Pollyanna Rainbow Sunshine and the Needles of Doom

Lyda here. Maybe I’m too involved with the blogiverse. With the people whose blogs I read. Frank, for example.

Maybe it’s weird, how much I care about Frank, considering that I’ve never met him in person. I read his blog almost every day, and I post comments, and we’ve talked a bit via email. I know that I don’t really know him, but I do know that he is talented, funny, kind, and a fabulous dad. And while I cannot really know what he’s going through, and I cannot bring him chicken soup or offer to babysit Oliver for him, I do think that leaving him a cheerful comment might help right now. Why don’t you leave him an upbeat comment too? Hey, couldn’t hurt.

The Cosmic Innernetting is like that. It creates a community of people who may never meet in person. 

Technology sometimes drives us apart - keeps us in our separate little cell-phone/drive-through/369-cable-channels/chat-room bubbles. Sometimes it insulates us from each other. We hear on the radio that x number of people were killed in an earthquake, or y number of people lost their homes in a fire - and it is just numbers. We have instant information - but there is too much to digest.

But technology can also pull us together. Human beings float in space above our planet - and we can watch. Soldiers hold their children tight before heading off to war - and we can weep over the pictures and then write our representatives in Congress.  A fiber artist finishes a sweater, or a quilt, or a sock - and we cheer with them. Fiber artist = anyone who creates something with yarn or fabric or fiber. Yes, I’m looking at you.

On our blogs, we tell each other about books, projects, ideas, problems, hopes, disasters. We write about obsessions and pleasures and pitfalls. With our rants and musings and silliness, we share part of ourselves.

We start to feel as if we know the person who wrote that.

In a way, we do. Sometimes we even become friends, because of the Cosmic Innernetting. There is more than one person for me to visit in Colorado now. Shiny!

In another way, we don’t. I’ve read all of Crazy Aunt Purl’s blog, and I read the book, and I even met her in person. It doesn’t mean that I know Laurie, any more than I know Terry Pratchett or Eric Idle. A writer’s work, an artist’s work, may be a glimpse into the person behind the work, but it is a distorted glimpse.

This partial imperfect connection is part of the joy and the danger of the Cosmic Innernetting. Finding someone who shares your obsessions? Awesome. Imagining a deep personal friendship where there is none? Not fabulous.

Take your zombie-loving Pollyanna here. I don’t tell ya’ll everything. I hold some things back because they are dark or embarrassing or just plain boring. That’s right. My life is even more boring than you think it is. Scary, kids.

Sometimes I email Anna-Liza to ask, “Should I post this? Is this too raw? Is this too personal?” Sometimes I write a post and it sits there as a draft for a week or a month or… well, I have one I wrote in April that is still sitting there.

And I edit things. A lot. I try to make myself sound funny, profound, together - or at least semi-coherent. I try to keep the whining to a minimum, which unfortunately I don’t always do in real life. I know, I don’t always do it on the blog either. Sorry about that.

All in the hope that ya’ll will read it in an idle moment and smile.

Not such a bad motive at that.

And while I do not know Jane, or Red, or Kelly, or KarenM, in “real life” - Marin, I’m pleased to say, I do know in real life  - I know enough to want to.

And I know enough to care about Frank.

Maybe that’s not so bad after all.

Lyda here. Is there any other kind of depression? I mean, no one talks about the Depression of Lightheartedness. The Depression of Fantasticness. But I’m digressing. Already. As Maggie Simpson once said, “This is indeed a disturbing universe.”

I’ve been struggling especially this last month, resulting in very few posts, and in the need for Anna-Liza to smack me repeatedly - thanks BFF, I need that. I’ll try not to dwell, but let me just say, being poor and unemployed sucks.

Does anyone need a professional organizer? A writer? An office manager? A bookkeeper? A proofreader? I can be bought! That’s what he said.  Seriously, I need work. Anyone? Anyone? 

Ya’ll send “Lyda gets a fabulous job” vibes, okay?

Or, ”Lyda wins the lottery so she never has to work ever again” vibes. I’m easy. But ya’ll already knew that. 

And if I did win the lottery, I would be very generous with sharing the wealth. There would be gifts. Fiber gifts. I’m just saying…

I spent last week digging a company we shall call Procrastinators R Us out of over six months of back filing - each month’s filing being three to five feet tall. It took all week and lots of muscle power. Sheesh, people, keep up with the filing! The back you save could be mine! 

