, I grumble. While I agree that traditional power dynamics in the classroom can be kind of bunk, I like to think that my extra 7 years of nose-to-grindstone give me some sort of say in what goes on in class. Or in papers. OR BOTH, GOOD CHRIST. Ergo, no 'throughout history,' 'in today's society,' 'people,' or any other terrifically vague phrasing transition that is the written equivalent of week-old oatmeal.

A Return to Web Pages, because I am OCD

I got Design Premium, I really did. And I'm staring at it, on my desk, terrified to install it because I realize just how much of my life that it could potentially EAT. This is mostly because of my insane jealousy of anyone that takes good pictures. I have an 8 megapixel camera. That's like 8 zillion particles of goodness, all of which should translate into giant, colorful, masterful photos. But what do I, the eminent artist, end up with? A bunch of godawful pictures of my pigs - and believe me, they are way cuter than most humans, so they should turn out okay in any picture, but they DON'T, they look like they're sitting under the worlds brightest LED flashlight and everything around them looks like everything looks after lightning hits. Even THAT sounds cooler than how these pictures turn out. Why do I have such bad photo juju? Thus, to make up for my TERRIBLE photo-taking skills (I swear, this is why I don't take photos, do you want to be forever uglified by my hand? I think not), I want to learn to use Photoshop. Then I can have a Flickr page that doesn't call to mind titles like 'how not to use the flash,' and 'these photos do not need Tide, because they are thoroughly washed out.'

Uh, the upshot of this did have something to do with website design, I swear. I'm more confident in my abilities to push graphics around, really. End of discussion.

Idiot Applies for Travel Grant, Realizes Stuff with Terrible FInality or Something

So I got it into my head that I needed to go to the Philippines. Yunno, because I'm half and all that. And have never been. And don't know the language. And generally don't know much about the culture either, other than the Drunken Line Dancing thing and the Lola Drinks and Falls Over a Lot thing. Neither of which, probably, are representative of the culture as a whole. (Wouldn't it be kind of tragically cool, though, if it were?) And then, wouldn't you know, I go to this mock interview all cocky and ready to talk about myself. Well thank the ol' lord in heaven that it was a MOCK interview, because I totally realized that I totally have nothing to say about a cultural project, other than to stumble over my own tongue and spit out something like 'uhhh, I think that an exploration of the postmodern division of 'self' personified by biculturalism is integral to...to a realization of difference...in America.' Two problems. A) I don't know what I'm saying, and B) I sound like one of my students, if one of my students had accidentally swallowed a copy of "A Very Short Intro to Literary Theory." Insert weird panic here. I mean, what the everloving fuck AM I doing trying to haul ass over to the Philippines for a year? Finding myself? Finding poetry? Does my thesis REALLY want to be an ethnographic study of She-Who-Doesn't-Look-Quite-White(Right)? (Har har, look at me use the clever academic parenthetical.)  Sure, I guess so. BUT EVEN STILL, if that's my thesis option, why do I need to go to the Philippines for it? You know son, I have no idea. I guess to figure out what makes up the other half of me. But I can't tell that to the Fulbright committee; they need 'actual reasons,' 'stuff that sounds academic,' 'anything but finding yourself, for chrissakes, we are not hippies here.' Okay, so, an exploratory poetic mission to bring to light the problematics surrounding the 'smoothification' of cultural splitting that happens all. the. time. in the US because we're supposedly the Great White Melting Pot. Or something. But I'm still not sure how that translates into 'I need to go to the Philippines I needa needa needa.' So that I can have knowledge of both cultures, so that I am NOT victim of 'smoothification,' so that I can tell other people how to NOT be smoothed over? OKAY FINE. I need to come up with something by next week. Har har!


Okay. Windbag post over. I cleaned my whole house this weekend. More on the lovely ramifications of THAT, later. Maybe.

Giving myself a whopping five minutes to update, as I have to go to a stupid meeting and it has been a stupid week and I have stupid nostalgia for summer stupid stupid stupid.

I am a little queasy about things at the moment. I have no idea why; my workload looks considerably lighter this semester and for all practical intents and purposes I'm on the right track, uh, 'career-wise' (whateverthefuck THAT means at this point in my existence, ho hum).

