Sullivan's Laws

Question of the Day: How could a university president hired from the outside who's only been on the job for two years inspire such fierce loyalty that faculty, students, staff, and alumni from all over the state would interrupt their lives and summers to stage a mass insurrection against an ill-conceived and badly managed plot by a corporate board to force her to resign?

Answer for the Ages: It's right here, in a WaPo story on how hard University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan, a leader with a "relationship-based, relationship-centered presidency," worked in those two years to win hearts and minds in Charlottesville. You should go read the whole story, but here's the money quote:

From the start, Sullivan outlined what she called “Sullivan’s laws”: Never surprise an administrator. Never punish the messenger. Don’t hide bad news; meet it head-on. People and time are our greatest resources; don’t waste them. When dealing with a difficult matter, don’t leave anyone out, or else be prepared for fallout.

We'll pause here briefly while you all swoon over such inspiring common sense from an academic administrator who gets that strong, effective leadership is first and foremost about listening. And honesty. Crazy! No wonder they wanted to dump her!

Also, however, I'm thinking someone should take that sentence about dealing with difficult matters and needlepoint it onto a pillow for Rector Helen Dragas, who could definitely use a lesson or two in fallout avoidance. Don't leave anyone out, especially if the person you are thinking of leaving out is, like, a rockstar/goddess among the group of people who will be most affected by the decision you are secretly engineering! Why? Because inclusivity is cheaper than paying Hill & Knowlton to clean up your mess!

AnyHoos, UVA's Board of Visitors meets at 3 this afternoon to vote on Sullivan's possible reinstatement. (WaPo games out how the voting is likely to go here.) Paws and fingers in Roxie's World are crossed that cool heads and common sense will prevail as the Board goes for its big do-over. We recommend that you follow the action on Twitter, which has been an amazing source of real-time information throughout the crisis at UVA. Even if you are not among the Twitterati, you can search on the hashtag #UVA for the latest tweets. By the way, WaPo has done a swell job on this story. You'd almost think they were still a serious newspaper, with actual reporters and everything. Srsly. Props to higher education reporters Daniel de Vise, Jenna Johnson, Anita Kumar, and Donna St. George for thorough, thoughtful coverage.

Peace out, Jeffersonians, and if there's any doubt as to where this blog stands on the matter of The People v. Helen Dragas, let us dispel it now:

A Picture-Perfect Week

Wednesday night at QTU, Angela Davis spoke to a huge, rapt audience on a range of topics, including the killing of Trayvon Martin, Americans' resistance to seeing racism as a structural problem, and the cause of prison abolition. (You can watch the whole event here.) The Moms were in the house and on the second row, which gave Moose a chance to snap this shot of the scholar-activist listening attentively to a question from the audience:

(Photo Credit: Moose, 4/18/12, College Park, MD)

Friday, as many of you know, was the day of the big gay spring carnival Moose's happy little program hosts every year on behalf of DC Queer Studies. This year's symposium was extra special, focused on honoring the life and legacy of writer/critic Samuel R. "Chip" Delany, who turned 70 on April 1. The day was drenched in sunshine, the papers were uniformly splendid, and the guest of honor was genial, generous, and wise. Moose snapped this shot of Delany getting ready to read from his new novel, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders:

(Photo Credit: Moose, 4/20/12, College Park, MD)

What's the takeaway from this long, exhausting, yet deeply gratifying week? Maybe it's something as simple as the importance of finding work that feeds the soul and keeps one focused on a world larger than oneself. Both Davis and Delany have spent their lives as writers and scholars engaged with questions of race, sex, and justice, and both seem, at 70 or on the brink of it (Davis is 68), to radiate equanimity and an optimism that seems not naive but hard-won and fiercely guarded. At breakfast with a group of faculty women the morning after her lecture, Davis amiably entertained more than 90 minutes of questions on everything from prison reform to the politics of university catering. She was thoughtful, funny, generous, and sanguine about the prospect of continued, if slow, progress toward justice. She counseled patience and emphasized the importance of building movements from the ground up. She reminded listeners that the election of Barack Obama was a victory not for him but for those who voted him into office. She feels that the Occupy Wall Street movement, whatever else it did or did not accomplish, was a sign that citizens felt empowered by Obama's election to mobilize against rising inequalities of wealth and the rise of corporate power. In reply after reply, it was clear Davis refuses despair. She sees what's happening. She grasps the underlying problems with depth and nuance. And her years in the trenches tell her that it simply means we are all going to have to spend a few -- or many -- more years in the trenches. All right, then.

Look, darlings, I know it isn't always possible to find work that feeds your soul. Indeed, sometimes, to pay the rent and stay alive, you have to take jobs that make you worry you are selling or crushing your soul. You may find yourself in the devil's company, on your knees and on his payroll, but that doesn't make you a devil. Sometimes you do what you have to do -- but you do it without losing sight of what you want to do. You'll get there, my friend. Take the long view, as Davis and Delany have clearly done in the course of their own complex, amazing journeys. Keep your eyes and your heart open. You might have to do a little more than click your heels together three times, but you will get to where you want to go, even if it isn't on any map you've ever seen. Don't ask us how we know. We just do.

We'll end with what is perhaps Moose's favorite image from this picture-perfect week, because it celebrates not only longevity but clever design that tastes as good as it looks. Here is the cake she had made to honor Mr. Delany at the party after Friday's symposium. It's decorated with the image used on publicity for the event:

(Photo Credit: Moose, 4/19/12)

We offer a virtual piece of this pretty cake to one and all, as a way of saying, "Eat, laugh, never give into despair. That's the one thing we truly can't afford." Peace out.

* * *

For Will Danger, who is working.

Support the VEA

We had sworn off doing any more vagina-related posts because the traffic they bring is just too weird, but when my overworked typist stumbled across the image above (provenance unknown, alas) on Facebook, she couldn't resist. Longtime readers know that the preferred description around here for lady people is vagina-equipped (which we're pretty sure we started using during the 2008 election). Nonetheless, we appreciate the appeal to natural law in the VEA's claim that women are endowed with their lady parts as all persons are endowed with rights to, you know, life, liberty, and blah de blah de blah. We are also totes on board with the slogan, Screw us and we multiply, and the hilarious reclaiming of the creepy Masonic emblem on the back of the dollar bill as a symbol of the might of a million vajayjays. We're down with that, obviously.

So, who'll be the Mockingjay for this fiery band of vulvalogocentrists? Who are we prepared to declare as the VEA's Soldier of the Week? Who is endowed with or schooled in the perfect combination of media-savviness and sistah-hood to deserve this honor? So many sheroes, so little time to blog them.

