a giant among zeroes

Here I sit, sipping my second glass of wine, giddy not just with alcohol, but with accomplishment. Today, I did what few can do without running the risk of nervous breakdown or spontaneous combustion. I bought pants.

This may seem like an ordinary task to you. In theory, it's not really a big deal. Go to a store that sells pants, and buy a pair. But in practice, it has caused me five weekends of stress and borderline body dysmorphic disorder. Take one sane, relatively-happy-with-her-body, non-dieting cake lover, put her in a changeroom with seven pairs of jeans, and watch her unravel. I'm still scratching my head trying to figure out how it all happened...

It started with the first weekend. My favouritest pair of jeans, that had served me and my bottom very well for almost four years crapped out. I was devastated. I mean, it takes months of amateur gymnastics(bends, stretches, lunges) to soften the rigidity of spanking new denim into comfy submission. But I took it on the chin, and went to my old haunt, Kensington Market, to see if I could scavenge myself a pair of orange tab 517's. It was a beautiful, unusually sunny day, and the Market cast its usual spell of sensory overload upon me. Even the stench of the fish monger stalls that we all try to pretend doesn't bother us didn't bother me. I was feeling good, I was feeling positive. I wandered in and out of various stores, tried on ill fitting jeans in cramped and musty curtained corners. I wasn't phased by my lack of success. Any seasoned Market go-er will tell you it takes patience and perseverance.

And I did persevere, over and over and over again. Impatience mounted. And mounted. And mounted. I even braved Eaton's Center(on a weekend!) It was there, on a Saturday afternoon, in the flourescent hell of a Gap changeroom, that I discovered that not only had all the pants in the mall been shrunk prior to my getting there, but that all the mirrors in the mall had been warped prior to my getting there. Something happens when you get infront of a changeroom mirror. Things become apparent that you wish would stay hidden...Like the Tom Selleck worthy mustache you'd always affectionately called "peach fuzz". Or those extra winter-pounds you've been shrugging off as "water retention". Vanity sizing did little to soothe me, if anything it irritated me with its assumption of my vain ignorance. (Hey, clothing companies, vanity sizing only works if no one actually knows about it!)

Me, a tiny room, bad lighting and a pair of jeans. Somehow, this was all it took to undo years of self-worth affirmations and self-esteem building.

As a young girl, I was very thin. And the thing I learned early on was that my thinness was a source of envy. Having always been thin, I'd never given it much thought. But after passing virtually every day with at least one(envious) comment on my size, I came to equate it with my worth as a person. Being a complete nerd, it was pretty much the only positive feedback I received from my peers. It did a lot of damage. Not only did I become obsessed with staying skinny, but when puberty and its inevitable weight gain hit me, I was traumatized and filled with self- loathing. I became terrified of food. It lasted years. Years of determining the relationship of calories and metabolism. Of over- and under-feeding myself. Of chasing the elusive carrot of the model body.

I can say now with some pride that I eventually tired of that struggle. I eat what I want. I don't talk about fat content, I don't shun carbs. But I can't say with all honesty, or without a little saddness, that I am entirely above being seduced by the idea of being the physical ideal. I am not completely removed from the fact that if I stopped eating cake or chocolate, I would be thinner, and closer to the shape of the fashion industry that tantalizes men and terrorizes women. There are legions of us in denial about our attentiveness to body image. We want to be thin, but we don't want to seem like we do. It's uncool to talk about your body, no one wants to hear it because it usually reminds them of their own physical grievances. So we pretend everything is okay, that we are living in a post-feminist society well beyond the battle of the body beautiful. You can avoid carbs and fat and call it allergies or food sensitivities. You can imitate celebrities who are always proclaiming they don't work out and live on cheeseburgers and ice cream(because really, the horseshoes of metabolic luck are only bestowed on the rich and gorgeous) and no one will call you on it, because so many of us are doing the exact same thing...

