Lilith Saintcrow

Just when one makes a good resolution, the world sets itself to kick said resolution right in the pants. I mean, it’s nothing really. This week was just the week I’d been working for months to get to, the five-day-a-week mark when it comes to working out. I was all set to do speed training.

Then along comes the dry arctic wind and the struggle to stay warm, plus the stress of weekend-before-last, and my body decides: Bitch, please. You are going to pour cranberry juice down like it’s going out of style, sleep for ten hours, and wake up with colored snot and body aches, not to mention a slight fever. You don’t like it? Tough. I’m the body, and what I say goes.

I knew, when I started coughing a bit last night, that something was up. So I went to bed early and slept like a log. Which means this morning the cold is still threatening, not actually doing anything new. That threat, however, is enough.

Yeah. So, I’m trying to battle the cough off. Which means no running today. I did manage to get the shovelgloving in, though. So today is not quite a total loss. But Jesus I feel like I’ve been run over.

Oh well. When I started this fitness thing I decided I was going to look at it this way: I am going to have to do exercise every weekday, one way or another, for the rest of my life. It is part of having a body, and I really really do not want to have someone else’s voice in my head, running my life and telling me I’m ugly. So, I can afford to be gentle with my body when it’s sick. It’s not like it’s going to matter when stacked against the years of me getting up and doing the workouts.

The seduction of this viewpoint is that I could start thinking a few days off doesn’t matter since I’m going to start up again “tomorrow”. Which is something I have to avoid like the plague. I get days off for injury, holiday, or sickness. Other than that, nada. See, I know my own capacity for procrastination. I do not want to go back to not working out. That felt awful.

Working out feels good. It took me decades to figure out what I wanted from working out, and to figure out the right set of reasons to do it, and to figure out that my body isn’t the enemy. It’s the friend that will be with me all my life, and I need to take care of my friends. They are, after all, very rare[1].

It’s hard when you’ve been taught your body is the ugly enemy all your life. It’s terribly hard to reclaim your own beauty. We’re told our bodies should be skinny like a preteen boy’s, hairless, poreless, meat in the service of the male norm. I know guys feel some pressure on their body images from media too, but women get the shorter end of the stick. (Because guys, you’re still the norm women are judged against. And you’re who we’re supposed to be hairless, poreless, skinny, virgin, and whore for all at once. And let’s not forget mother.)

Which is why I threw away the old bathroom scale we had out in the garage. I don’t want a single one of those things in my house fucking up my self-esteem or my daughter’s. I want her to know I’m working out because I want to be strong, not skinny. I don’t care if I’m pear-shaped all my life–but I’m going to be a strong pear shape. I’m going to be able to sledgehammer zombies, run hard and fast, and kick the ass of anyone who messes with me or my kids. This is what my working out is for–not so I can live up to some ideal that keeps changing, an “ideal” that is only meant to take the money from my pockets. (And at seventy-five cents to the dollar every male earns, I’ve got to be a lot more careful where my cash goes. And if you tell me that last twenty-five cents is because we get preggers and can’t work, I’ll just point out that when we get pregnant we’re continuing the human race and raising more consumers to keep the effing economy going. We deserve to get paid for that–or at the very least, not penalized. But that’s another blog post.)

I felt so liberated when I threw that scale out. I just wish I would have killed it with the sledgehammer first. HARD.

Reclaiming one’s beauty is a hard thing. Because we have so many voices who want to tell us we’re ugly and powerless, and we neeeeed them to fiiiiiix it by handing over money/power/sex/what-have-you. Those voices creep into my head and whisper that I’m ugly and worthless and need to be somehow fixed, and it’s hard to dispute them because they insidiously feel like my own thoughts after a while–because they’ve been repeated so often, from so many sources.

But they are not my own thoughts. They are damaging, toxic leftovers other people want me to think, for a variety of reasons. It serves the interests of a lot of people to make women’s bodies and minds their own worst enemies. Mothers don’t have to feel bad about their own wasted dreams if they pass on the damage, ad companies and diet companies and makeup companies and fashion companies get paid, toxic “friends” get a flush of ersatz self-confidence by putting other people down, predatory men[1] get victims, the self-help industry gets to make even more of a mint telling us what’s “wrong” with us. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Screw all that. I want my beauty back. I want my beauty and strength reclaimed. If it’s an uphill battle when I’m feeling sick or down, well, nothing worth having comes without hard work. I’ve learned that much by this age, at least.