We might have given the nod to the official go-to gal of Roxie's World, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who had a brilliant week this week, achieving "late-breaking adoration" and "pop cultural ascendancy" -- in addition to the global domination she has enjoyed for the past few years -- by being cool enough to catch the wave of the Hill-arious Texts From Hillary meme launched by Adam Smith and Stacy Lambe. (That's the final image in the series there on the left, with Mme Secretary's actual texts to the site's creators. Here's the concluding "thanks for the meme-eries" message from Smith and Lambe.) How good was Clinton's week? WaPo declared her the Internet's "new queen of cool." Jezebel gushed that she had managed to "make herself seem even more badass than she already was. Well played, Hillz." Shoot, even the execrable Maureen Dowd, whose psychotic anti-Clinton ravings during the 2008 primary battle earned her this blog's undying enmity, had a nearly nice column on Clinton's "newly cool image," though she couldn't resist tossing off a couple of gratuitous digs -- e.g., saying that the pictures that launched the meme make Clinton look, "as Raymond Chandler would say, . . . 'as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.'" Ah, MoDo, you never disappoint.

Anyhoo, we take nothing away from Hillz's glorious achievement in opting instead to name actress and activist Ashley Judd the first (and perhaps only -- you know how lax we are about these things) Soldier of the Week for Vaginally Endowed Americans. Judd had a pretty awesome week, too, and not just because Becca Winstone, the character she plays on her new ABC series, Missing, added bank robbery to the impressive set of kick-a$$ skills the retired CIA agent has at her command. (Shoot, in the first episode alone, Becca garrots a guy, breaks into a jewelry store and a warehouse, gets through a couple of high-speed chases while wearing wildly inappropriate footwear, reconnects with a sultry, torch-carrying ex-lover, and does a decent job of speaking several languages. Also: She gets shot, falls into a river, and survives for episode two. Quel surprise, oui?)

Don't get us wrong. The Vaginally Equipped Americans of Roxie's World are devoted fans of Missing. It is totally formulaic and often gobsmackingly implausible, but it is utterly delightful to watch Judd's Winstone haul a$$ all over Europe in an effort to find her kidnapped son and solve the mystery of her late husband Paul's life and death. (Paul was also CIA and was killed by a car bomb ten years earlier.) The plot may not be believable, but Becca is, thanks to Judd's steely eyes and razor-sharp maternal instincts. What can we say? We think the world could use a few more vengeance-seeking soccer moms who can fight like a ninja and hack into a computer.

But that's not why Judd is our VEA Soldier of the Week. Nope, she gets the nod and perhaps a mockingjay pin of her very own for her righteous response to a flood of snarky commentary and speculation about the state of her face, which has been puffed up recently by steroids she took for a nasty sinus infection. Judd used the occasion to offer up an indignant yet nuanced reply that took on the whole machinery of patriarchy and the way that public as well as private conversations about women's bodies are used to rob them of their power and dignity by reducing their personhood "to simple physical objectification." It's a smart, fiery piece that acknowledges women's complicity in the problem. "Patriarchy is not men," Judd explains. "Patriarchy is a system in which both women and men participate. . . .It is subtle, insidious, and never more dangerous than when women passionately deny that they themselves are engaging in it." Sing it, sister!

Judd didn't just write her little diatribe and go back to the business of being famous -- and beautiful. She followed up by doing a powerful interview with NBC's Brian Williams in which she talks about the experience, contextualizes it through deft comments on the hypersexualization of girls and women, and invites others, men included, to share their own "puffy-face" or "big-butt" moments, stories of being shamed or hurt by judgments about their bodies. She's also continued to bang the drum on Twitter, with a steady stream of affirmations and links to other posts (by far less famous people) on the subject. You don't follow @AshleyJudd? Well, sucks for you, sweetheart. Melissa McEwan does, and so do we, as of this week.

Ms. Judd, paws up to you, for talking back to patriarchy rather than being shamed or silenced by it. You recognized a teachable moment and used the power of your celebrity to make the most of it. Vaginally Endowed Americans and fair-minded individuals everywhere salute you for your honesty and your astuteness. You are our VEA Solider of the Week. Peace out.

(Photo Credit: Richard Drew, via)

Remembering Adrienne Rich

As you have no doubt heard by now, another shero has left the building. The poet Adrienne Rich, whom Moose has lovingly described as the fairy godmother of lesbian feminism, died last Tuesday at her home in Santa Cruz, California. Tuesday, you may recall, was Moose's birthday, which adds an extra bit of poignance to the loss here in Roxie's World. Rich was only 82 years old. Only -- Yes, children, 82 sounds kinda young to the ornery 50-somethings who hang out here. Someday, you'll feel the same way. Swear to dog.

What can we say about Rich that others haven't already said in the outpouring of praise and sorrow that quickly followed news of her death? Simply that her poetry was and is, like certain pieces of music, part of the soundtrack of our lives. It is lodged deep in our heads and hearts. Lines come to us unbidden, in sleep, in crisis, in moments of intimacy. Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine. . . .I came to explore the wreck. / The words are purposes. / The words are maps. / I came to see the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail. . . .With whom do you believe your lot is cast?

The collage above features the autographed title page of Moose's well-worn copy of the book dykes of a certain age all had on their shelves in the 70s and 80s alongside their well-worn copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves and The Moosewood Cookbook. You couldn't get dates back in those days if you couldn't quote most of the "Twenty-One Love Poems" from memory. While changing the oil of your girlfriend's car. Or holding a mirror up to your vajayjay in a circle of your closest friends. (Closest friends: That's lesbian-speak for ex with whom I am still complexly entangled or chick I am hoping to sleep with next.) Just kidding, kinda.

Moose isn't quite sure when she got Rich's autograph on the sacred text. She thinks it must have been at a reading at Womanbooks in New York (which is discussed in this totes excellent Signs article by Kristen Hogan on women's studies and feminist bookstores), when Rich was promoting her next book, A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far. Yeah: Fall 1981. Moose was the scraggly grad student standing in line clutching the poet's previous book, which she had gotten as a gift from one of her closest friends. She eventually got around to purchasing A Wild Patience and writing a paper comparing it to Dream, because she took a course called Theories of Female Creativity and you could get by with that sort of thing as long as you threw in a dollop or two of French theory to make it all look legit.

Did you really expect this post to be about Rich? Here, let's try again.

We needed a fairy godmother, someone whose words had the power of incantation and a wisdom that seemed ancient. We needed that to counter all the voices in and out of our heads shouting "No!" to our every desire, our dreams, our ambitions, our longings for another kind of world. Rich was important because she gave voice to those dreams, even as she demanded that her readers attend to the world 

as it is     not as we wish it
as it is     not as we work for it
to be 

("The Spirit of Place")

For all the dreamy feminist utopianism of her lush lyricism, Rich always had a foot firmly on the ground of the world "as it is." Yes, she gave us permission to revel in the joys of erotic pleasure and outlaw love, but she also reminded us that the world was always with us and those private pleasures couldn't command all our energy and attention. In the nineteenth of the twenty-one love poems, the speaker reminds her beloved, "I told you from the first I wanted daily life, / this island of Manhattan was island enough for me." The remark is in parentheses, a graphic emblem of the tensions between separateness and connection that are the subject of the final poems in the sequence.

