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our bodies, ourselves

Seeing real people's bodies is the best antidote to the culturally-inscribed feelings of self-consciousness and inferiority that many of us have spent our whole lives feeling. It might sound like weird advice, but seeing your friends naked is really good for you. Since you already love them, you are not judgmental about the way that their bodies look because their bodies are the physical manifestation of the people that reside inside the bodies. And it helps you realize that your body is the same way. I've lately been consumed with love and affection for my own body--not because I have big round boobs or a flat stomach (see Fig. A.) because I have neither of these. Instead, I've become less concerned with the way it looks from the imaginary observer's standpoint (into which I'd formerly constantly placed myself) and more concerned with the way it works and the way that it feels from the inside. My boobs are important and wonderful because I get pleasure from them. My stomach is wonderful and important because it digests the food that I eat and it strengthens and clenches from laughter, not sit ups. If my body does so much for me - from keeping my heart beating, to moving my legs so I can get around, to effortlessly forming on my lips the words that I want to speak - how could I be so ungrateful as to wish it were different?

Fig. A. 50% insane discipline and repression of appetite, 50% photoshop
Nobody that I know actually looks like this, and I probably won't meet anybody who does.

Fig. B. Much closer to the way that I look and the way that the people I know look. She's not dieting or obsessively working out but she's obviously living the life. She's also more womanly than Fig. A. who looks more like a teenage Barbie.
(P.S., who is the girl puking in the background?)

so dance around your house naked even if the neighbors see you over the fence. Fuck it.

an epistemological note

Just got home from some beers with a radical PhD student friend of mine and honestly it was a really helpful talk. Lately I've struggled with relating to my parents as I learn and change my views and the relationship with them has taken on a vague fictional antagonism in my head. The deconstruction of this feeling & the realization that it's manufactured is important; realizing that the stakes aren't so high (i.e., no one will disown me because of my religion/politics) helps too! Generally I've been thinking lately about my the perpetual state of righteous indignation against geopolitical and philosophical problems isn't an effective or healthy way of being. The humility to apply an ethically-neutral standpoint theory to the way other people feel and behave is helpful too. I'm finding the answers to the big questions for my own life, but these are grounded in my own life and experience. I would never claim to believe in objective truth, so it's arrogant to try to apply my own conclusions to the different experiences of other people. I won't stop pushing for political goals (I never could!) but must push differently. Not "hey, I have the answer and I'm super pissed that other people don't have this super smart and objectively correct answer that I've come to, and instead choose to live in ignorance and intellectual indolence," but rather respect for the experience and standpoint that bring people to draw the conclusions that they have drawn, and engaging them at their own level in a non-aggressive way. The encounter between two people and the co-construction of a mutually-agreeable conclusion is more valuable than me haranguing and trying to convince them of my way, because my bounded and limited experience - although compelling and moving to me - is valid for me and me alone. Humility in interaction and the objective to negotiate truth rather than pushing my own agenda would do me well politically, professionally, and personally.