But all that is a long-term thing. Today in the short term I’m nursing that cold and keeping the house warm. And reminding myself that my beauty–our beauty–is always there. We may forget it, but like the presence of the Divine it is intrinsic. It does not go away just because we cover it or forget it. It takes so little to honor it, to uncover and remember it. Just a very little bit of effort. So much of being ugly to each other is feeling ugly ourselves and striking out against it, when there’s no need. Taking the small effort to uncover and reclaim our own beauty can save us from being ugly to each other and to ourselves.

That’s a grand thing, and it’s worth spending that few moments every day on. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I have to blow my nose. That cold, she is preparing to kick my ass if I don’t drink more cranberry juice and take some rest.

Over and out.

[1] The word “friend” is bandied about a lot. It can mean acquaintance, buddy, person you know, or any number of things. Context is sometimes not sufficient to figure out which meaning–but that’s another blog post.
[2] Note I’m not saying all men. I’m saying PREDATORY men, and they’re out there. Don’t set up a straw man argument about how I hate men, mmkay? I like men. I gave birth to one, I’m raising two, and I’ve dated and married a few of them. There are predators among men as a whole–and a lot of opportunistic almost-predators get tipped over into ACTUAL predators because victims (of both genders) are so handy in our culture. If you DO choose to set up that straw man, be prepared to have your comment nuked without warning. Nuff said.

Bulleted List! Because I am not coherent right now.

* This week is all about checking out Redemption Alley copyedits, eyeing the very-very-last PDF proof of the YA, and taking a break from other stuff to write some shorts. I need the break, quite frankly. Flesh Circus and NaNo both ran through me and left me dry with a bad pain in my head. Guh.

* Getting back on the treadmill this morning was hard. Thirty minutes of running, even at my snail’s pace, was hard. Now that it’s over, though, I’m actually feeling pretty good–freshly washed, and finally caffeinated. I swear to God I can feel the blessed caffeine soaking into my tissues. It’s glorious.

* I had originally planned to do a lot of website work last week. I’d forgotten about, what was it, oh yeah, that two-day orgy of cooking and cleaning that was Thanksgiving. *headdesk*

* I actually heard from the editor about Flesh Circus. I was really worried about the book because, well, it turned out weird and I was trying new things and ZOMG I have a total freak-out every time I send a book in anyway. But it’s fine, she liked it, and any fiddles or indiscretions are very fixable.

* This last weekend was not as relaxing as it should have been. For some reason I’ve been on tenterhooks, as if disaster is looming over my shoulder. I’ve figured out it’s the usual way I feel about the holidays. I saw Christmas lights going up all over and felt that sick stomach-drop of fear and tension all over again. Thanksgiving actually went really well–the best it’s gone in years–and my task this holiday season is to be gentle with myself and start finding ways to make it enjoyable and low-stress. If I figure out how to do it, believe me, I will shout it from the rooftops.

* I finished a couple books this weekend and started Robert Service’s biography of Stalin. Reading that in chunks with Gender, State And Society In Soviet And Post-Soviet Russia interspersed is actually really interesting.

* About the Stalin biography: I’ve been kicking around a question inside my head. The question in its simplest form is this: do dictators (especially dictators of ideological and totalitarian states) ACTUALLY believe in the Revolution/State/religion/whatever? What percentage is die-hard believer and what percentage is cold-blooded sociopath mouthing the slogans? How do they deal with the cognitive dissonance between the grandiosity and pomp dictators go in for and the rhetoric of struggle and sacrifice they all seem to mouth with regularity? How do they justify living high on the hog when their policies lead to mass starvation/privation? IS there any cognitive dissonance or justification going on inside their heads, or do they accept the perks of power just as a matter of course because they’re special Right Men?