The surreal part was that their filing room - filled with huge shelves that you can move back and forth on tracks via a big crank - was a converted vault and had no air circulation.

This Pollyanna was sweating… sorry, Grandma, I mean, “glowing”… like a horse every day.

It was like being trapped in “Metropolis.”

But without the robot.

I was not sweating like a pig - pigs don’t sweat. That’s why they roll in mud - to moisten their skin and cool off. Mud also protects against sunburn. And that is your Lick The Pig Fact of the Day. 

Look - “The Joy of Pigs” ! A must-see NATURE video. Just look at the cute lickable piggies on that link!

Shit, I’m digressing again…

Doing filing for a solid week did make me appreciate all the jobs I’ve ever had that were NOT solid filing. And also, all the jobs where the room temperature was less than 85 degrees.

Meanwhile, in other whining…

My sleep has been weird; I keep waking up in the middle of the night unable to go back to sleep again. And I’m not sleepy at my normal bedtime, so I’ve been staying up late. Also, I’ve pretty much lost my appetite, which is very unusual for me. As one could tell by looking at me, although hopefully one would be too polite to say so.  I’ve been watching TV at weird hours (more on that in the next post), and working late into the night on my quilting Mystery Projects.

Yes, I know, how evil I am to keep mentioning the Mystery Projects when I cannot tell you about them yet. Bwahahaha!  But I can report that I’m done with three of them - completely, totally done. Three - three F.O.s! Ah-ah-ah!  And the others are getting very close to completion. Soon I will ship them out - “I’ll ship you, my pretties… and your little dog too!” … “These things have to be done delicately, delicately…” - and then I will at last be able to post about them.

“Anticipation… Antici-paaation… It’s making me wait…”

Oh, now I’m craving thick fries with ketchup.

“I digress, therefore I am…”

I’ll even post a tutorial about the Mystery Projects, which are actually quite fun and go quickly.

If you don’t do 7 or 8 all at once.

Which is of course what I am doing.

Because I am insane.

But ya’ll knew that, didn’t you?

Hi, Anna-Liza here.

I had to take an unplanned day off to get some emergency dental work done. I managed to break a molar and went in this morning to have my dentist take a look at it. Turned into an impromptu root canal, so now I’m on vicodin (or the generic equivalent thereof) and noticing that it doesn’t work as well as a jawful of novocaine. Then again, it’s nice to be able to taste things and feel my tongue.

You know what? I need to quit doing that mom thing. You know, that thing where we take care of everyone else’s stuff first, and get around to our stuff when we get to it … or it hurts? Yeah, that thing. Because I knew I’d chipped a corner off this molar weeks ago, but I didn’t do anything about it until more bits broke off and it started hurting. It would have been a lot less expensive, for one thing!

I did get a chance to use my Health Savings Account for the first time. Our insurance has it set up so you get a debit card that you can use to pay for things directly out of your HSA. It’s really convenient! I just have to make sure I don’t confuse it with my regular card.

And I have different dental insurance now, with the new job. I had to change dentists, and I’d never met this guy before. Luckily, he’s a good guy and very nice. And when I said something about having put off coming in, he just shrugged and said, “So, you’re saying you’re human.” I really appreciate that–I hate getting scolded by the dentist or hygienist almost as much as I hate getting the novocaine shot.

So instead of getting a temp filling and going in to work for the afternoon, I’m typing this and thinking about taking another pain pill. I’ll be spending the rest of the afternoon reading (probably not knitting, unless it’s something pretty simple). Even so … I’d really rather be at work!

I am taking the opportunity to do part of the Reading in Wonderland challenge. My daughter, the Knitting Sprite, turned me on to Tamora Pierce’s writing a while back. I’m reading the Circle of Magic quartet now, which is set in a different world than most of her books. In this series, she focuses on magic in craft, such as spinning, weaving, metalsmithing, gardening, etc. I’m enjoying it quite a bit! This one would be, I guess, the “read something from a genre you don’t usually read” category. It’s Young Adult, so it doesn’t quite fit the Children’s Picture Book challenge. However, I have to admit I read YA once in a while, because an awful lot of really good books get missed because they’ve been put into that category. Trust me. And go check out the “teen” section at the library sometime soon. 

(ETA: I actually wrote this over a week ago and forgot to post it. But I reread it and decided to post it anyway. Damn drugs! –A)

Hi, Anna-Liza here.