Who do we take to task for this rampant demoralization based on physicality? Advertising agencies? The fashion industry? Ourselves? Is there any one guilty party? Or are we just buying into the idea that if we are as near as possible to aesthetic perfection, we won't be as prone to loneliness or depression or mortal concerns, like dying alone, unloved, untouched, in our size ten(but really size twelve) pants...

I guess all I can do is hope for a day when our society commends women for what they do with their hearts and brains and guts, and not for how little physical space they take up. When our empowerment as women comes from the assertions of our rights to equality and respect.

Me, I'm taking on the fight. One badly-lit changeroom at a time.

stones in my shoes

I remember being little, about five or so, and sitting at the dining room table trying to stifle yawns at one of my parents' dinner parties. My chubby cheeks had been pinched raw and lipsticked with the greeting of the guests, and I was anxious to have cake and go to my room. One of the guests turned to me, smiling;"So, tell me, what do you want to be when you grow up?"

Oh dear.

It was that question. The question adults feel compelled to ask kids, usually for entertainment purposes. The thing was, I'd been asked it before, and I always just shrugged and said "I dunno", because I honestly couldn't see that far ahead. But this time, the answer shot out of my mouth, clear as a bell, startling even me with its decisiveness;

"I want to be a lunchroom teacher."

The adults roared with laughter, and my cheeks burned with shame. I didn't understand their reaction, because my answer was delivered with complete earnestness. Once the swell of embarrassment subsided, it was explained to me that there was no such job(and if there was, you'd have to be union). I moved on to loftier career aspirations after that. And kept them to myself.

But what if that night was a signpost, one reading "Simple life, a million km away"? Was my answer an inadvertant display of unambitiousness? Was it a precursor to my desire for a life less complicated by corporate snakes and ladders, glass ceilings, and colour-collared workforces? A yearning for a life peppered with the love of friends and family, a cute apartment, a dog, and the constant feeding of my insatiable lust for armchair anthropology? I told myself I was content to waitress the rest of my days, so long as I had the freedom to figure myself out. It seemed a fair trade, a bit of financial hardship for some emotional integrity.

The principle that work is a part of your life, not the sole governing force has always guided my hand when making life choices. I loved learning, but I hated school. I dropped out several times, for several years, and had no interest in going to university or college to find a career. I figured it would be an even larger-scale, socially apocalyptic nightmare than high school (And you had to pay, thousands of dollars for the privalege of your suffering!) No, I was content to coast along the periphery of bottom end jobs, relatively unskilled, because while they offered no real security or stimulation, at least there was always a multitude of them to choose from to stave off boredom. And while I lacked a structured learning environment, I took it upon myself to read and absorb the life that was going on all around me, to live through observation, trial and (numerous) error. I assumed it would suffice.

But it hasn't.

Lately, I have been overcome with the panic of having immobilized myself with the wrong choices in life. I take it to bed like a joyless lover, I wake up to its unwelcome face. It sits in my guts like indigestion;
Didn't go to school.
Never took up a trade.
Wasted education money on trip to France.
Friends all have careers or are in school.
Am nearing thirty, live alone in basement.

Snippets of pitiful self-doubt float around my mouth, too afraid to be spoken. I make myself feel heavy with my alarming lack of direction. My wants for a simple life grow in proportion with my wants for nicer furniture, for a pet, for a life above ground and beyond fear. My concept of "simple" has reached new heights of complexity because of this. And I feel tired, dead, dog-tired by the pace of life in this city, a city whose pace of life has far exceeded its inhabitants' capacity to live it. To fulfill even the most unmaterialistic want is expensive. And the bottom end jobs are paying the bills, but creating a far greater emotional deficit. I don't feel accomplished, or enriched by what I do for money. I don't feel I'm doing anything of real social value beyond being as decent and kind a person as I can be. Like a lot of big-city folks, I live in the universe of my own backyard, and the gate is rusting on its hinges, making it very hard to open.

