wherekizzialives

[wherekizzialives]

Update ahead of a Wild (and social media free) June

Hello lovely people who are kind enough to read my posts, this is me offering you a very small update on a) what’s been going on in my world since I went on hiatus, and b) what I’m going to be up to over the summer.  Best news first; the sale of my parent’s house completed at the end of April. Huzzah, hurrah and hooray indeed! It’s such a massive relief to have got the sale over the line and not…

[wherekizzialives]

why didn’t gandalf just carry the ring to mordor himself with these tongs

[wherekizzialives]

“X bodily fluid is just filtered blood!” buddy I hate to break it to you but ALL of the fluids in your body are filtered blood. Your circulatory system is how water gets around your body. It all comes out of the blood (or lymph, which is just filtered blood).

[wherekizzialives]

This weekend I was told a story which, although I’m kind of ashamed to admit it, because holy shit is it ever obvious, is kind of blowing my mind.

A friend of a friend won a free consultation with Clinton Kelly of What Not To Wear, and she was very excited, because she has a plus-size body, and wanted some tips on how to make the most of her wardrobe in a fashion culture which deliberately puts her body at a disadvantage.

Her first question for him was this: how do celebrities make a plain white t-shirt and a pair of weekend jeans look chic?  She always assumed it was because so many celebrities have, by nature or by design, very slender frames, and because they can afford very expensive clothing.  But when she watched What Not To Wear, she noticed that women of all sizes ended up in cute clothes that really fit their bodies and looked great.  She had tried to apply some guidelines from the show into her own wardrobe, but with only mixed success.  So - what gives?

His answer was that everything you will ever see on a celebrity’s body, including their outfits when they’re out and about and they just get caught by a paparazzo, has been tailored, and the same goes for everything on What Not To Wear.  Jeans, blazers, dresses - everything right down to plain t-shirts and camisoles.  He pointed out that historically, up until the last few generations, the vast majority of people either made their own clothing or had their clothing made by tailors and seamstresses.  You had your clothing made to accommodate the measurements of your individual body, and then you moved the fuck on.  Nothing on the show or in People magazine is off the rack and unaltered.  He said that what they do is ignore the actual size numbers on the tags, find something that fits an individual’s widest place, and then have it completely altered to fit.  That’s how celebrities have jeans that magically fit them all over, and the rest of us chumps can’t ever find a pair that doesn’t gape here or ride up or slouch down or have about four yards of extra fabric here and there.

I knew that having dresses and blazers altered was probably something they were doing, but to me, having alterations done generally means having my jeans hemmed and then simply living with the fact that I will always be adjusting my clothing while I’m wearing it because I have curves from here to ya-ya, some things don’t fit right, and the world is just unfair that way.  I didn’t think that having everything tailored was something that people did. 

It’s so obvious, I can’t believe I didn’t know this.  But no one ever told me.  I was told about bikini season and dieting and targeting your “problem areas” and avoiding horizontal stripes.  No one told me that Jennifer Aniston is out there wearing a bigger size of Ralph Lauren t-shirt and having it altered to fit her.

I sat there after I was told this story, and I really thought about how hard I have worked not to care about the number or the letter on the tag of my clothes, how hard I have tried to just love my body the way it is, and where I’ve succeeded and failed.  I thought about all the times I’ve stood in a fitting room and stared up at the lights and bit my lip so hard it bled, just to keep myself from crying about how nothing fits the way it’s supposed to.  No one told me that it wasn’t supposed to.  I guess I just didn’t know.  I was too busy thinking that I was the one that didn’t fit.

I thought about that, and about all the other girls and women out there whose proportions are “wrong,” who can’t find a good pair of work trousers, who can’t fill a sweater, who feel excluded and freakish and sad and frustrated because they have to go up a size, when really the size doesn’t mean anything and it never, ever did, and this is just another bullshit thing thrown in your path to make you feel shitty about yourself.

I thought about all of that, and then I thought that in elementary school, there should be a class for girls where they sit you down and tell you this stuff before you waste years of your life feeling like someone put you together wrong.

So, I have to take that and sit with it for a while.  But in the meantime, I thought perhaps I should post this, because maybe my friend, her friend, and I are the only clueless people who did not realise this, but maybe we’re not.  Maybe some of you have tried to embrace the arbitrary size you are, but still couldn’t find a cute pair of jeans, and didn’t know why.

[wherekizzialives]

Your body is an ancestor. Your body is an altar to your ancestors. Every one of your cells holds an ancient and anarchic love story. Around 2.7 billion years ago free-living prokaryotes melted into one another to form the mitochondria and organelles of the cells that build our bodies today. All you need to do to honor your ancestors is to roll up like a pill bug, into the innate shape of safety: the fetal position. The curl of your body, then, is an altar not just to the womb that grew you, but to the retroviruses that, 200 million years ago taught mammals how to develop the protein syncytin that creates the synctrophoblast layer of the placenta. Breathe in, slowly, knowing that your breath loops you into the biome of your ecosystem. Every seven to ten years your cells will have turned over, rearticulated by your inhales and exhales, your appetites and proclivity for certain flavors. If you live in a valley, chances are the ancient glacial moraine, the fossils crushed underfoot, the spores from grandmotherly honey fungi, have all entered into and rebuilt the very molecular make up of your bones, your lungs, and even your eyes. Even your lungfuls of exhaust churn you into an ancestor altar for Mesozoic ferns pressurized into the fossil fuels. You are threaded through with fossils. Your microbiome is an ode to bacterial legacies you would not be able to trace with birth certificates and blood lineages. You are the ongoing-ness of the dead. The alembic where they are given breath again. Every decision, every idea, every poem you breathe and live is a resurrection of elements that date back to the birth of this universe itself. Today I realize that due to the miracle of metabolic recycling, it is even possible that my body, somehow, holds the cells of my great-great grandmother. Or your great-great grandmother. Or that I am built from carbon that once intimately orchestrated the flight of a hummingbird or a pterodactyl. Your body is an ecosystem of ancestors. An outcome born not of a single human thread, but a web of relations that ripples outwards into the intimate ocean of deep time.