You know, one reason for starting this blog was to get in the habit of writing at least a few times a week, if not every single day. Of course, with a two-headed blog like this, if we both wrote every single day it would get … cluttered. Confusing. Wordy. All of those. But still, I think I’m taking the restraint thing a bit too far when it comes to blogging.

You have probably noticed that Lyda writes far more frequently than I do. Might could be she’s the more disciplined and practiced writer of the two of us. Might could be she has more ideas. Might could be she just has a lot more time on her hands. (For whatever reason, the Texasism “might could be” has been in my head all day, so I’m hoping this will exorcise it. Might could be.)

Anyway, that’s not to say that I don’t have lots of ideas, I just keep on not writing about them. “Oh, no one wants to hear about that. That’s too boring/offensive/in-jokish. Whatever.”

I have no problem telling stories in person. In fact, the problem in that case might be that I enjoy telling stories a little bit too much. Might could be.

So screw it. I’ll start telling more stories. A friend of mine, who is a Burner, a yoga teacher, and a mom, thinks there’s some kind of problem with my throat chakra. Me, I know there’s a problem with my throat chakra, I’ve known it for years, but I’ve never known what to do about it. It’s not that I don’t talk, believe me. Just ask Lyda, or Marin, or Ms. English Hotcar (who has not graced this blog page for many moons, but I’m sure she’ll come up again sometime). Writing, having my words out there where they can be read, reread, and substantially criticized, might free something up. Or maybe shut something down.

One thing I am planning on doing (still not finalized) is taking a series of evening workshops with a shaman named Aumrak. She lives in Guatamala, is nothing at all like what most people picture when they hear the word “shaman”, and is entirely a delightful person. I had a very powerful moment with her in conversation last year, and feel very strongly pulled to do some kind of work with her. She’ll be here in mid-June, and will lead the Solstice ritual at SolFest. (Darlin’ K and I plan to go to SolFest, too.)

It’s weird, I have had a damned interesting life so far, and I’m not entirely sure why I think it won’t continue to be interesting, but I keep saying stuff like “I’m not very interesting myself, but I know a lot of interesting people.” I’ve been through earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados and blizzards, and never had any serious injuries or losses as a result of them. (I even have cousins who live near Mt. Pinatubo and were there when it erupted. I don’t feel any need to have the “erupting volcano in my backyard” experience myself, though.) I have given birth and attended to dying friends, had just about every kind of sex I’ve ever wanted to have, been onstage and backstage and in the audience.

And there are still things I haven’t done that I want to do. And I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. I just know that, whatever it turns out to be (or they turn out to be) I want to be as purely me as I can manage, moment by moment. And that throat chakra thing is just possibly the next thing I need to clear out of my way. Might could be. Yup.

Lyda here. Another book review today.

I read this book, “Change Your Mind, Change Your Life” by Dr. Daniel Amen - and it did change my life.

I actually read the book straight through once, then re-read an especially pertainent section, then read the whole book straight through again. Obsessive much?  Plus, I watched the PBS show by Dr. Amen on this book. Which I recommend, if you can find it on your local listing. The PBS show is how I found out about the book, which has been out for years.

I learned a lot about how the brain works, and how different areas of the brain affect human behavior. This is a book that is not just general knowledge, “oh, isn’t this interesting” stuff. This information applies very specifically to the behavior of people.

People I know.

And me. Cleaning obsession? Now I know what part of the brain is pushing me.

Fascinating.

And I found, as I read certain parts for the second time, that I was shedding ancient resentment and anger at someone specific. This person, I realized, had acted based on what was happening, chemically and otherwise, in their brain. It really was not their fault. I had worked a lot on this stuff, so I was surprised at how much I still had to let go. But there it was, and there it went.

Liberating.

There is great information on dealing with people one finds difficult. Which we all have to do - because we all have “difficult people” in our lives somewhere.

And sometimes, as Pogo says, “we have met the enemy, and he is us.”

There is excellent information on dealing with one’s own issues, behavior, and thoughts. It’s like reading the Rosetta Stone for your own personal brain.

Awesome.

This book really did change my thinking on a lot of things, gave me insight and clarity and helpful tools to shift some things and to deal with others. Both my own stuff and other people’s.

Anyway… everyone who has talked to me for more than ten minutes this month has already heard how great this book is. And now, so have ya’ll.

Brains………..

Not just for zombies anymore.

Lyda here. I’ve read some books recently that were actually not written by Terry Pratchett. Oh, yes, I’ve been re-reading his too. Of course. But these were in addition to… Ya’ll know.  I thought I’d give ya’ll a quick book review today.