So here I sit, once again, with my panicky confusion. Scratching my head, trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. I try to navigate my way through the human traffic along downtown Toronto streets, with honking cars, rising dust, heapfuls of hope and bellyfulls of unsureness. In the parallel universes of dreams and real life, the questions remain the same. Do we ever really grow up? Or do we just grow into lives anchored by the gravity of other people and their expectations of us? Is there peace and quiet if we follow the prescribed course of education, profession, marriage, and parenthood? Is there internal chaos and lifelong regret if we don't?

I don't know, I really don't know. I hope the answers will come someday. And till they do, I will tread in these thought-provoking, heavy shoes, and try not to trip on the cracks.

the deep end of the swimming pool

When I was little, my mom took me and my sister to swimming classes at the Y. I always felt apprehension, as we sat on the deck by the deep end. There was a feeling of chlorinated unease, of churning, rippling infinity as I looked down into the water. I recognized this as fear. One day, as all of us little dolphins-in-training were practicing our splashing and paddling, our teacher took away the security of the bouyant flutter boards we'd been using, the natural progression in learning how to swim. When it was my turn to venture into the unknown, I panicked. I began to sink. Water got up my nose. I coughed. And choked. And wept. My teacher was unmoved by my fear, and after several long minutes of my suffering, my mother stormed onto the deck from the upstairs gallery where she was watching, tongue-lashed the instructor, and took me home. My fear of deep water remains where I left it that day, complete with irrational fantasies of sharks and evil water urchins waiting to pull me under and hold me down.

Fear of the unknown depths has followed me into my personal life as well. I am not alone in this, although the universality of my fear does little to dilute its potency. Having been shy most of my so-far days, I've been scared of the possibility of being misjudged, misread, mistreated. People have been my deep water. Like most of us, I've avoided risk-taking, especially when it comes to like, lust and love. I've always opted for the surest thing. To me, nothing ventured was nothing lost.

But lately, something's been happening. I don't know what, exactly, whether it's maturity, the lunar cycle, or just being tired of treating fear with more reverence than life, but lately, I am becoming braver. We're supposed to get braver in adulthood, aren't we? But instead, we develop more layers of self-preservation. As children, we are encouraged and more willing to express emotion in as simple and pure terms as possible. As adults, we hide behind protective behaviour, because the idea is that as we age, we are supposed to need the emotional flutter boards less and less. How unfair and untrue this is! We should become more adept at self-expression, not more skilled at deflecting insecurities or hiding them behind nuanced subtext.

The other day, I took my sagely sister's advice, and decided to ask the man of my daydreams(and a former blog posting) to have a beer with me. And he took me up on it. There I was. Sitting on the couch with the man I'd built up an idea, an image, a persona of over the course of two years. Conversation rose and fell like gentle waves. He said sweet things about me, I responded in kind. It was all going so well. Then he told me he thought a girl had tried to ask him out over e.mail. I thought he was talking about me, but he wasn't. He said how he wasn't interested in her, that he didn't know if he was interested in dating at all. At that moment, I knew I had to tell him how I felt. Because while I knew the likely outcome, I didn't care. I still had that last bleary, beery mirage of hope. He looked over at me and asked me what I was thinking. So I said it, as plain as toast;

"I've liked you for almost two years."

It's not that I didn't think about being rejected. I did, a fair bit. But for once, not being open and honest was a bigger atomic mushroom cloud than dashed hope. I just couldn't diffuse the words or the cataclysmic importance of going after what I wanted. He was flabbergasted. He didn't know what to do or say. He'd had no idea.(I thought I was so obvious!) He told me he didn't feel the same way.

And it didn't kill me.

It didn' t sting, eviscerate, implode or drown me. I was caught up in the adrenalin of my boldness. He asked if he could hug me, and I said sure, and as he did, my back cracked,(yes!awesome!) and we both giggled and made jokes. This was what was on the other side of rejection, if you were really fortunate. Not the starchiness or strangeness of bared wounds, only one more barrier of the unknown broken down, and vulnerability met with graciousness and a bit of humour. Towards the end of the night and my glass of beer, I watched his mouth move as he talked, and I knew with near certainty that my kisses would never meet his. I also knew he wasn't who I dreamed he was. Gone was the perfection of courtly admiration, which lacks the burps and farts of realism that humanize love. In its place was a man confused by life and purpose and all the same dragons of existence we all do battle with.