You hear in that "I told you from the first" something of the moral rectitude that could make Rich both annoying and bracing. She was capable of a prescriptivism that could be damaging to both politics and poetry -- and wrote about that risk in poems like "North American Time":

When my dreams showed signs
of becoming
politically correct
no unruly images
escaping beyond borders
when walking in the street I found my
themes cut out for me
knew what I would not report
for fear of enemies' usage
then I began to wonder

What felt like righteousness, though, was also a consciousness of privilege and of the duties Rich obviously felt as a white, North American, middle-class woman to make use of the power she had to try to effect change. You could say she exaggerated the amount of control women had over their lives, as she seems to do in a line like, "Only she who says / she did not choose, is the loser in the end" (XV, "Twenty-One Love Poems") -- Or you could say she recognized that no amount of oppression ever let one off the hook. We are all to some degree responsible for our lives and accountable to our moment in history -- "the life of your tribe / the breath of your planet," as she puts it in "North American Time."

Adrienne Rich gave voice to our dreams, and she demanded that we work to make those dreams real. Rich has moved on, too soon, alas, but the work, of course, continues. We realize now it isn't just women's work, as we might have supposed in earlier, separatist moments. It's all our work, and we'd better get to it. Because somewhere, we might imagine, Rich and her friend and sister/warrior Audre Lorde are impatiently waiting for us "to perform the needed acts" ("Toward the Solstice"). Let's get started, shall we?

* * *

For other remembrances of Rich, see Katha Pollitt in The New Yorker, our pal Margaret Swedish on her writing blog, another pal over on Gukira, and a poem by Marge Piercy on the Ms. blog.

Good Grief, Another Vagina Post

A Pointed Message for Bob McDonnell, Governor of the Commonwealth of Vagina Virginia, and Other Republicans Unhinged by Ladies, Lady Parts, Lady Bidness, and (Insinuations of) Lady Badness:

Translation: You will be held accountable for your actions. Or, as we used to say back in the olden days of take-no-prisoners gynocentric orneriness: God is coming, and She is pissed. The wrath of the great Feminazi Cooter in the sky shall rain down upon you. You have been warned.

Why? Because people with vaginas also have eyes, ears, memories, and the right to vote. Unless of course you decide they can't be trusted to make that kind of judgment by themselves either. Better hurry, boys. Election day is just 248 days away. And please don't ask if that's a laser between my legs or am I just happy to see you. Trust me, fellas. It's a laser.

(Credit for the Laser-Shooting Vagina: Picked up, by way of a Facebook friend, from Jessica Valenti's Tumblr, but no one seems to know where it originated.)

A Woman of (Less) Substance

We pause briefly to note that it was one year ago today that Moose stepped on the scales at her first Lifestyle Adjustment Program meeting. By all means click away if celebrations of such things bore you senseless. Stick around, though, if you're willing to let a middle-aged broad indulge in a virtual happy dance. Take it away, Moose.

* * *

Thanks, Rox. Wow, what a difference a year makes, huh? Pound-wise, I am three-quarters of the woman I was on January 12, 2011. Fitness-wise, I am in dramatically better shape than I was a year ago. I can run four miles comfortably (if slowly) and could hang out in plank pose for the better part of a day if I had to. (And wouldn't life be cool if a girl were called upon to hang out in plank pose for the better part of a day? I mean, srsly. Think about it.) Attitude-wise, I feel sharper, calmer, and more resilient. I feel happier, more able to cope with whatever comes at me. Losing weight doesn't make life perfect by any means, but it can make the stresses and strains easier to manage.

I've been on maintenance since mid-July, though I actually continued to lose weight through August. My weight has now stabilized smack dab in the middle of the "normal" BMI range for my height. (Insert standard qualifiers about the limitations of BMI here.) What's working? you might ask. If you've been following my adventures in middle-aged embodiment, you already know the answer to this question, because what's working now is what has been working all along: Mindful eating, moderate exercise, and a supportive social network. (Thank you, Goose. Thank you, awesome LAP at Work group. Thank you, Facebook friends. Thank you, sisters [literal and figurative] and yogis.)

Is it really that simple? I feel sheepish and a little surprised to be saying this, but, yes, for me it has been that simple. I didn't need to radically change my diet. I just needed to eat less, drink less, and move more. My life now is not about deprivation and sacrifice. My meals aren't sad little piles of lettuce covered with fake cheese and fat-free dressing, and my workouts aren't daily forced marches. Over the holidays, I feasted on all of my favorites: my grandmother's olives, pecan pie, lobster casserole, chateaubriand (!). My feasting was a little more restrained than it was in years past, however, and I was pretty careful to eat light on non-feasting days to keep things in balance. I was also willing to spend 45 minutes on a treadmill on Christmas day so that I would actually feel hungry when it came time to tuck into that chateaubriand. My rule on exercise continues to be a firm yet flexible commitment to doing what I can when I can. I try to get in two or three cardiovascular workouts a week plus a 90-minute yoga class. Keep it simple. Keep it fun. Make exercise a priority, but don't beat up on yourself if you miss a day. As noted fitness guru Scarlett O'Hara once said, "Tomorrow is another day."

So, yes, the new normal for me is about balance and moderation, but it is also about joy and pleasure. I am not exaggerating when I say that the hardest part of this whole process was stepping on that scale one year ago today. Everything I've done since then has felt easy because I knew it was contributing to  my sense of well-being. I hope I never forget the flood of relief I experienced in that moment, as I realized that I had finally formulated the intention to rework my relationships to food, movement, and body. I will do a happy dance today to celebrate this milestone, but in a way I've been happy dancing all along. Thanks to all of you for dancing with me!

***

In other news, Hostess Brands, makers of Wonder bread, Twinkies, and the fruit pies Moose regularly devoured over the course of her misspent Midwestern youth, filed for bankruptcy protection on Wednesday, for the second time this decade. Are we alone in thinking the world would spin just fine on its axis without Ding Dongs and Donettes? Yeah, we didn't think so.

For other posts on the emergence of Moose 2.0: A Less Portly Dyke Than She Used to Be, go here, here, here, and here.

It would be wrong to end without an actual happy dance, wouldn't it? Hells to the yeah! Let's bring in a little Beyoncé, shall we? Move your body, baby -- and love it, no matter what. Peace out.

Upward-Facing Moose

Time for an exciting round of Complete the Caption! The above photo depicts Moose:

a) working on her tennis serve, which, she insists, does not actually require a ball or racket;
b) looking good but seriously underdressed for holiday caroling in the neighborhood;
c) smiling with gratitude because the pile of ungraded papers is not quite as high as her outstretched arm.

The answer of course is d) posing for a photographer at her local yoga studio to illustrate a little piece she wrote for the Willow Street Yoga Center Newsletter. (Yeah, it ain't Critical Inquiry or glq, but she wouldn't get a merit raise if she published in those fancy venues this year anyway, so what the heck?) We've pasted in a slightly revised version of the essay below. You can access the original by clicking on this link and then opening the PDF for the winter 2012 newsletter.