See, I have this theory that a lot of petty family dictators are Right Men, and I’m curious how far the dynamic extends to totalitarian dictators. I’m still kicking the idea around and it’s pretty fuzzy, which is why it comes out in such a glorpy mess. Thoughts are welcome–what do you think about this?

* Speaking of stuff I finished over the weekend, DAMN YOU KAIGOU! I just got around to reading books 1 and 2 of Bride of the Water God and now I CANNOT WAIT for #3 to be out. It’s amazing, the art is great and I like the story. The art is actually better than great. I like it almost as much as I like Lanny Liu’s stuff. *shakes fist* You have addicted me, evil Kaigou. I love you.

* That’s about it. I’m putting off working, can you tell? Off I go to proofread. Loads of fun. I really want to take a day off but I would feel guilty if I did. And I did have the whole weekend off–well, mostly, I did poke at some stuff because I felt bad about not working.

*facepalm* I am a nut.

Over and out.

The world is barren enough.

With your knowledge that life, with endless vigor, seems to tilt the playing field on which we all live, in favor of unhappiness and hate… this is what your heart tells you to do? You want to sanctify marriage? You want to honor your God and the universal love you believe he represents? Then Spread happiness — this tiny, symbolic, semantical grain of happiness — share it with all those who seek it. Quote me anything from your religious leader or book of choice telling you to stand against this. And then tell me how you can believe both that statement and another statement, another one which reads only “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” –Keith Olbermann

I could not agree more. The world is indeed barren enough.

One of the reasons I do not identify myself as Christian is because of this very issue–no, not gay marriage, but the underlying hypocrisy. People cherry-pick quotes from the Bible to justify whatever hate they feel like slinging today. They quote the Old Testament’s jealous, insecure god (with a need for praise greater than an adolescent male’s, as Ruth Hurmence Green so memorably put it) and conveniently forget that Christ hung out with the hookers and the lepers, the people he wasn’t supposed to even touch as a good Jewish boy. Those Christians who do espouse love (pun definitely intended) are so few and far between, and they usually meet bad ends at the hands of the established hierarchy. The religion (as most monotheistic religions do) relies on a division of Good vs. Evil, Us vs. Them, Kill Them First, Hate Hate Hate.

Then there’s the threat of hell if you don’t toe the line. Look, the divine love that engenders all is not going to send you to Hell. You can (and probably will) create your own hell while you live and after you die; that’s well within your purview as a human being. But God(s) doesn’t need Hell.

What parent WANTS to torture their child endlessly? A very, very bad one. And I cannot believe the Divine is a bad parent. A sarcastic one sometimes, a parent with an adolescent sense of humor sometimes, but not a bad one. Not a sadistic one, to punish us over and over again for choices made with “free will”. The fiction of eternal punishment is a lie told to keep us paying, praying, afraid, isolated, and powerless.

The world is indeed so very barren enough. Every chance of love and commitment should be cherished. Not bashed in the head by hypocrites (and let’s not even talk about the Mormon church, those who brought us polygamy and the Mountain Meadows Massacre, bankrolling this hatred and hypocrisy about the “sanctity” of marriage). It constantly amazes me that so many so-called Christians, as well as others who consider themselves “religious” or “spiritual”, have entirely forgotten the “do unto others” and the “love thy neighbor” parts of their holy one’s teachings.

I guess it must be easier to hate. But isn’t there ENOUGH hatred in the world already? Can we not add to it? Please? The fire is large and it will take so long to burn itself out. We don’t need to fuel it more.

Still sick but getting better. Coughing a bit, but the nose has largely stopped trying to flood the rest of my face. Fever gone down. Today is my last day of rest before I go back to my regular workout schedule–I’ve been shovelgloving the past few days to keep myself together, and to get myself moving and get the crud worked out.

I feel like the sickness has broken in more ways than one. I listened to both speeches last night–McCain’s concession and Obama’s celebratory. Do not read further unless you want to hear my opinion. You’ve been warned.

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Big question for the week. Why on earth do we do what we do? More to the point, I’ve been talking about craft a lot lately and not so much about the whys and wherefores. And this morning, while slogging away on the treadmill, I started thinking about why we write.

Bear in mind I’m philosophical today.

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