I theenk, really, that it's the influx of new grad students. You know, they all know each other because they've been ReProgrammed (orientation-ed) together and I remember it being that way for ME last year but still. I am in my little claustrophobic world with 2 real gp's, one big gp, and like two people that I hang out with sort of maybe regularly. In short I am feeling mildly isolated. And when I am not new people, I am finding that I HATE NEW PEOPLE. Which sucks! Because supposedly I like people! I don't hate them AS people, I just hate the concept.

It's not you it's me I sweartagod

I will never escape being the dorky kid. I think my students this semester definitely think so already, and I've only seen them for an hour and a half. I hope to Christ they're as neat as this past summer's kids. Because really, if I get another Spring 2007 I will break kneecaps, y'all.

Must go fast! Need sleep!
Tomorrow I must wake up at the hairy butt-crack of dawn in order to drag my sorry self over to a conference on Rhetoric and Technology. I would be super excited for this if it weren't at EIGHT THIRTY IN THE MORNING. I will be listening to a presentation on blogs that I would otherwise find fascinating and will probably be nodding off. I am becoming paradoxically nocturnal - that is, I can't wake up early and I usually stay up ungodly late, and yet I hate it when it gets dark. I love the summer not because of the heat (frankly I become a total bitch when I'm hot - whereas if I'm cold I'll just shut up and shiver away), but because it stays light so late. I hate the dark. And yet I spend the majority of my waking hours in it because, if given the chance, I'd sleep till 2 every day. Maybe I should ditch this academia shit and get a job as a third shift janitor. Then I'd NEVER see the sun! Wee hoo!

In other news, I plum forgot to note that I saw Ratatouille when it came out a couple weeks back and I loved it more than I can say. Yes, angry_geologist, I realize that the plot was, uh, elementary at best. But you KNOW that you just ogled the effects the whole time anyway. Mostly I spent my time fangirling over how cute the rats were. I love rodents. Is that weird? It possibly is. The beady eyes, I heart them so. And FOODIE rats! I haven't had nearly as much time to cook as I'd like this summer, and with the billion-percentage humidity around here lately, the last thing I want to be doing is turning on all the heat-making appliances in my kitchen all at once. Ratatouille was my little fix, and I could probably watch that pixellated blue mouse run around all day and not be any less happy for it.

Okay enough with the cute. What else. Also just finished the first (I don't get HBO shut up) season of The Wire and am hooked, albeit I found the season finale a little anticlimactic. This probably had less to do with the case wrap-up than with my own stupidity - with shows like that, you could hit me over the head with a club made of PLOT SUMMARY and I still wouldn't get it. Seriously, though, has anyone seen it? This show kicks some major ass. Major, major ass. But I have no idea how they found evidence to get Avon. Still no clue. Guh.

Okay. If i don't go to bed now I will be a very grumpy conference attendee and teacher tomorrow, and no one (least of all my students, who have no sympathy for me as they have to be somewhere at 9 every day anyway) wants a grumpy Kim on a 90 degree Tuesday.

I appear to have an update in my basket. I kept thinking that it would be a good idea to update from chi-town (which is pronounced SHY-town, oh haha, I had been calling it chee-town, like a town made of cheese), but then I thought 'uh, I probably don't need an update on how weirded out I am that this house is filled with crazy sports medals that make me feel like a giant underqualified oaf.' It was an excellent trip, complete with dogs on trampolines, ME on a trampoline, Lake Michigan, Medieval Times (more on THAT later), and some good other-kid family drama. Oh and a dive bar in Rogers Park, which I kind of loved. I didn't get to go to Taste of Chicago, which is something you do when you're a damned tourist (me), and not something you do when you are actually from the area and hate all the damned tourists (that other kid and family). I am back on the Egads Coast now, and am feeling more comfortable. And by comfortable I mean sticky.

Really, I mean, I should be lesson planning! But I have to work back into the daily blogging stuff. Haha. Daily. Who am I kidding? Certainly not both of my readers.
After last semester, I feel squicky about teaching. I realize that I tried a crash course in technology without really, uh, planning it. Good on me. But I wasn't prepared for the personal attacks, the 'I hate this class so much!,' and the low rating numbers. I honestly don't think I'm a bad person. And the last thing in the whole wide world that I want to do is lose my enthusiasm for teaching, because if I do, I really have no idea what I'm doing in academia. Because god knows I don't want to spend my days holed up in some archive doing research at a big, bureaucratic institution. A small liberal arts college is the thing for me. But for that, I have to love teaching. And I want to love it. And I want to be good at it, dammit. I hope my students this semester truly see that, and are willing to work with me and be honest with me at the time, rather than letting all their frustration puddle up until it spills out in a big, messy-ass blot on my SRTEs. Ugh.