This one goes out to all the readers and friends who have followed the adventures in embodiment of Moose 2.0 over the past year. Your support and interest have meant a lot, and your stories have inspired and delighted all of us in Roxie's World. The post is dedicated to Suzie Hurley, first teacher, with love and gratitude for all that her vision has brought into being.

* * *

Lessons from the Mat
by Moose

I recently lost fifty pounds, and yoga helped me do it. Indeed, if I were inclined to be entrepreneurial, I would probably be making infomercials for something I might call the Yoga Diet, or perhaps even the Willow Street Diet: LOSE WEIGHT AND INCREASE FLEXIBILITY, WHILE STANDING ON ONE LEG!

I know: Maybe it’s a good thing I’m not especially entrepreneurial. Besides, Google tells me someone has beaten me to the punch on the Yoga Diet. Bear with me, though, as I try to explain my infomercial impulse.

Yoga may not be a major fat-burning activity, but I am serious when I say it contributed significantly to my efforts to re-contour my middle-aged body. I returned to Willow Street in the winter of 2009 after several years away. I had taken classes for a couple of years early in the 2000s, mostly Level Is with Suzie Hurley, but I decided to take a break in 2003 during a ridiculously stressful period in my life. (Two words are all I need to explain a crazy time and a dubious decision: home renovation.)

By the time I got back from my “break,” I was seriously out of shape and significantly overweight, because I had given up not only yoga but also a commitment I had maintained for most of my adult life to regular, vigorous cardiovascular activity. On the brink of my fiftieth birthday, I was feeling out of sorts and starting to worry about the long-term consequences of having gotten so out of shape. In other words, I was starting to feel old, and I didn’t like the feeling.

Returning to Willow Street was a small but important step on my long road back to health and fitness. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I see now that getting back to the mat was a way of gently yet powerfully re-connecting with a world and a self I was afraid I had left behind. Ultimately, that re-connection helped me find the will to lose weight by giving me a way to think about weight and body issues that feels affirming and enabling rather than punitive and disabling, which, I think, is how much of our culture’s talk about bodies, especially female ones, tends to be.

Back on the mat – first in Joe Miller’s Level I classes and lately in the I/II class he and Natalie Miller co-teach on Friday evenings – I learned three lessons that were enormously helpful in what I would eventually (and only half-jokingly) term my Lifestyle Adjustment Program. The first was to approach yoga in a spirit of play. This is an aspect of Joe’s teaching that deeply resonated with me, perhaps because it’s something I strive to do in my own classrooms. I am an English professor at the University of Maryland. The intellectual discipline of reading literature in a serious way can be intimidating, so I have always tried to cultivate a light, relaxed atmosphere in the classroom in the hope that students will learn more by worrying less and not noticing how hard they are working. Similarly, Joe’s insistent playfulness helps to demystify the discipline he teaches – which can also be intimidating -- and allows students to enter into it in their own way and at their own level. “Thanks for playing,” he often says at the end of class. Those words never fail to bring a smile to my face, but they’ve also encouraged me to feel comfortable trying to learn new and challenging skills. Fall out of a pose? No big deal! We’re just playing! Try it again!

That spirit of play guided me toward a second and equally valuable lesson, which was to love and honor the body I have, to appreciate what it can do now, and to stop berating myself for what it can’t (yet) do. My prolonged sedentary period had left me feeling alienated from a body I didn’t like or recognize. Yoga helped me let go of self-loathing and treat myself with a compassion that had eluded me for many years. Love and compassion, not disgust, were what finally got me, in January of 2011, to go to a meeting, step on a scale, and say, “OK, I am ready to do something different.”

Finally and perhaps most importantly, yoga gave me practice in mindfulness, which proved to be invaluable as I worked to cultivate and sustain new and better habits in relation to food and activity. I realized that my weight gain had a lot to do with the fact that I had just stopped paying attention to how much I was eating and how little I was moving. Food tastes better and is more satisfying when you pay attention to every bite, no matter how simply or sensibly it’s prepared. Mindfulness has meant that I experience my new way of eating as the opposite of the deprivations we associate with dieting. I have been cooking up a storm since I started losing weight, and I’ve enjoyed every moment in the kitchen and at the table – as has my well-fed partner, by the way!

Playfulness, compassion, and mindfulness: These are three lessons I learned on the mat that have helped me transform my body and my attitude fairly dramatically in the past year. You may not see me in an infomercial, but you will definitely see me in the studio, working hard but happily and with deep gratitude to continue this extraordinary process of learning. Thanks to everyone at Willow Street for playing with me and teaching me so well.

Dear Hillary Clinton,

We love you so. No, really, we adore you and totally groove on the way you have become like the Global Queer-Affirming Good Girl. Srsly, the burly women and pretty boys of the world unite in saying that you are homolicious!

Nonetheless, with all due respect, we wish you would re-think the hair. I am sorry, Mme Secretary, but we cannot love a ponytail.

Yours sincerely,

Roxie

(Photo Credit: Anja Niedringhaus, Associated Press [via]. New York Times caption: U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, left, after her speech on human rights issues at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, on Tuesday. [Video of the speech is here.])

It is a violation of human rights when people are beaten or killed because of their sexual orientation, or because they do not conform to cultural norms about how men and women should look or behave. It is a violation of human rights when governments declare it illegal to be gay, or allow those who harm gay people to go unpunished. It is a violation of human rights when lesbian or transgendered women are subjected to so-called corrective rape, or forcibly subjected to hormone treatments, or when people are murdered after public calls for violence toward gays, or when they are forced to flee their nations and seek asylum in other lands to save their lives. And it is a violation of human rights when life-saving care is withheld from people because they are gay, or equal access to justice is denied to people because they are gay, or public spaces are out of bounds to people because they are gay. No matter what we look like, where we come from, or who we are, we are all equally entitled to our human rights and dignity. -- US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, "Remarks in Recognition of International Human Rights Day," Palais des Nations, Geneva, Switzerland, 12/6/11.

You go, girl. With you till the last dog dies. Or 2016, whichever comes first.

Remembering Ruth Stone

Ruth Stone, who died November 19 at the age of 96, was a friend of ours. By friend we don't mean we spoke on the phone every day or spent summers at her charmingly decrepit Vermont farm house. Indeed, we hadn't spoken in several years before the National Book Award-winning poet passed away. The friendship we claim is rooted in the depth of our affections, not the amount of time we spent with a fine poet and a feisty woman who toiled in obscurity for decades. We loved Ruth, and she loved all the denizens of Roxie's World.

To Ruth, everything on earth was intensely alive -- full of meaning and worthy of recognition. Thus, in "Vegetables II," she says of an eggplant she contemplates eating, "We put our heads together. / You are so smooth and cool and purple, / I say. Which of us will it be?" In the early days of their friendship, when the Moms were cat lesbians, Ruth would inscribe copies of her books to them and their cats, Spike and Lily, illustrated with adorable little cat cartoons down by her signature. When I came on the scene in the mid-90s, Ruth laughed uproariously at the wild antics of my exuberant puppyhood, but, as the photo anchored to this paragraph shows, she could also calm me down enough to curl up and enjoy some poetry. (Ruth is reading a volume by another of our beloved poet-friends, Alicia Ostriker, in this picture.)