Your Body is an Ancestor, Sophie Strand

[wherekizzialives]

I’m paying to force seven thousand strangers to see a photo of my late husband having fun with his dog. Tumblr Blaze is totally worth it. XD

[wherekizzialives]

Did I daydream this, or was there a website for writers with like. A ridiculous quantity of descriptive aid. Like I remember clicking on " inside a cinema " or something like that. Then, BAM. Here's a list of smell and sounds. I can't remember it for the life of me, but if someone else can, help a bitch out <3

[wherekizzialives]

If anyone is interested in a sort of potted history of footnotes, I wrote one on my blog last year, after I got an anon comment accusing me of plagiarising Terry Pratchett because I use them regularly:

Screenshot of comment lest anyone think I’m exaggerating:

the singular unfortunate effect of getting really into discworld at a young age is that i formed a Certain Impression about the purpose of footnotes, and now i am entering academia and it is still my true and firm belief that the footnotes are for being funny in and NOTHING else

[wherekizzialives]

What’s your score?

𝐒𝐂𝐎𝐑𝐄𝐒

16-20 Safe Space Ace

11-15 The B Team

5-10 Wise

0-4 Legendary

Feel free to play along and put your number in the tags. Remember, it's a point for something you've NEVER done (not the other way around...kind of confusing.)

Anyway, I've done them all, so I got 0.

[wherekizzialives]

“But first and foremost, I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple—or a green field—a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing—an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness—wonderful as that part of it is. I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak—to be company.”

― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

[wherekizzialives]

i think if your account has existed on this site for a certain number of years you should be grandfathered into ad free browsing. a decade seems reasonable like if you signed up in 2012 or prior you have tenure

[wherekizzialives]

Thank you for that, I have learnt my “new thing” for the day!

Brought coffee and coffee cake to class this morning and once the adults had partaken I let the kids have some of the coffee cake.

Child: Study, why doesn’t it taste like coffee?

Me: Coffee cake isn’t usually made of coffee, it is a cake adults eat with their coffee, that’s why it’s named that.

Child: Interesting…my mom claims cake is not for breakfast. And now I discover adults have been having cake that is specifically meant for breakfast this whole time… fascinating.

[wherekizzialives]

Are there cakes that you don’t consider to be “coffee cakes” then? Because here in the UK coffee cake is, in fact, a coffee flavoured cake. Which can obviously be eaten alongside a cup of coffee but is not specifically for that, and the same goes for all our other cakes. We do often pair Victoria sponges with afternoon tea but even that’s not a hard and fast rule.

Brought coffee and coffee cake to class this morning and once the adults had partaken I let the kids have some of the coffee cake.

Child: Study, why doesn’t it taste like coffee?

Me: Coffee cake isn’t usually made of coffee, it is a cake adults eat with their coffee, that’s why it’s named that.

Child: Interesting…my mom claims cake is not for breakfast. And now I discover adults have been having cake that is specifically meant for breakfast this whole time… fascinating.

[wherekizzialives]

kitty car 🐱

[wherekizzialives]

via

[wherekizzialives]

Going on Hiatus

Going on Hiatus: A quick update about what’s happening in my world at the moment

Currently the amount I have going on is making me feel as if I am trying to juggle knives, melons and eggs while spinning plates, blindfold, on a trampoline. So – since I have learned from the past, and these days do my best not to make my life any harder than it has to be – I’ve decided to pause all posting on both this blog and my monthly substack newsletter for the time being. If things* go…

[wherekizzialives]

"We have to continue the tradition of AIDS activism" says the person who ditched their mask in 2021, doesn't know what long covid is or does, and hasn't so much as googled covid since 2020. If you're only up in arms about continuing the tradition of AIDS activism now that Trump is playing some culture war BS, you've been ignoring the disproportionate amount of queer people killed by covid and living with post-viral illness from covid, and you should feel bad. Covid-safety is key to intersectional activism, especially since racially, ethnically, sexually, and medically marginalized people bear the brunt of most major issues in our society. It's easy too: Hold events outdoors, require and provide masks, provide air filtration during indoor meetings. One CR box has the same efficacy as two large HEPA filters and only costs ~$60 to build and ~$25 to maintain when you have to replace the filters. Can a handful of activists really not scrape together less than $100? Care about your community. Stop getting them sick. Stop leaving the ill behind. Quit being ableist fucks. That's how fascism always starts: The medically vulnerable are first to go, then it ramps up from there.