I read “The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History” by Katherine Ashenburg - which is about personal hygeine in Europe and the United States. Interesting, and sometimes - often - squirm-inducing. Not for everyone, but a fascinating and different look at cultural norms and behaviors.

Of the historical eras covered (versus modern day), I’d say a modern American would be comfortable with the personal cleanliness of the Romans. Unless ya’ll get squirmy about sharing your bath with 30 or so friends, neighbors, and countrymen. Got to get ready for that orgy. Ya’ll know. Actually, it sounds like the bathhouse was a great place to meet people and then… yeah, do what you were going to do at the orgy.

“I still love to wash in your old bathwater.” Yep, that’s the lyrics. See?

But after the Plague in Europe? Ugh. Let’s just say, it wasn’t all “huzzah” and quaffing ale. From the descriptions, I’m guessing the body odor in this time period would knock me right over. Not to mention the shit in the corridors of the castles. Oh yes, it was. 

And the final section, on the growing American obsession with extreme cleanliness, is interesting. And also squirm-inducing. In a different way. You can read an excerpt of the book and listen to NPR talking to the author here.

Lyda here. Boy, do I wish I could have sat there with Anna-Liza this weekend, knitting and talking and watching her kids play in that neat coffee shop she wrote about yesterday. I think she posted pictures as part of her campaign to get me to move to Colorado. Yes, I am tempted. And I don’t even drink coffee. But hot chocolate… yum. But most of all - time with my BFF.

We did talk on the phone. For hours. Thank goodness for unlimited weekend calling.

We’re having another heat wave here in So. Cal. Yes, there is at least one fire burning - not near us.  Yes, it’s miserable - it was 95 degrees at our place yesterday, and here at the coast we don’t normally get temperatures that high even in August. On the other hand, Anna-Liza said they had snow on Saturday. We discussed trading weather for a day - we would love a day of snow, and she would like a warm summery day. Unfortunately, the weather gods and goddesses did not grant our request.  Or maybe the Quantum Butterfly is just flapping its wings too much. The heat does not make the breathing any better. Pant.

Friday night, the Resident Sith Master went to a movie with friends, and I watched “The Jane Austen Book Club” with the Dread Cat Tommy. He fell asleep; I enjoyed the movie and even watched all the special features before RSM came home. I didn’t read the book.  The movie was fun, with some really good actresses playing off each other. Kathy Baker, Maria Bello, Emily Blunt, Amy Brenneman, Maggie Grace, and Lynn Redgrave. And the men were also good and very nice to look at. Hugh Dancy , Marc Blucas and Kevin Zegers - all a bit young for my taste, but very cute. Jimmy Smits, looking very good in his tux, definitely to my taste. Light girly entertainment, just what I was in the mood for.

Practically all weekend, while the Resident Sith Master played video games and I watched TV, I worked on The Increasingly Inaccurately Named “Easy” Heart Quilt. Which involved actual ironing. In the heat. Because I am insane. I also cooked - actually cooked with heat - breakfast and dinner both Saturday and Sunday. Yes, thank you, I would like a medal. But I digress…

Saturday, I gently picked out stitches on one square that was wrong, and then sewed a replacement square in place. Directional fabric can be a pain when you have a feline assistant who likes to move the fabric around.

I passed the halfway mark on stitching together the rows for the quilt top. By lunch time Sunday, I passed the two-thirds mark. By bedtime last night, I had sewn all but the last four rows together. It looks good at this point. All fingers crossed.

I will probably finish sewing the rows together tonight. Then I will need to figure out the binding, and the backing which will include a way to hang the finished quilt.

After I iron the quilt top. And pet it and love it and call it George.

Obsession. It’s not just a perfume.

“Still crazy…”

Lyda here. No progress last night on the Increasingly Inaccurately Named “Easy Heart Quilt.” Because the Resident Sith Master is home! Hurray!!!

His first day home, and he had two friends come over for an all-day video game frenzy. Why, what did you do for Spring Break?  I worked late, and got home at 7:30 - and one friend was still there, so I went into my bedroom and watched a bit of TV and hung out with Tommy the Sith Apprentice cat. Who was noticably calmer now that his Master was home, which means I might live until the weekend.

I spent some time admiring the Heart Quilt layout which was on my floor, of course.

