Bethany the Martian

This really just bums me out.

A woman who was looking forward to her wedding went on a crash diet, lost approximately 48 pounds, and died before her wedding.  The diet consisted of 530 calories a day.  She saw her doctor twice while she was trying to starve herself into a smaller wedding dress.  The cause of death was unclear, although cardiac arrhythmia is likely.

But this made me mad:

A LighterLife spokesman said although Miss Clowe’s BMI had reduced from 37 to 32 when she died, she was ’still clinically obese’ and ‘her health may have already been compromised.’

He added:’We were very sad to hear the news about Samantha. The coroner said Samantha was clinically obese which increased the risk of cardiac death.

‘It had been suggested that there was a possible link to the diet but the coroner said it was very difficult to make such a connection.’

Let me put it the way I heard it: well, it’s sad she died but she started out fat.  Sure it’s not the fat that did it?  I mean, yeah, we’ve had deaths associated with our diet before and sure, she’d seen a doctor twice and yeah, she was sort of starving herself to death, but her BMI was 32!

So, uh, gonna go eat something before I rage too much.  My thoughts are with her family and the man she was going to marry- this can’t be easy for them.

Twitter had a #whatnottowear thing going last night, and I contributed.  Here’s my little contribution, and an expansion:

#whatnottowear if it doesn’t fit, doesn’t feel right on you, you don’t feel good in it, you don’t like it, don’t wear it.

Don’t wear something because it’s trendy if you don’t feel good in it.  Don’t wear something because it’s supposed to be slimming- good god no.

Whenever you go clothes-shopping, do not compromise.  Don’t get something just because it fits- if you put it on and it fits great and you love it, that’s fine.  But don’t buy it just because it has the ability to wrap around your ass- especially if it’s a big ass.  Trust me, I’m an expert on big asses.  I bought jeans that fit me but I didn’t like, and I only wore them when everything else was dirty.  Not only is it awful to wear something you don’t like, it’s a waste of fucking money.

I’m going to repeat this- do not compromise.  If tights under skirts go out of style, but you like wearing it, keep wearing it.  I think I will- tights help with the chub chafing, and the right (nuclear powered) kind can even smooth the lumps out a bit.  Really flared jeans haven’t been in style for a while- boot cut are still okay, but we really have gone back to skinny jeans.  I don’t like skinny jeans, I don’t feel good in them, so I don’t fuckin wear them.  (There are girls who look great in them and to this I say: rock it!)  I do feel good in flared jeans- I just made my first pair since I graduated, and man did I feel awesome wearing those bad boys around.  I’ve got four more pairs of jeans to do that way, and I’m just trying to decide what fabric to use.

And if you don’t feel awesome and sexy, at least feel warm and comfy.  If you wear your jammies to the store, I won’t tell.  You should see mine.

I’ve been thinking for days for something to say about Fat Acceptance that other people haven’t said better, but I think it’s come down to this: the day I quit hating my body was the day that I realized I would never escape being ‘big’.

I have a friend, she’s tall like an amazon with large hips and large shoulders.  And not in the ’she’s tubby’ way, either.  She’s a knockdown gal who’s got miles of leg.  She’s just broader than a lot of girls her height are built.

So here’s this gorgeous woman, she’s much taller than me and she’s very broad across.  You can see her shoulders and where the bones are, as well as her pelvic bones.  We felt to where my hips start, and my hips at the bone are broader across than hers.  And I’m a good 4 inches shorter than she is.  (And yes, I can feel where my bones are under all that lard.)

The punchline is no matter how much weight I’ll lose I can’t get around that I’m a short gal with a broad disposition.  My brother’s short and broad too- we realized that looking at his army graduation video.  He’s, like, twice as broad as most other guys around him.  We’d never noticed because my shoulders are nearly as broad, and so are my friends, and my very tall boyfriends.  We all come from fairly similar genetic stock (okay, my boyfriend doesn’t have nearly as much German, but he comes from a Tall family and he’s just built bigger than a lot of people.)  We’re all big people, and so it took comparing my brother to a whole bunch of other young and fit kids to realize that not only was HE huge compared to others, so were we.

That was kind of the snapping poing, the moment where I realized that bone-thin I’d be way too fat for a lot of people.  And god, who wants to be bone thin?  I like my padding, I like being squishy.  I’ll admit that I would rather not be quite as squishy as I am, but it’s becoming more and more for pretty superficial reasons.  Jeans are harder to find, as is underwear.  So are bras, but if my mom was a DDD at size 4 I just don’t see much hope for THAT ever becoming a non issue.  Not without surgery.