Goose first met Ruth at an epic lady poet-palooza held in May of 1986 to commemorate the centennial of Emily Dickinson's death. Upon that occasion, Ruth spoke movingly of Dickinson's astonishing originality and of the conditions in which her poetry was produced. Much of what she said of Dickinson might have been said of Ruth, too:

When I read her poems, these original, hard as steel poems, and I feel the intensity in every word, words used in new ways, bent to her will, then I think she was self-sufficient, an artist whose mind was never asleep, whose concentration recreated, made fresh all that she saw and felt, as though she saw through the ordinary barriers, not as a visionary, but as a laser beam. But when I think of how little recognition she received in her lifetime, and how devastated she must have felt, though her fierce pride concealed it, then I am angry and sad. Yes, a great artist knows and can work in almost total isolation, but it is a terrible thing to have to do. The original mind seems eccentric, even crazy sometimes. In her cryptic inventions, she broke the tiresome mold of American poetry. We still stand among those shards and splinters.

The original mind seems eccentric, even crazy sometimes. Oh, maybe just a little. Moose's favorite Ruth story involves an afternoon in the late-80s when Goose was at school and she and Ruth were hanging out with the cats in the apartment they lived in back then. Moose was supposed to be working on her still unfinished dissertation. Ruth was supposed to be resting to get ready for an evening reading on campus. At some point, Moose tuned in to the sound of Ruth's voice. Out in the living room, she was muttering something about death. "Oh, dammit. Oh, death," or words to that effect. When Moose ventured out to see what was happening, Ruth was sitting on the couch staring at her hands. "Ruth?" Moose shyly inquired, for she barely knew her elderly houseguest. "Everything okay?" Ruth turned to her, with her large brown eyes open wide, and declared, "Death is after me. Ever since that car accident. I knew it. Dammit." "Uh, okay, Ruth. What makes you think that?"

At that point, America's most obscure great poet held out her hands so Moose could see them. They were bleeding. Not from any visible wound, mind you -- Just bleeding. Two thoughts immediately popped into Moose's dissertation-enfeebled mind. The first was something like, Cool, stigmata -- We can turn this joint into a religious shrine and retire our grad school debts by charging the pilgrims to get a look at Ruth's hands! The second was no less selfish but a little more paranoid: Oh, great. I'll be a footnote in the next edition of the Norton Anthology of Lit by Women: Stone bled to death while Moose agonized over her paradigm-shifting analysis of Sarah Orne Jewett's "An Autumn Holiday."

Then Moose got a grip. She asked Ruth a few questions and quickly ascertained that the poet, lacking health insurance, had likely been overdosing on aspirin to treat neck pain from a recent car accident. She had also been subsisting mostly on candy bars during the long bus trip from Vermont to Maryland. Moose figured the bleeding had to be a side effect of the aspirin and the diet. She fixed Ruth a sandwich and they spent the rest of the afternoon playing with the cats. That night's reading was a spectacular success. Strange postscript to the story: The Moms had a ratty old cloth couch back in those days. Ruth's hands left a couple of blood stains on the couch that never faded. Swear to dog, kids, those stains looked as fresh and bright on the day that couch was finally hauled out to the curb as they did on a sunny afternoon when America's most obscure great poet scared the bejesus out of a befuddled grad student.

Here are Ruth and Moose on a bench outside the Folger Shakespeare Library during that same visit. They had gone there with Goose to see an amazing exhibit of Marianne Moore materials from the Rosenbach Museum and Library's Moore archive:

And here are Ruth and Goose on the same bench:

Oh, dammit. Oh, death. Oh, dammit, indeed. Damn you, death, for taking those we love from our midsts. Damn you for leaving us with nothing but echoes, shadows, fading images of nearly forgotten selves.

But thank you, Ruth, for the gift of your friendship and the consolation of your far from ordinary words. Thank you and dogspeed.

Half-Naked or Half-Dressed?

Hillary Clinton burst out laughing the other day when a scantily clad fellow bearing a torch streaked behind her and Hong Kong Chief Executive Donald Tsang as they were posing for photos together in Hawaii. Her reaction is priceless -- an utterly spontaneous hearty guffaw, complete with a delighted clapping of hands. Ah, Madame Secretary, we still carry a torch for you. Thanks for lightening up a dull, gray, overloaded Thursday.

Watch the vid, kids. We bet your Thursday could use a little levity, too. Hang in there, and maybe we'll all get treated to a glimpse of a scantily clad something or other before the day is over. Peace out.

 

Weighty Matters, Again

Suddenly this whole body politic thing has gotten kind of literal. A couple of weeks ago, the nation's pundits briefly obsessed over whether New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was too fat to be president, for which they were roundly -- get it? -- chastised by this here. blog. Now, Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill  is getting body-policed from the other direction. McCaskill recently took off fifty pounds and used Twitter -- cleverly, in our opinion -- as part of her weight-loss plan. She announced to her nearly 60,000 followers in May what her goals were and used the social media tool as a means of holding herself publicly accountable to them. On October 8, McCaskill proudly tweeted that she had reached her goal weight. Thursday in Jezebel, Erin Gloria Ryan declares herself "happy for [McCaskill] for doing what she set out to do," but says that she finds it "depressing that the standard by which women measure our fitness is still the number on a scale." Ryan continues:

It's dismaying that we still feel like we need to announce shamefully to the world when we believe that we have become too large, and then return to proudly tell world when we become tinier, and that we reflexively feel compelled to tell other women when we've noticed that they have shrunk. Stop it, ladies. Stop it right this second.

The headline on the column is, "Can We Please Stop Setting Weight Loss Goals?"

Ryan makes a good point. "Weight alone is not an indicator of health." True. There are plenty of other numbers one ought to consider -- blood pressure, cholesterol, glucose levels -- to get an accurate picture of overall health. It's also true that the kind of public scrutiny of her body that McCaskill invited is a double-edged sword. Such scrutiny and the harsh set of judgments that goes along with it is, as Ryan notes, a major source of the pressure women feel "to become ever smaller."

As you might suspect, however, the Recently Overweight Person of Roxie's World does not find Sen. McCaskill's story of public, socially mediated weight loss depressing or troubling, no matter how much she might agree with aspects of Ryan's analysis. Moose, who at times has used this blog as an embarrassing or inspiring (po-tay-toh, po-tah-toh) public record of her own adventures in re-contouring a middle-aged body, had this to say in response to the story: "60,000 followers? Little Lord Jeebus, I'd kill for 60,000 followers! Apparently, senators are connectivity nodes, whereas English profs are just, um, nerds."