Once his friend left, I made RSM come admire the quilt too - which he pronounced cool but with way too many tiny pieces. Insightful, yes?  We had dinner, and I told him all about “Quantum Leap” so he was up to speed by the time it came on. In fact, I talked so much and so excitedly that he hardly got a word in edgewise. I missed him. We enjoyed watching the show together, and I got a little caught up in the “hugging my son” area. I waited until his friends were gone for the hugging. I be cool, dude.

This morning, I had an appointment with the nurse practitioner. She thinks I might have asthma, but for fun (ha), she ran an EKG too. (EKG okay, breathing not great.) So tonight I go to the drugstore to get an inhaler. If this keeps up, I will need a sherpa to carry all my meds. Shesh!

But asthma might explain a lot.

Obviously my brain is not getting enough oxygen.

It’s the only explanation for upteen-billion hours spent shredding perfectly good fabric into teeny tiny pieces.

It also explains why my Zombie Army hasn’t eaten my brain.

I thought it was loyalty.

No. It’s because my oxygen-deprived brain is not up to their exacting standards.

And the Dread Cat Tommy’s brain is too small to be even an appetizer.

As for the Zombie Army staying well away from my son’s healthy and no-doubt delicious brain…

Which part of “Sith Master” do ya’ll still not understand?

All of which means my Zombie Army will once again be prowling the streets tonight.

Ya’ll have been warned.

Lyda here. We’ll be back to our regular schedule of movie reviews and zombies tomorrow. Oh, and knitting and quilting. And funny weird stuff. Today… not.

I’ve hesitated to post this, but I feel compelled, for whatever reason. I’m just going to put it out there. Feel free to skip this and read yesterday’s weirdness post instead.

I’ve posted on and off about weight and body image and social pressure and sexual stereotypes and such stuff and nonsense. That’s seven, seven self-referencing links. Ah ah ah ah. (thunder) 

Now, alas, we come to some personal experiences which I feel oddly compelled to share.

I was the first girl in my class to hit puberty, and hit it hard I did. By 5th grade I was already “busty.” That year, the teachers lined all of the kids up to weigh and measure us. Everyone, boys and girls together, in the gym. One teacher stood at the scale and called out the number to another teacher, who wrote it down. The same thing with height - one teacher called out the number so another teacher could write it down. Their voices echoed through the gym with every number.

I was one of the tallest girls. I was also the first girl they weighed who was 100 pounds. When they called out my weight, kids giggled. Looking at pictures from that time, I know that I was the right weight for my height, my development, and my activity level. I was not fat. But I suddenly felt fat that day.

It was a horrible day. It was no fun for the rest of the girls, and no fun for the boys either. The giggling was a sign of the tension, the nerves. Because there was humiliation enough for everyone that day. As if 12-year-olds don’t have enough self-consciousness about their bodies.

That was the year that we watched an animated film to learn about our changing bodies. At least this time they separated the girls from the boys. The boys went out onto the field to play football, the assumption being that adolescent boys didn’t need to know about their changing bodies nor what was happening to the girls - ah, the 70s. 

When the teacher said that wearing a bra helps your breasts to develop (um, what?), all the girls and the teacher looked right at me. As if I had chosen to “blossom” so early.

All this was bad enough in 5th grade, in a school that I’d attend since 1st grade, where I knew the other kids and had good friends and good relationships with my teachers. The gender lines had not been drawn too heavily yet - my best friend that year was a boy, and boys and girls still played together on the playground. We had secret crushes, yes, but we were still kids.

That summer my family moved to a new city, and I suffered extreme culture shock. And my period started. 6th grade was a nightmare. The kids were very different, rushing to adulthood as fast as they could. The girls wore makeup and stockings. Kids dated and smoked and drank. I was the weirdest kid in my class, maybe the whole school, with my very frizzy hair and my odd clothes and my midwest accent and my unusual family.

I was still a kid but I was walking around in a woman’s body. I only made one friend that year. Everyone else treated me as an object of ridicule. It probably didn’t help that I thought I was smarter than the teacher and 98% of the kids. The library was my refuge; I read the fattest books I could find, including “War and Peace,” that year. That’ll show them.

Junior high was a nightmare, and high school was only marginally better.

My mom began to criticize my eating habits and my weight, and then suddenly one day she stopped. I found out later that she had stopped because she didn’t want weight and food to define our relationship, or my self-image. I thought she’d given up on me.

