(no subject)

So I spent over 15 hours on a Law & Order set, didn't get to see the girl on Vday and in the course of the day found that more than one of all of you is in a great deal of pain, so profoundly not of your own makings.

I believe all of us, every day, sell ourselves short, because we really do embody more miracles and possibilities we can imagine. I'd venture to say that most people, and certainly probably all of you on my friends list, get this on some level in whatever way you choose to frame it, and struggle against it righteously. This is what makes us human and divine.

We are all always better than our circumstances, but that is a condemnation neither of the world around us, nor of ourselves, even at the times of great sorrow, confusion, inaction, wrath -- what have you -- as long as we struggle against it.

I think we all wish with varying frequencies we were better, but that is not a bad thing and also doesn't mean for a second we are not astounding.

And that's my really fucking tired sentiment for the day.

nothing to declare

So, as previously noted, I have recently acquired a new dentist. He's a great dentist, his prices are a little better than many, and I'd give out the recommendation any day of the week. Before I continue, please note that my dental phobia is extraordinarily severe; if I've found someone I'm comfortable with treating me, I cannot just choose to go somewhere else. Which unfortunately means accepting or addressing a little problem, not unique to this particular practioner. So don't, for the love of all small gods, tell me to change dentists. That's not the answer to this story.

I am not bullimic. In fact, I have morbid, nearly phobic feelings about vomitting and have done so only three or four times in my life (not enumerating multiple nstances within two specific medical events counted within that three or four). However, the specific condition of my teeth as arrived at through a highly acidic diet, severe night-time grinding, 7.5 years of braces and bad genetics, does lead dentists to inquire if I am or have been bullimic. I don't take offense at this, as I'm very clear on how the question is arrived at, and it is a medical query of legitimate concern.

The problem ensues when I explain why they think that and why it's not the case. They don't believe me. They insist I protest too much. Sometimes, they will lecture me about relatives (who may or may not exist) who don't have eating disorders per se but were so worried about calories they just kept popping life savers to keep them going while they tried not to eat. Maybe that's what I'm doing, they ask.

I've never been anorexic either.

Not that I haven't been accused of these things before. (I want to pause here to talk about the word accused. I get than an eating disorder is a disease, not a weakness of character, but that understanding doesn't change the tone of these exchanges that have appeared throughout my life, so my using the word is not about my feelings about eating disorders but the way in which other people present their feelings about them to me. I think it's a digusting way to address an eating disorder to someone, whether or not they have one, and it's part of the problem I am coming to. Please, I don't want to be the villain of this tale; I've lost friends to it before).

I am, for the record, 5'6" with a weight that is generally somewhere betwen 110 and 120 lbs, depending on all sorts of factors -- hormones, exercise, what I'm eating, schedule, health. I have never counted calories except during times I was so poor I was afraid I wasn't consuming enough. When I first reached this height I weighed less than 100 lbs, and then sat at about 103 for years. I danced, had sort of only half gone through puberty. It wasn't a big deal. I ate like a horse and that's how it was. But you know what girls at camp said. Girls and school and old man doctors. Isn't that how it always works? For what my body has always been, I'm the right shape and size and weight for my height. It's not something I worry about, and believe me, I know that's a blessing on many fronts.

So I am not offended when the dentist asks me if I have an eating disorder.

But I am offended when he doesn't believe me when I reply. If I were a man, with these teeth, he would ask the question still. But I suspect he would believe me when I answered. Maybe it's not that I'm a woman (and this is so noted as he drops hints about how women think being too skinny is attractive, but it's not, trying to lure me into confession), maybe it's because he knows I'm an actor. Sadly, I'd like to think so. it offends me less.

But there is more to the dilemma, the aggravation, the sorrow, and let's be frank, the intense rage, I feel about this, the perils of being a woman in search of medical care. Considering a number of things about my nature, it would be somewhat unfair of me to offended by someone probing to see if I were a liar, because, after all, like everyone, I often am.

There is something else the repeated doubt says to me, and that is is that I don't, in the doctor's eyes, deserve this body. That I couldn't possibly have come by it honestly, whether through genetics, hard work or dumb luck. That a woman like me, with a mouth or a face like mine, just doesn't deserve such a socially valuable thing (and believe me, I'm aware of that, even if my own aesthetic preferneces do not particularly line up with that world view), and as such, could only possess it through pathology or deceit.

I have made and do make so much of my living and my art through my flesh, so to imply that it is not mine, that I am unworthy of it, that it is a lie or a falsehood, is a slap in my face. The first thing I was ever praised for was my ability to express myself through dance -- not my intelligence, not my writing, but my flesh, my certitude. I live in it so fully, when there have been so many good reasons to try to pull away from it -- health, accusation, and the pure beauty of my rather complicated fantasy lives. It's so utterly what I am, even my too thin and too long arms which when I look at them cause me to realize I often cannot fathom what use I could possibly have in this world not made for ethereal things.

People will always believe what they want to believe, and hear what they want to hear, and my flesh has always been suspect in some fashion or other (which I think is something all women could say before defining their meaning across so broad a spectrum it frightens me), but I'm a prideful creature in so many ways, including my willingness to enumerate my flaws. But there's no trade I can make, no sins I can declare to stop what is ultimately irelevant and condescending questioning. This is what it means to be in a non-dominant social grouping -- you are not just a transgessor, but _the_ transgressor, emblematic of everyone who looks or lives like you, both when you succeed (taking something you have no right to) and when you fail (being a burden on others).

I'll let you do the Miltonesque pondering on your own time, but so often it is the pettiest things that make being a woman feel like you've lost a war you can't even remember fighting.

on an entirely seperate note: Lost

can I just say that while it was inevitable that I'd find a character like Sayid interesting and that I've always been fond of Navine Andrews, that the combination of this actor and this role is just one of the most riveting characters ever?