i'm baaaack...for today, anyway.

promises, promises...

so sorry i have been a lazy girl in terms of posting on the blog as of late. the past few months have been nuts at work - we moved from one big, labyrinthine building to another bigger, more labyrinthine building. i was involved intimately in the whole crazy-making process. this meant loads and loads of time spent in front of the computer. this also meant i had absolutely zero interest in spending any time in front of the computer after work for any reason - blogging, emailing, graphic design, lesbian porn (kidding, dad!). nothing. nada. nope. the idea of more time with a computer nauseated me. i even came to resent my Treo - "Satan's phone," i came to think of it. everyone, including Satan, can get in touch with you anytime, anywhere.

so anyway...


hi! how ya been?

so there's the work thing, and..and! i really am trying to spend some time figuring out what the next step is for size ate - the blog, the show, the Moi. the blog started as an online diary meant to share my neuroses surrounding body and food. the idea being that this would make it easier for me to then get up on a stage ALONE in front of 80 people and talk, act, dance, sing about it for an hour in my one-woman show. PRACTICE EXPOSING MYSELF is what this blog really should have been called. like a flasher-in-training. so i did that, and i did the show, and so...


now what?

hm. not sure.

the show itself has some performances coming up, and i'm planning on booking more so that's good...wonderful...great. i'm really looking forward to re-uniting with my "little bastard child" (as my friend coins those projects we deem "problems" but end up getting most of our attention, and in the end, our love, and so they turn out beautiful and well-adjusted and successful, or...in prison). i am such a different person now than i was when i first performed this show almost two years ago. the same in many ways, but oh-so-different and "grown" in ways i never could have imagined. i'm eager to see what sort of voice i'll give the show from this vantage point. and it's so very exciting for me, because this was always the point of the show; that it should be organic...growing, changing...juuuust like the human body. and it is. it will.

"snaps" for change!


i think my recent silence stems from uncertainty about what this blog is to be going forward. a diary? a resource? a forum? a bit of all three? should it be more structured or keep the same free-flowing whateverness it's had for the past 3 years? honestly, not a big deal. it really is just a blog, and who knows...my point is...i'm working on it. working through it. playing through it. getting my hands dirty and fingerpainting my future. so, my postings are gonna be messy, and infrequent and probably not quite clear, but i'm here, and i'll keep posting about body, food and culture and looking forward to hearing from you when something ping! resonates with you. it really has been the emails i've gotten from readers and YouTube viewers that have kept me going in my development of size ate. you dears, are The Fire Under My Ass. so, thanks. i needed that.

and yes, yes, yes...you nosey nellies who've asked, there still is the whirling dervish of laughter and curls...the boy who draws hearts on lattes and whose good-good heart and balsamic vinaigrette make me swoon. someday...i'll introduce you. ( :

overheard in the office.

"models always look like the most miserable people, so why is it we always want to wear what they're wearing?"

back from lala land...

what loooove looks like in the laskey family...

the philosopher and his little brother, ethan.

sorry for the lengthy pause in posting. i was in Lala Land for the first time this past week. Los Angeles, i mean. where Botox grows on trees. i'll be posting some pics and deets in the coming days, so stay tuned. i'd really like your opinion on my nose job.

KIDDING!

i also went to San Diego where, among other things, i hung out in the Jacuzzi with my 10-year old nephew, tyler:

(a heavy sigh) "i wish i were rich."

"you don't think you're rich?"

"well, i know i'm rich in loooooooooove, but i mean the other kind."

don't know, but don't wanna go.

my aunt and 88-year old grandma came to NYC for the day on saturday to visit. we had an absolutely wonderful time. we ate lunch at Rock Center Cafe, rode the Circle Line cruise, ate lunch again at the Eatery, wandered through the magical dome that is Grand Central Station, had cocktails at a nearby pub...we gabbed, we giggled. it was a great day full of many lovely moments to cherish, but beyond a doubt, the most memorable moment was a single sentence uttered by my Aunt Charlene in complete and utter sincerity as we were riding through the city in a cab:

where is that F-A-R-T Schwarz?

this is the package, ok?

I quit Weight Watchers. Can you believe it? I quit! Fergie Schmergie! I hate fiber. I like Mallomars and if Derek isn't going to love me for the tiny amount of cellulite I have on the back of my thighs then fuck him. Screw that guy. This is the package, ok? It's exactly the same under the wrapping. This is the package, no exchanges, no returns. Right? Why does our society push us to be perpetually uncomfortable with who we are. It's so messed up! Wanna know why? (reading from a magazine) "Boost your buttocks and thighs. Luscious Liposuction. Flawless face lifts." That's why. Enough is enough. We need to stop letting society and media and our religious leaders delegate who we are. You're amazing and I'm even more amazing and anybody who doesn't get it can screw themselves. (sigh) That felt fantastic.