So I asked my mom to take me to the doctor, who put me on a no-carb diet. I was 16. I took a special girl’s gym class for “weight control.” I was surprised to learn that some girls were teased just as unmercifully for being “too thin” as I was for being large-busted and curvy. And only years later did I realize that I had been at a healthy weight for my body before the diet. And that my doctor could have encouraged me to be more physically active rather than put me on a diet. We had a wonderful teacher who encouraged us to focus on our health, rather than our weight.

But for me, and I suspect for most of the girls in the class (and most of the kids in the school), the idea that our value depends on other people’s judgements about our bodies was already deeply instilled.

From age 12, I was harassed, teased, forceably pinned up against walls by older boys and by men my father’s age. I was pawed and molested, heckled and jeered at, physically threatened and terrified. There was viciously gossip about me, and the girls were as bad as the boys. Boys did not ask me out, but they did try to look through my windows at night. Can’t you hear “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves” playing in the background?

Because a girl with my body type must be a slut, a trollop, a whore. She must want it - even though I didn’t even know what “it” was yet. And a girl with my body type must be stupid too, a dumb blonde.

And no one did anything to stop it. I did not tell my dad or my brothers. I was too ashamed. I did not tell my mom or my sister very much either. I thought it was my fault.

I grew up thinking that my body was shameful. I grew up thinking that I was not in control of what happened to it, or to me. I grew up thinking no nice boy or man would want me.

And always, behind the shame and the guilt, behind the anger and the despair - there was FEAR.

Fear for my life. Fear of physical harm, which I did not escape. It’s a short step from sexual harassment to sexual violence.

Fear that I was unlovable, that I was not worthy of love.

Fear that I was what they all said I was.

I was thirty-three years old the first time I pushed a man away and said “no.” I was terrified. But the anger finally overcame the terror.

And I did not die.

That would have been a surprise to the girl I was at 12, at 16, at college.

Since then, I have been trying to learn to love myself as I am right now. I have been trying to heal.

But like far too many of us, I still carry the scars.

Most of them do not show.

Except, perhaps, in my eyes.

Lyda here. Anna-Liza sent me something that got me thinking. I’ve been working on this too long, and I’m just going to post it, whether it is any good or not.

It’s time to shut up about “the Cost of Obesity.”  The article ends with a suggestion that the candidates support a ban on weight discrimination. My favorite part (page 2, second paragraph) is how the cultural stigma about being overweight contributes to negative health effects.

Size-ism affects employment, education, medical treatment, and self-esteem. The media often portrays fat people as lazy, stupid, crude losers. Peers, teachers, employers, medical professionals often treat the overweight - and those with different body sizes and types and differing physical abilities, anyone who doesn’t seem “normal” whatever the hell that is - with contempt, as if they are less deserving of respect. As if they are, in fact, less than human.

This behavior would be outrageous if directed at any other group. A doctor, a teacher, a fellow student, a boss treating someone unfairly because of their ethnicity or religion? Intolerable!

So why would it be okay to discriminate against someone because of their body?

People who would never attack someone’s religion or ethnicity think nothing of criticizing a person’s weight, food choices, and exercise habits. This happens to people who are “average weight” and those who are “very thin” as well as those perceived as overweight. Ya’ll know how I feel about turkeys who intrude into someone’s personal life and choices without being invited.

People who would never tease someone with a disability think nothing of joking about a person’s height, body type, or athletic ability. People who would never denigrate someone’s heritage or sexual orientation think nothing of putting down a person’s hair style, clothing, or grooming.

Thinking nothing is the problem.

It is exhausting to deal with these attacks - and the more often it happens, the more it impacts self-esteem. This is harmful for children, and it’s no picnic for adults either. It creates fear and hatred.

Read this. And this.

What to do about it?

We can all work together to create an environment where every body is respected. Whatever size, whatever shape, whatever physical abilities, whatever the outer trappings.

Whatever the inner trappings too. It’s important to remember that we really don’t know what another person is dealing with. At USM, it was said over and over again, “Each person is really doing the best they can at the time. If they could do it ‘better,’ they would.”

One does use discernment to choose one’s friends, for example. And actions have consequences, sometimes including incarceration or hospitalization. But discernment is different than judgement. Consequences are different than hatred.

Hey, good news. You really are doing the best you can do in each moment. Give yourself a break.

But I digress…

Together, we can create a climate of respect and tolerance.

We can treat each other as fellow beings worthy of respect and love.

If you have any questions on how to do this, I would suggest you consult the nearest dog or cat. They’ve got this down, ya’ll.

Okay, all together: “I’d like to teach the world to sing…”