I don't know where we'll go from here. Maybe we'll become fast friends. Or maybe we'll slowly fade from each other's lives. Time will tell, I suppose.

And in the meantime, I'm learning to tread water.

wash 'n go gal?

There are girls out there who wake up with perfectly rumpled hair. Their freckles are adorably scattered around their neat little noses, there is no toothpaste residue caked in the corners of their pink mouths. Their lashes are long and dark, without the help of make-up. They bound out of bed to the bathroom, garbed in adorable pajamas with lambs in sleeping caps on them, yawning and rubbing the last bit of tired out from under their eyes, and splash cold water on their faces. They don't need practical things like cleanser for 'combination skin', because they don't get pimples. They don't have to deal with the kind of sulphuric morning breath reserved for feral animals and city sewage systems, nor do they have to contend with last night's eyeliner forging its shadowy passage south of the eyelid into the no-man's land of undereye circles. They awake from slumber glowing.

I torture myself with the idea of these girls.
I want to be one of them.
But really, I'm low maintenance theory trapped in the body of high maintenance practice.

I never jump out of bed ten minutes before I'm due for work. There's no such thing as a lick of mascara for me. I take a shower, yes, but there is multiple product usage-shampoo, conditioner, body wash, shaving cream, razor, loofah, spot cream. Then I'm on to make-up. Having trained as a make-up artist, I am quite resourceful with time and eyeshadow. I'm not one of those girls who can't leave the house without make-up, I frequently do. It's just that I love make-up, it's candy for my face. (And I do like candy!) Then I have to decide what to wear, which would seem easy, I mean, I have a closet full of wearable clothes. But the criterium for garment selection is based on mood, and I am cursed with far more moods than clothing options;
The 'I-want-to-be-invisible' mood
The 'I-want-to-be-noticed' mood
The 'I'm bloated' mood(frequent)
The 'I'm-so-not-concerned-with-trivialities-like-fashion' mood(rare)

I think what I'm struggling with isn't so much being low or high maintenance. I'm struggling with the stigma of vanity. The perception of self is meant to be tempered with modesty, but that modesty is really for the benefit of the outside world, the jury of our lives. If women are seen as putting too much effort into their appearance, they are criticized from all sides, mostly by other women, I suspect.(We are terribly watchful of each other) They are scorned for trying to attract male attention, or reviled for trying to incite female envy. They are seen as shallow and vapid. With the merest whiff of vanity, their intelligence is subtracted from their sum total as a person.

We've set ourselves up for failure. We just can't get a break. The entertainment and marketing industries commodify, and thus, demand aesthetic perfection from its female participants, and they, in desperate turn, buy every bottle and jar of overpriced promise of beauty they can afford. And we admire the beautific results, but we loathe the efforts it takes. We look each other up and down, assess, appraise, rate, and largely disapprove. A judgement takes place where there should simply be acceptance, and even admiration. There are cracks and fractures within the framework of womanhood. And vanity just doesn't seem like a viable enough explanation for me. Especially when the branding and stigmatising is at the hands of other women.

I'm not trying to scapegoat. I think every person has to excercise the choice of self-determination, because there's enough information on hand to make an informed one. So why does an intelligent, socially aware girl like myself self-determine and still feel the weight of the scrutinizing gaze? Why do I feel like my femininity negates my feminism? Why do I want to be effortlessly lovely when I clearly enjoy taking the time to commit a little artistry and thought to my looks? This false modesty we perpetuate is more damaging than indulging in a little vanity, because it holds us accountable to ridiculous standards we had virtually no say in designing. Quite frankly, there is nothing wrong with taking a break from the near-constant cultivation of interior beauty most of us engage in and having some rollicking fun with the packaging we put it in.

Or at least just wiping the morning crust out of our eyes.