Molly Shannon as Carrie in the movie Gray Matters. sent to me by Cassie, a size ate reader. thanks for thinking of me. to quote another Mollie Shannon vehicle, "you're a SUPERSTAR!"

distract me, please.

well, it's a miracle if anyone is still reading this blog. i have been absolutely and utterly distracted over the past few weeks. working like a madwoman and exhausted and so damn sick of computers, the last thing i want to do is touch one in any capacity when i get home from work. i have actually dreamt about Excel spreadsheets the last two nights. what would freud have to say about that?

get a life, woman.

full disclosure: oh, okay...and then, yes then...if you really wanna know there is this boy who draws hearts on the tops of lattes he makes for me...

with a side of noogie.

"i'll have the wedgie burger with fries, please."

"uh. i'm sorry?"

"the wedgie burger."

"i'm so sorry?"

"the wedgie burger."

i hand her the menu so she can just point it out, and her index finger lands on the VEGGIE burger.

i have no idea what might be in a wedgie burger, but i know i don't want one.

a fat rant.

i can't believe i've missed this...it is WONDERFUL. it has gotten a TON of press, and she's gotten 903,983 views as of a few minutes ago. it clearly resonates with people...of ALL SIZES.

thank you, Joy Nash.

cooking for a boy

"i don't know what i should make...i mean, i'm much more of a winter cook - soups, stews, hearty things...i live off of salads in the summer. should i do a pasta? but i never make pasta. fish scares me. chicken's sorta boring...maybe i..."

"he won't care. pick your dress."

gratuitous baby pic of the week #2

grant mitchell laskey having "Doughnuts for Dad" at pre-school...

good boy...likes his carbs.

thank you.

do you ever have one of those days when you look around you and realize how very lucky you are to be where you are and surrounded by those who surround you?

today was that kind of day - i wore my blessings like a blush.

no more "date salads."

i went on a date thursday night (yes, i've actually had a few of those lately), and The Cute took me to an excellent sushi place downtown. while he was away using the loo, i struck up a conversation with the folks at the table next to me - two women on a business trip.

"oh, so you're from miami, you all must have really great sushi down there."

"oh, i've been all over, and this is by far the best sushi place i've ever been to...and i'm not on a date, so i can stuff my face."

"well, i am on a date, and i'm still gonna stuff my face."

"good for you...and you'll still have more fun afterwards than we will."

lesbians like tiaras too.

okay, okay...full disclosure:

my neighbors k + k are out of town for the week, so i "borrowed" their periodicals (really just the People magazine and the Time Out New York).

hi guys! i'll return them uncrinkled, and i promise i did not read them while on the throne.

i was flipping through the TONY and came across an interview with Glenn Marla, the reigning Miss LEZ and self-described "fat go-go and sex-positive superstar." i'm not a lesbian (really, Dad, i'm not), but if i were, i think i'd be a lot like her. she describes her style as combining "aspects of gut-as-glamour, dapper dandy, and trannie realness with a strong relationship to color – and a love of spandex and sparkle." on second thought, i'd like to work on adopting her style philosophy, whether i shoot for the other team or not. sparkle is a non-gender-biased cosmetic upper.

she said a few things that stuck with me, more so than anything any Miss USA has ever squawked:

My platform was to make backfat the new cleavage, and I don't know if you have looked around lately, but backfat has become all the rage!

I'm an ethical slut who tries to fall in love at least once a day...

I do believe that one can be fabulous, amazing, brilliant, sexy and nice.

one of those days...

...when you feel like no one sees you, or when they see you, they're rude.

...when it rains, and you have no umbrella but everyone else in this city seems to have a golf-sized one and absolutely no problem clipping you in the face with it's metal talons without so much as a "sorry," and it feels personal, like god chose this weather because he knew it would piss you off because you must have done something wrong once that you don't even remember, but you're sure it was something you did, something you ate, some thought you thunk, some booger you picked then wiped under your school desk when you were in Mrs. McClane's 1st grade class because you just didn't feel like walking up to her desk for a tissue.

THIS

IS

YOUR

PUNISHMENT.

...when the guy behind you in line at Duane Reade sighs dramatically, and says, "oh c'mon!" as you take a wee bit too long for his taste removing money from your purse. normally, you'd just ignore it and seethe, but something about the events of today make you look him straight in the eye and say,

"if it's a problem, you can move to another register."