Here's the thing, kids: The number on the scale is one among many numbers you should consider when you are evaluating your health and fitness, but sometimes, you know, losing weight is a reasonable goal, no matter how steeped the culture is in misogyny and fat-shame. If you set your sights on losing weight, you should use whatever tools are available to help you do so. And if you are a woman and a public figure, your body is going to get scrutinized and analyzed and judged every day of your life no matter what you do. (See, for example, Clinton, Hillary Rodham: cankles, cleavage, hair, weight, wrinkles.) We admire Sen. McCaskill for using social media and her status as a public figure to help her achieve a goal and to frame proactively the story of her weight loss rather than soldiering along on her treadmill waiting for the inevitable questions and comments to start. Hers was a risky strategy that could easily have backfired if she hadn't succeeded or if she were less adept in the art of the Twitters. She'd have been labeled a fat old broad trying desperately to look cool. In comments to CBS News, McCaskill shows that she was well aware of the risks but also savvy about how Twitter fits into a postmodern pol's communications strategy -- and her Lifestyle Adjustment Program:

My Twitter account -- I look at it as a way for people in Missouri to see the whole picture. I tweet about my kids. Yesterday, I tweeted about how happy I was that my daughter said she had cleaned her apartment all day. I think it's important for people to see that I've got the same kind of problems and challenges that everybody else does and, obviously, for a woman in her 50s, figuring out how to stay in shape with a really hectic schedule is a big part of everybody's daily struggle in my state and, I think, all across the country.

Along the way, McCaskill posted clever tweets about her progress, including a dramatic announcement about having divorced bread and pasta, which inspired her legions of followers to weigh in, as it were, with menu suggestions, advice, and helpful reinforcement. The senator still hopes to rekindle her relationship with carbohydrates, thinking it might work out on an occasional rather than a daily basis as she shifts her focus to maintaining her weight loss.

To which the Recently Overweight Person of Roxie's World replied, in precisely 140 characters:

@clairecmc, I recently broke up w/ potatoes, but carbs, in moderation, CAN fit into a sensible diet. Meet my new pal, butternut squash. Yum!

A hearty PAWS UP to you, Sen. McCaskill. The women of Roxie's World salute your effort, your good humor, and your smart use of social media as a way of sharing your experience and crowd-sourcing the challenges of eating well and getting fit while working hard for the fortunate citizens of the Show-Me State. We wish you well in your ongoing commitment and sincerely hope that Santa brings us a treadmill to aid in our own efforts to balance health with busyness.

What do you think, kids? Are we missing something in not being depressed or concerned by McCaskill's story, blinded by self-interest as we may be on this issue? Is Ryan fair in raining on the parade by harping on the compulsion women (and, sometimes, non-women) feel to publicly declare that they have become too large and then proudly announce that they are thinner, better, healthier people? Is there a way to acknowledge and address that problem without dissing McCaskill -- or, you know, my humble, recently overweight typist?

As always, darlings, we eagerly await and rely upon your wisdom. Meantime, someone is off for a quick run before a meeting and a trip to Baltimore to see a few thousand friends (including, at long last, Tenured Radical, with whom the Moms shall [decadently!] dine this evening). A happy Friday to you and yours. Peace out.

Tuning In/Out (Live!) to Melissa Etheridge

Caption this (kinda blurry) photo, which does indeed show rocker Melissa Etheridge sandwiched between Moose and Goose backstage last night at Baltimore's Pier Six Pavilion:

(Photo Credit: Emily Rodgers, 8/9/11)

What? You're surprised to see a couple of humble English profs consorting with a Grammy Award-winning mega-dyke? On a Tuesday night? You're shocked to see Moose 2.0 in the arms of a woman with a, um, reputation for getting around with the ladies -- while Goose looks on with a smile? You didn't imagine that Moose's new wardrobe included sexy belts and at least one Peter Pan/Robin Hood/Jane of the Jungle-type tank top?

Well then, darlings, it's possible you don't know the wimmin of Roxie's World quite as well as you thought you did, isn't it?

Here's the scoop, you brave and crazy gals and non-gals: The Moms have the good fortune to be represented in the Maryland House of Delegates by the awesome and openly gay Heather Mizeur, who just happens to be good buddies with Etheridge. (Because, yes, all lesbians know all other lesbians and hang out with them on a regular basis. Which is why Moose has spent the better part of thirty years waiting for Jodie Foster to call, dammit!) The meet-and-greet with Etheridge was a fundraiser for Mizeur. The Moms were happy to contribute, because Heather is the real deal, a politician who truly believes in government of, by, and for the people. We see a great future for her and look forward to being seated in the friends' box when Heather is sworn in (by, uh, Chief Justice Elana Kagan) as the first openly lesbian president of the United States of America. Moose is already trying to decide what to wear.

Anyhoo, dolls. You are probably dying to know what they talked about and what morsels of gossip they picked up among the dyke-erati. The Moms impressed Melissa by recalling that they had seen her at the Bayou in Georgetown way back in the day -- 1988, Etheridge was quick to recall, before she had really broken through to popular success. (The Moms credit one of Goose's very first grad students with bringing Etheridge to their attention -- and getting them down to the Bayou that evening.) A totally unexpected bonus was that Etheridge's new partner, Linda Wallem, was also in attendance last night. Wallem is a TV writer and producer who co-created Showtime's spectacular Edie Falco vehicle Nurse Jackie. Moose did not quite get down on her knees to thank Wallem for designing and developing one of the most extraordinary female characters in the history of series television, but she came close. Wallem, we are pleased to report, is a funny, friendly gal. We wish her and Etheridge many years of attracting and captivating one another.

Oh, and the concert? Fabulous, of course. Etheridge, who turned fifty in May and faced breast cancer seven years ago, still rocks her guts out on stage. We think even Comrade PhysioProf, who usually takes strenuous, visceral, Anglo-Saxon exception to our musical taste, would have enjoyed the show, which was loud and tight and kept the audience on its feet all night. It was a sweaty, satisfying evening, which is more than one can say for a lot of Tuesday nights in Baltimore, n'est-ce pas?

Now, aging rockers, about those captions you are going to write: Hop to, will you? You come up with some pithy lines of dialog, and then we will tell you what Moose was actually saying as the world's most famous lesbian rock star wrapped her bare shoulders in a vise-like grip, while her partner of 27 years looked on with delight. Go on. We know you weren't really planning to work this afternoon. Go on and close your eyes, imagine yourself there last night. You know you want to.

Peace out.

Daring to Eat a Peach (Cobbler)

(Photo Credit, Food Prep, and Point Calculation: Moose, 8/2/11)

Longtime readers know how much we love the peach cobbler recipe from The Silver Palate Cookbook. You might -- or might not -- have been wondering how we were going to get through peach season without indulging in a treat so delicious Moose says it produces a response similar to Meg Ryan's famous scene in When Harry Met Sally. The first few weeks of the season, Moose had been experimenting with LAP-approved crisp recipes that were delicious and happy-making, if not quite, well, orgasmic. What can I say, people? Quaker oats and agave nectar are super cute but not, you know, sexy.