That could have been much crazier.  It started to rain about half-way through the day, and for some reason when water falls out of the sky it makes people desire pizza.

So I’m home this evening, considering the money I made and vaguely watching a Vincent Price movie.  (Theater of Blood.  I’m a fan of ‘inventive ways of killing people’ movies that star my favorite tall guy.)  I made decent money for a day like today, not fabulous money, but decent money.

I also have a terrible headache, my teeth are causing me problem due to sinus pressure.  It’s frustrating because there’s just not much I can do.  I just gotta hurt, and I sorta want to run headfirst into a wall over the whole thing.

I’ve also been having weird- I don’t know that I’d call them nightmares, they’re more like daydreams.  But they’re not voluntary.  Day-nightmares?  Daymares?  Possible hallucinations brought on by stress?  Anyway, I kept having these flashes of someone showing up at my work and shooting me.  I don’t know why, and they were quite involuntary.  If I daydream, I prefer for it to be about…. oh, anything besides that.

I didn’t think they were real, so they likely weren’t hallucinations.  Waking nightmares is the best way to put them, I suppose.  I dunno, but I find them exceedingly odd.

I have a love/hate relationship with OU games.  Well, more like tolerate/hate.  I can make decent money but on the other hand they SUCK BALLS.  Pedestrains just wander in the street, oblivious to any traffic or, you know, anything at all.  A lot of the drivers act like they’ve never seen the fucking road before.  There are plenty of streets that magically become ‘only one car can fit and fuck you’ streets.  Did I mention other drivers act like they suddenly appeared behind the will, as if by divine act, without the actual ability to drive?

There’s a lot of prep to be done- we spend most of our day making dough.  If any onions have to be done, I spend the day miserable due to a mild onion allergy that isn’t bad enough to let me off but is awful enough to cause pain and temporary blindness due to my eyes swelling.

There are situations in which I can stand cooked onions, but as far as I’m concerned if I never have to touch another raw onion for the rest of my life, I’ll be happy.

The problem is that we often have a lot more people so we end up doing a whole lot of extra work for the same, or sometimes less, money as a normal day shift.  so I really could do without them, but on the other hand, the night crew makes an assload of money.  I kind of miss being on the night crew, but I like all of th epeople I work with during the day.  It’s nice to know that I can get along with everyone, and I do know their honest opinions of me.  It’s not entirely flattering, but I like knowing for sure if someone likes me, if they think I’m slow, what have you.  (For the record, general opinion holds that I’m slower than most of the good day-shifters, but I’m steady, don’t have to be told what to do, I’m generally on time and I normally don’t whine without reason so I fit into the ‘good’ category.)

It’s just kind of frustrating, I think, because I used to work evening shifts and I always made more money, but I really am not quite fast enough to be on the night crew.  It gets way busier after dark, and I understand they need people who are willing to break land-speed records to get pizza there and back.  I try to go only five miles an hour or so above the speed limit (actually, I’m painfully rule-adherent whilst I deliver.  This is probably my greatest weakness.)

‘Tomorrow is liable to be madness in a bag.  I’ll try to keep my twitter updated with acerbic comments, but I guarantee nothing.  Depends on how long tomorrow stretches, and how sadistic the night manager decides to be.

School year’s started and between school and work (which generally revolves around school- delivering pizza on campus, natch) I’ve kinda been busy.  I keep meaning to write and forgetting like a big dummy.  I’m working on a review of Repo! The Genetic Opera but it’s been slow in coming, and I think it’s mostly because I’m trying to do, like, eleventybajillion things at once.  Also, I’m hungry.

Have no fear though, developement continues on my new website and blog.  There have been some things that have been distracting, but I think we got past most of those.  I’ve been Twittering (for those of you who get here from Twitter- most of you- I’ve been busy the last few days, but expect full-on Twittering from now on) and I’m starting to grow fond of the ’say the most you can in 140 characters’.   I view it as a writing challenge when I’m feeling perky.

So I guess this is another update on future updates whereupon there will be more updates, but I just like writing so people know I didn’t just drop off the face of the damn planet.

I did manage to get my old job of delivering pizza back, which is a huge relief.  We dyed my hair purple in celebration- yes, there will be pictures today or tomorrow- and I’ve been sitting in a big bath of relief.

My friend and I also recently got out own domain and hosting and everything, so soon I’ll be moving my blog there.  We’ll also have more content than just my blog, she and I will do written movie reviews (she doesn’t know this yet. Heh.) as well as making fun of Twilight.  We also have a fiction project lined up that we’re both really excited about.

So, yeah, coming soon is what this boils down to.