"really?"

"yes, really." would you like a fucking escort?

maybe it's because i'm wearing all black, you think. i must just blend in. or maybe it's because i have suddenly become ugly and fat and so that's why everyone's being so awfully rude to me today.

that is what i do on days like today. if i can't make sense of other people's crappy behavior towards me, i assume that it's about me and some horrid flaw i have that is inspiring their behavioral vomit to land on my shoes. i know many folks who do this, and it varies as to what that imagined flaw might be. for me, and this'll come as no big shock, it's most frequently a physical flaw i imagine is encouraging these people to put on their meanypants.

blaming the body. exhausting. silly, maybe, but it's typical of so many of us folks who've struggled with eating issues and body image. i've done it for years, and it's a testament to my progress and healing that i really only do it on the shittiest of days anymore (midsummer 90 degree days count as "shittiest" too). days like today...when teenagers on the train ride home make fun of my all-black waitressing clothes:

look, she even has a black umbrella to match.

maybe, no...absolutely, it has nothing to do with you and your perfectly imperfect person, and everything to do with the shitty weather and that person's failing marriage, and that person's blister, and that teenage kid's pregnancy scare, and that guy who just got smacked in the face with a gigantic golf umbrella two minutes before you stood in line together at the Duane Reade, and all he wanted was a pack of cigarettes.

so, no. like most people's reactions, it had nothing to do with you and everything to do with their own internal scheisse, but still...no one could blame you if a little schadenfreude smirk did slide across your face when that guy asked for a pack of Newport Lights, and the clerk behind the counter replied:

"we're out."

it's never too late to source what you might have sourced.

it always creeps me out a bit when i get anonymous comments on blog posts that are more than a month or so old...

who is reading me, and why won't they let me see who they are?

and this one is no different, i'm still a little creeped out, but the intention seems to be a good one. i (incorrectly) quoted george eliot in a title of a blog once and failed to indicate who said it (it wasn't me). i'm so familiar w/ that quote, i guess i assumed everyone was and didn't need a source. anyway...i got this today -

"It is never too late to become what you might have been."
George Eliot, pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans. Post the source please.
Thanks and feel good. - Anonymous

ouch. hard not to feel like i'm being accused of plagiarism or something, but whatevs...them's there the breaks of sharing your writing publicly. for the record, it's mary ann evans who went by the nom de plume george eliot - author of one of my favorite books- Middlemarch. if you like jane austen, you'll probably like her too. she's like jane austen with a PhD in British political and social history...who wears stilettos.

so thanks, mr./ms. anonymous, for keeping me honest. it does feel good.

gratuitous baby pic of the week #1

grant mitchell laskey

i'm gonna limit myself people. once a week. i swear.

(fingers crossed)

the raisinet philosophy

today, just after lunch, i had what i thought was a craving for chocolate. i scraped some change together and went to the vending machine and bought myself a package of Dark Raisinets. a relatively healthy compromise i reasoned - dark chocolate full of antioxidants and raisins full of fiber. whatever. that bit is irrelevant. i got back to my desk, sat down, readied to open the bag and realized:

i didn't want them anymore.

i just wanted to be allowed to have them.

it's not new news that allowing yourself to have things (not just desire then deny them) sometimes suddenly leaves room for you to figure out that you didn't actually want them in the first place, you just wanted the freedom to choose.

i'm still surprised when i see that concept in action in my own life, having lived in a self-destructive cycle of complete denial then totally whacked-out binging for so long. i suppose it's the same reason i have two 5-pound bags of chocolate and candy in my cupboard nowadays. the candy has gone relatively uneaten, but it's always there, my SweetTart-scented security blanket of sorts. i am allowed to wrap myself up in it's sweetness anytime i like, but i rarely want to nowadays, and i can't help but partially attribute that to the fact that its consistent presence gives me a choice to do so, or not. by giving myself permission to eat or to feel (b/c in the end that's what all this is about - permission to feel all your feelings - the good, the bad the ugly) anything i want to, i have quieted the denial devil that sat on my shoulder screaming her philosophy of 'NO' for so many years.

i can now hear my body sweetly whisper (or scream) her needs and cravings - sometimes waffle fries dripping with cheese and mayo, sure, but oftentimes sauteed spinach with a little garlic and olive oil over the Ben & Jerry's Phish Food ice cream in the freezer. now that's something that never woulda happened in the old days.