MOVING ON.
You know what has caught my attention as of late? It has apparently caught heebie_geebie's attention too, but I swear that this interest on my part was independently generated. Or something. Oh but before that I simply must link to this ridiculous piece of news - my immediate reaction was, unsurprisingly, 'uh, can you do that?' but I should think harder. Of course he can do that, because so far the amount of Constitutional violations that this administration has racked up makes allowing some snitch to walk around without shackles seem like peanuts. PEANUTS, I tell you.
At any rate. Back to my original point. I have been perusing pro-fat blogs. What is a pro-fat blog, you might ask? It is a blog that is pro-fat. As in, fat people, and fat in general, and they call themselves fat, I guess like gay people call themselves queer, and black people call themselves niggers, or whatever...all this taking-back-the-term shit has my head spinning. Regardless, there are a growing number of these blogs, and scholars (in all true senses of the word) that are beginning to poke and prod at the notions that society has about fat people (society = American/European, i.e. white people, i.e. the folks we're all supposed to hate because they're privileged. Or something). Perhaps  one of the most prominent examples of this is fat fu, which contains links to such sites of note as Big Fat Blog and others.
MMMkay.
Let me get the nasty out of the way first - I'm not fat. In fact, I'm thin. I'm pretty much underweight. So perhaps I have no right to be saying any of this; perhaps I should just take my societally accepted, fatless ass and go the hell home. But I have developed some pretty strong beefs with some of what these pro-fat ranters are saying. OH NO! First a list, to avoid anyone thinking that I am some sort of pro-ana crazyface.

1. I thoroughly believe that social standards for weight are for the birds
2. Ad campaigns like this one make me near-physically sick
3. I am revolted by pro-ana communities, most women's magazines, and most cosmetic surgeons
4. I believe that the obesity 'epidemic' in this country and others have been deliberately inflated by certain communities in order to boost such enterprises as The Diet Industry In General, and Surgeons Who Have A Thing For Stomach Stapling Etc. Shame on THEM.

HOWEVER.
I am becoming steadily more annoyed with what I read on pro-fat outlets. Why is this, you self-absorbed, thin, 'acceptable-normal' bitch, you might ask? Well. I love being snarky as much as the next person, and I love disabusing people of their conventionally held beliefs. And I love the fact that pro-fat bloggers and confident in their health and their body shape. Hell, I wish I could be as confident as THEY are. But I also come from a family of doctors. My stock is medical, and my parents are some of the most reasonable, intelligent, benevolent people on the planet, and when my dad goes in to work every damn day, I wish I could drape him with a superhero cape, because that is what he is in my eyes. A goddamn superhero. So when these pro-fat people start marching around and denouncing the AMA in its entirety (there's probably an even better example of sweeping generalization in there somewhere, but hey, I'm pressed for time), I start to get my proverbial panties in a bunch.
Yes, I realize that obesity is fast becoming one of those blanket terms that's fucking everything up. But don't tell me that if you can't get up a flight of stairs without panting like a dog, something ain't wrong. Genetics are well and good, but don't even try to TELL me that your genetics make it acceptable for you to eat shitty food and lay around on your ass all day. Diets don't work, agreed, but don't snub your nose at me when I think it might not be a bad idea to eat more fruit and less potato chips. And for fuck's sake, STOP MAKING ME FEEL LIKE SHIT BECAUSE MY GENETICS DICTATE THAT I'M SKINNY!
This, I believe, is the issue that really gets under my skin. It's the time-tested method of 'you hate me, so I'm going to hate you all right back,' and frankly, it makes a lot of these pro-fat blogs just sound like a bunch of insecure women lashing out at anything and anyone they can in order to make themselves feel less shitty. That's not the point. The point is to debunk the real myths, expose the specific people behind the myths, feel GOOD in your body even if your BMI (which I think is bunk) is 42, and to make society realize that healthy and fat are NOT mutually exclusive! Can't the pro-fats all fucking do this without insulting me, my family, my logic, my values, and my body? Can't they?
*cough*
That's enough rant for one day, thaaaank you. I have as much beef with society as the next person, but oof.

Uh, I am tuckered out from all that, which will probably, if word gets out, inspire a lot of people to publicly denounce me right here on this blog. I can't wait.