This past Sunday, though, the peaches were so stupendously beautiful that Moose began to dream about her old flame, peach cobbler, the one with two-thirds of a cup of actual sugar, not to mention white flour and vegetable shortening! And -- here's the truly orgasmic part -- topped off with whipped cream (right there!) spiked with peach (oooooh!) brandy (yes!). Goose seemed to be thinking about it, too, and got a little misty-eyed when Moose indicated it might not fit into the household's new food plan. "Oh," Goose said, "OK." [Translation: I have been with you for 27 years and know I need to express support for your ludicrous position while also conveying the slightest bit of disappointment. That way, when your position shifts -- and I know it will --, I get points for being willing to forego pleasure for your sake -- and I get the cobbler, too!]

Goose got her cobbler -- and several relationship points for epic forbearance over the course of the past six months. She's been a trooper, but how, you may or may not be wondering, did Moose come around to the idea of making -- and eating -- a dish that contains all those sinfully delicious ingredients? Is the virtue binge over? Has she fallen off the wagon and returned to the kind of mindless, decadent eating that got her into her middle-aged funk?

Hardly, darlings. Moose woke up Tuesday morning, stepped on the scale, and saw that she was still losing weight rather than merely maintaining it, which is the goal now. This whole clean living thing can get a little addictive, you know, especially for a girl who finds it hard to believe that what she sees in the mirror is real. Anyhoo, she came downstairs, used her LAP's recipe builder to calculate the points per serving for the glorious peach cobbler, and sent Goose to the store to get heavy cream. "I love you, honey," she said, "and there is room in my life for an 11-point treat. Get asparagus, too. We won't be having carbs at dinner tonight."

So, see, it wasn't a lapse or a sin or an instance of being bad. It was a conscious choice, an instance of eating mindfully and well. Resulting in a happy little food orgasm and a week's worth of motivation to keep racking up activity points. Step aside, kid. That is MY treadmill for the next 45 minutes. I've got a date with the sweetest cobbler on dog's earth, and you're in my way!

Feel free to weigh in, as it were, with your own summer food delights. What are the treats that get you, um, going?

By the way, if you missed it, WaPo had a couple of good pieces on aging well in yesterday's "Health and Science" section. Here's one on a 62-year-old guy who has stayed remarkably young looking just by being consistent in his commitment to a pretty sane and simple set of health and fitness habits. One expert quoted in the story estimates that after 50 how you age is about 30% a matter of genetics and 70% a matter of lifestyle and behavior. The good news here is that moderation works. You don't have to work out seven days a week and forego booze and, you know, peach cobbler in order to live long and well. Moderate exercise and a diet low in saturated fats will do the trick. Oh, and not smoking, of course, but you knew that. Here's another article on older athletes that focuses on injuries and how to avoid them. Also helpful.

In other news, the United States narrowly avoided fiscal disaster yesterday, but no one seems too happy with how things worked out. Gosh, kids, do you think this deal would taste better if we could throw a dollop of whipped cream spiked with peach brandy on it? Yeah, me neither.

Peace out, my pretties, and may your day be sweet as an August peach.

The Virtue Binge

Goose has been out of town on urgent Emily Dickinson-related business for nearly a week. Moose has been batching it, which used to mean she'd revert to grad school habits of having popcorn and beer for dinner while zoning out to really trashy movies on Lifetime. Good times, right, Moose?

Anyhoo, this week, aside from Wednesday night's decadent dinner at America Eats, in which Moose permitted herself the (now) shocking indulgence of a third glass of wine, she's been living like a freaking monk. It's been all yogurt and whole grains and farmer's market veggies. Not a beer in sight. Her big indulgence food-wise was to use half a cup of olive oil in some pesto she made. Half a cup! And pesto meant that she treated herself to pasta for dinner! Whole wheat, of course. Whoa, Moose. Way to ride the edge.

Then there's been the whole activity thing. The trips to the gym. The rides on the stationary bike in the basement when she felt too lazy to schlep to the gym. The Friday yoga class. The Saturday yoga workshop. Yes: Two and a half hours spent painstakingly refining plank and cobra poses. Srsly, kids, the fun just never stops around here, does it?

You leave town, and I go off on some kind of virtue binge, Moose quipped to Goose in a text message yesterday. The quip got her thinking, and -- Oh, heck, I think I'll just let her tell you. Being disembodied, I am less equipped, as it were, to talk about certain kinds of things these days. Take it away, Moose!

* * * 

(Photo Credit: Anon, Self-Portrait After Plank Workshop, 7/30/11)

You have to admit it's a funny line -- I go off on some kind of virtue binge -- but it's also a revealing one, loaded with assumptions and, perhaps, anxieties about bodies, behavior, discipline, moralism. It registers a certain pride, yes, but it also captures some of the discomfort I've experienced in recent months as I've tried to find ways to talk and write about losing weight without sounding sanctimonious or fat-shaming. (That discomfort is explored in this post.)

At this particular moment, the notion of a virtue binge also resonates with the political fiasco unfolding on Capitol Hill, as Republicans and Democrats battle, with nearly equal disingenuousness, to position their nearly indistinguishable plans for trimming the alleged fat off the nation's fiscal body as the morally correct one. (And how telling that the fiscal and governmental bodies are so frequently imaged, as in the cartoon anchored to this paragraph, as obese to a degree designed to elicit disgust.) The binge will end -- because binges always do -- the moment the deal is signed and there is no more political advantage to be gained by exaggerating one's own virtues and the vices of one's opponents. It will be resumed -- because binging generally is -- when new circumstances arise that once again make it expedient to demonize the opposing side as lacking in virtue. (Yes, darlings, I am well aware that one of our two major political parties is more in thrall than the other to a strategy of framing any kind of difference or disagreement as a world-threatening conflict between good and evil. I am lumping them together because everyone involved in the debt ceiling debacle has behaved so badly and because both the president and Senate majority leader Harry Reid strike me as guys whose lives have been one long virtue binge.)

Anyway: The virtue binge may be a uniquely and obnoxiously American phenomenon, a hangover of what one astute student of cultural history has described as The Puritan Origins of the American Self. That is a major source of the discomfort I feel with my own little quip. I am troubled to hear myself describe my weight loss and my recommitment to fitness in such terms because they suggest that I have internalized a set of value judgments about physical/moral fitness that I am deeply committed to contesting. (See, for example, the first two chapters of this book.) A quip is just a quip, of course, and I could take refuge in the idea that the joke mocks the tendency it names and therefore does contest the values that might motivate any kind of virtue binge. I was a firm believer in the salvific power of parody long before Stephen Colbert came on the scene.

All kidding aside, though, perhaps what really bothers me is the inadequacy of the language available for describing experiences like the one I have had over the past several months. How do we talk about weight and fitness -- especially as women, feminists, and queers -- without falling back on metaphors that equate physical health and "normal" size with moral virtue? I'm obviously a big fan of the Lifestyle Adjustment Program I used to lose weight, but I can't bear to read the "Success Stories" prominently featured on its website because they so relentlessly emphasize the virtues of being on track and in control. Success in these terms is a matter of reasserting discipline over a body defined as unruly, disorderly, and out of control.