and then sometimes, it's not about the food at all, is it? it's the shared glance, caress, kiss, connection i crave. the ones that come from sharing that little piece of tiramisu in the tiny italian place with the tin ceiling, skinny waitress and unripe pears. imagine not having giving myself the permission to taste that.

you can learn a lot from an unopened bag of chocolate-covered raisins. totally worth the 75 cents.

living from the inside out.

came across the new book by makeup artist Bobbi Brown the other day at work called Living Beauty. it's full of the typical makeup and skin care tips (with some nutrition and wellness tips thrown in for balance), but i picked it up primarily because it focuses on aging, and there are a few profiles of famous women highlighting their views on beauty and aging. some good little nuggets of wisdom in there from Susan Sarandon, Vera Wang, Lorraine Bracco, Marcia Gay Harden and others, but my favorite part of the entire book though, was the foreward by sassypants Debra Winger. i liked it so much, i typed it up for you here:

The prospect of writing about a woman "aging gracefully" has always given me pause. The term itself sounds as if one is lingering on each landing of a descending staircase, waving elegantly. The descent is what i do not like.

Aging, I feel is more of an ascension; I like that it is an "ing" word. It denotes a process that is alive and happening, growing up and getting closer. Now, we all know what "closer" may mean, but I think of it as moving toward the essential: what was there in the beginning and will be there in the end. We spend a lot of time in between trying to mask our age, hide it, reshape it, but it usually looks just that way...an altered state.

I have tried in the last decade to abstain from value judgments of those who choose plastic surgery. I don't know enough about it to even remark. Sometimes the results are startling to the untrained eye, but many times I'm sure I don't notice what has been done. For me, though, I am actually interested in the process of aging as an unfolding of some mystery. When I was little, someone told me that when you age, you turn into the person you were all your life. My grandmother, although possessing beautiful skin, had a sort of permanent grimace, that she called her smile. It did things to her face that said a lot. My mother, whom I didn't get to see age past seventy, had a twinkle in her eye that stole your attention immediately.

Each time I travel to another country and encounter another culture, when I return I am struck by the degree to which American culture is led by the media and not the lives and inherent beauty of its general population. This is not to say that everyone subscribes to this view, but it is safe to say that the popular cutlure has no room for real wrinkles. We are the specialists in no lines, no map, no history and this includes the history of many other lands. My favorite state of mind is when I am not made to think about myself from the outside in. The fact is, this is a fool's errand. Through a series of events early in my life, I found that the message I got about "vision" is that you will never truly know what you look like to others, because it is your consciousness and your critical eye that are looking in the mirror. It is simply a measure of one's own compassion for oneself, which we all know is the first step to compassion for others.

It seems to be that the challenge is to be the embodiment of whatever is happening in your life at that moment. Sad faces can be extraordinarily moving and beautiful. Happiness is a message, not a look. Making it more difficult, the movie industry in the United States promotes a lineless, motionless look for women of all ages that is, ironically, so nonthreatening that it is scary. But not "scary" in the way we want in the movies. Not in a way that would wake us up, kick us in the butt, and say, "Hey! Get on with it!"

The knowledge that Bobbi has shared begs the question of how palpable can beauty, enhanced or not, be without acceptance of oneself at every stage of life. I am interested in this question. I also applaud those who hold up different approaches to beauty. It is a big world and there is room for us all. A deeper understanding can only lead to a greater appreciation. The effects of our actions are written on our faces. Why not tell countless stories in many languages?

lbs. the musical

i just received this in a mass email from my theater company...somewhere between size 10 and size 12, one seems to become "full-sized."

'LBS. THE MUSICAL'

John Paolillo (choreo.-writer) Mary Feinsinger (music) & Lisa Ferber (lyrics)
are casting a workshop of lbs. The Musical, a comedic view of what it is
like to be full-sized in a small world.

Seeking—Three Full-Sized Women: size 12-24; Three Thin Women: size 2 to 10;
One Slender Male. Note: All must be late 20s-early 30s and be very strong in
dance, song, and acting (triple threats). All types encouraged.

Auditions will be held june 2, 2-5 p.m. at New York Sports Club, 62nd St. &
Broadway, NYC. Bring pix & résumés, along with a tape/CD (karaoke) of music
to sing to. No pay. you will be asked to dance sing and read.

life is short, eat (the best part of the) dessert first.

is it self-loving or self-indulging to bake a batch of Julia Child's brownies on a saturday night, frost them with chocolate buttercream icing and then cut out a square directly from the center (leaving a significant Pyrex eye staring back at you) because in your estimation, that's where the best brownie resides?

and who says self-loving and self-indulging can't be one and the same?