"I feel like I've conquered the world," says my LAP's most famous current spokesperson, singer Jennifer Hudson, of her weight loss. Such language perpetuates a dualistic model of the relationship between mind and body that is both punitive and terroristic. I hate it -- even though I know full well that I had come to feel fairly out of control in relation to food, drink, and weight. Even though I admitted, right here in Roxie's World, that I had reached the point of feeling miserable in my body by January of this year and proudly offered an illustrated announcement just a few weeks ago of "what feeling better looks like." Careful and non-fat phobic as I have tried to be, my own language is as problematic as Hudson's, even without the cheesy metaphor of world domination.

I want another way to narrate this story, some alternative to the plots of conquest or redemption that have done so much damage in American culture and the world. I don't want to see what I am doing these days as either a virtue or a binge, because virtue is boring and binges are transient. I want to say to the friends and the sisters who are looking to me for advice and inspiration in their own efforts to take off weight that mind and body are one and we have to let go of self-loathing. We need to find ways to relate to our bodies, ourselves with love and compassion, whatever our size and shape. And we need to find ways to talk about the disciplines of self-care not as regimens of self-punishment and sacrifice but as forms of pleasure and play. You hear some of this rhetoric in the wellness industry's "this is not a diet" mantra, but my LAP's emphasis on tracking and control still sounds more anxious and paranoid than I would like.

The most satisfying language I've come up with so far is one that emphasizes mindfulness in relation to eating and activity. I put on weight over the course of several years because I stopped paying attention to how much I was eating and let go of a commitment I had maintained for most of my adult life to regular, vigorous exercise. In cultivating mindfulness, I've discovered new pleasure in food, which tastes better and is more satisfying when you pay attention to every bite, no matter how simply or sensibly it's prepared. And I've reconnected with the deep pleasures of working/playing in and with my body to learn new skills or to revel in the joy of movement for its own sake. Yes, I spent two and a half hours on Saturday afternoon working strenuously to improve my ability to perform what are basically glorified push-ups -- and walked out in a state of endorphin-produced bliss as glorious as anything I've felt in years. My posture was impressive, too. I don't want to underestimate the challenge of getting into shape after years of being mostly sedentary. It's been hard and humbling, but it has also been enormously satisfying and in a lot of moments just plain fun.

Perhaps what I am getting at is a model of bodily discipline or practice similar to what Foucault describes in The Use of Pleasure as "the arts of existence": "those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria" (10-11). I like the emphasis here on both intentionality and artfulness as aspects of self-making. Or perhaps I'm thinking of the vulnerable, imperfect, necessary body Adrienne Rich tenderly claims in her "Contradictions: Tracking Poems (18)":

The best world is the body's world
filled with creatures     filled with dread
misshapen so     yet the best we have
our raft among the abstract worlds
and how I longed to live on this earth
walking her boundaries     never counting the cost

The best world is the body's world: Amen. This ain't no binge, friends. It's a way of life. Peace out.

(Photo Credit: Anon, Self-Portrait After Plank Workshop [2], 7/30/11)

Dear Abby

Would you please come home and raise the debt ceiling? Yours sincerely, US of A

Because, you know, I'm pretty sure she could.

(Photo Credit: Martin Meissner, Associated Press, via. AP caption: United States forward Abby Wambach celebrates after scoring the winning goal against France on Wednesday.)

Girl's got a good head on her shoulders, after all, which is more than you can say for the dudebros in DC these days.

(Photo Credit: Associated Press, via.)

Sigh. We are officially soccer-illiterate here in Roxie's World, but you know we love us any estrogen-fueled spectacle of power and grace, so we are all in for Abby and her gang o' high-kicking gal pals over there in Germany battling for the World Cup. You go, girls, and when it's over get your firm behinds home and get to work fixing any of the several. pickles. our nation. is currently in.

Meantime, whatever it is you do to win a soccer game, we hope you will do it supremely well against Japan on Sunday. Use your heads, wimmin. Right? Right! Go, team, go!

And, you, dudebros, being all preening and stupid and strateger-ic: Straighten up, fly right, and pay the bills. The clock is ticking, and your nation is sick of the dithering. Shut up and make a deal. Use your heads, if you can manage to pull them out of your un-firm behinds.

Yours sincerely, US of A

Blogger Babes Bare All!

Apparently, it's Show-and-Tell Day in the academic feminist blogosphere. Missed the memo? Consider this your invitation to participate!

Our dear friend Historiann, whom we have never met in the dimension commonly referred to as Real Life, posted photographs this morning of herself and her husband frolicking in the Colorado wilderness. These are, as far as we know, the first images Historiann's readers have ever seen of the Real People behind the blog. To our surprise and considerable disappointment, Historiann is not wearing chaps or brandishing a lasso in the picture. On the other hand, the head-and-shoulders shot proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that our favorite tenured cowgirl has a very fine neck and a regal way of looking at a camera, which somehow does not surprise us. Think Audrey Hepburn, only outdoorsy-er.

Not to be outdone by our blog pal's sudden penchant for self-revelation, the Beach Blanket Bingo players of Roxie's World are pleased to offer this bodacious image of Moose last week in South Haven, MI, looking for all the world as if she is ready for the swimsuit competition in next year's Ms. Blogosphere pageant:

(Photo Credit: Little Sister of the Moosians, 7/4/11)

Yes, as a matter of fact, we have lost our minds. It could be the heat has gotten to us. It's hot as heck here in the national capital area today. We thought this photo might help local readers cool off. Also, we thought you'd get a kick out of seeing the reading glasses placed strategically in front of the giant sunglasses, not to mention the kind of high-octane reading material Moose takes with her to the beach. (Look, she had her Kindle with her, too, and actually read a screen or two of Sherry Turkle's Alone Together before nodding off in the sun!) We also felt it was important to immortalize the ridiculous floral bathing suit Moose was forced to buy out in New Mexico when she showed up at a hot springs spa that used to be sex-segregated and clothing-optional. That she is still wearing the suit nearly two years later proves that cheapness triumphs over vanity in la famillle Moosianne.

Mostly, though, we offer this shockingly revealing image as a way of commemorating the six-month anniversary of Moose's Lifestyle Adjustment Program. It's true. Six months ago today she walked into a meeting, stepped on a scale, and made a commitment to eating less, moving more, and feeling better. Tomorrow, she will walk back into a meeting, step on that same scale, and declare herself on maintenance. An important part of the journey will be over. A victory will be (sensibly) celebrated, and a new stage, more challenging in many ways for Moose than the effort to take off weight, will begin. To mark that transition, we offer a photograph, not to brag, shame, or even necessarily inspire, but simply to acknowledge and to remember: For one feisty middle-aged broad, this is what feeling better looks like.

Peace out, darlings. Be well.