morning...

Gosh, it's morning. Those of you who know me well will know that I'm not usually awake at this time of day - not unless I'm still up from the night before. But things are different today. I'm not yet sure just _how_ different.

I set up this journal thingy yesterday while I was pissed off with my ISPs. I have two: PlusNet and dircon. The PlusNet account is a fixed-rate thing where I can connect for so many hours a week without needing to pay for the phone calls; the dircon account is Richard's old account that he's had for years. The PlusNet account is my primary account, because it's fixed-rate, and we use the dircon account as backup, if something's wrong with PlusNet.

One of the main things I do online these days is read usenet. My friends from various places, in particular alt.polyamory, are very important to me and it's the main way I seem to keep in contact with people these days. I've never been very good at sending personal email on a regular basis, but I can take part in community discussions without really thinking about it. One seems very easy whilst the other seems quite hard. And yet both involve sitting in front of a screen typing words into the computer. Still doesn't make sense to me.

Anyway, so yesterday morning, the news servers at _both_ of my ISPs were down. This has never actually happened before. dircon is usually 99% reliable, and PlusNet aren't too bad either. I was online - and I didn't know what to do! So I set this journal up on a whim. A few minutes after I finished typing up my second entry yesterday, news.plus.net sprang back into life, and I read news for a couple of hours, before deciding to go to bed sometime around 3pm. My plan was to go to bed around 3pm and sleep for a couple of hours, getting up again about 7.30pm so I could go to see my friend's band. This didn't happen.

Just as I was going to bed Andi (fluffkitten) logged onto irc. All of us on #soc.bi were worried about her because she was having an operation on Wednesday morning, so I couldn't just say hi and log off - I had to make sure she was OK. It turned out that she was absolutely fine, a bit spacey but not in too much pain and apparently recovering well - and I was pleased about this - but then by the time I actually went to bed (only maybe 15 minutes after I'd first meant to go) I was overtired, and I just couldn't get to sleep. I lay in bed and dozed, because I was too tired to do anything else, but I don't think I actually fell asleep at all. When Richard phoned me about 7ish to get me out of bed, I decided that I didn't actually feel well enough to go to the gig.

In the end, I went to Starbucks (to get a cream frappuccino) and to the shops (to get some food). I went home, put the food in the oven, read yesterday's paper, ate the food - and by the time I'd done all that it was 10.45 and Richard was home. He'd eaten on the way back, so we snuggled for a bit, and then I went to bed.

I woke up again about 5.30am. This isn't something I'm used to doing. I am most emphatically _not_ a morning person. But despite still being tired, I couldn't get back to sleep, and nothing seemed to help.

It was a beautiful morning when I woke up. It's clouded over a bit now. Summer mornings always make me wistful, but that's another story. I'm going to post this before I start trying to explain...

fat acceptance

After my last post I was going to write something deep and insightful, but Richard woke up and we went out to Starbucks for breakfast. I renewed my library books, got back, and started ploughing through usenet. I had something like 900 unread messages in both soc.bi and alt.polyamory, the two newsgroups where I actually read the majority of posts (as compared to the 9 other groups I read where I just skim the new topics as they turn up). It's taken me basically most of the day to do that. As well as reading, I've been posting quite a lot as well. I wrote lots of things about alt.polycon (which was April 27th - 29th in Seattle), a long article explaining why I don't like having sex with men other than Richard, and some really cool observations about myself.

One of the things that came out of my trip to Seattle was a genuine acceptance of my body for the first time. I used to be very thin (I was a UK size 10), and remained so until I got to college. Somehow, between cooking for myself and not doing enough exercise, and being depressed and some kind of general change in my metabolic rate, I started to put on weight, until I got to about a size 14. I stayed that size for a couple of years - then, as depression hit again, I went up to a size 16. To put this into perspective, a size 14 is the largest size offered in most high street fashion shops, and a size 16 is the smallest size in the "plus size" shops. People who are size 16 are fat (unless they're very muscular and need to wear that size because of their bulging muscles, or something).

Now, pretty much all women, apart from some of the very skinny ones, think that they're "too fat". But I had proof - I had clothes in my old size, and stretch marks on my legs and hips. Oh, and a doctor bitching at me about my weight (bleh). Coming into contact with fat activists, who point out that it's ok to be fat, made some difference to me. But I still felt "wrong". I felt it was ok for other people to be fat, but not for _me_ to be.

Somehow, sometime during my trip to Seattle, this attitude changed. I didn't notice the change as it happened - I've only just noticed it now. Suddenly I feel comfortable with my body again. I've found clothes that I look good in, and I don't feel revolted by seeing myself naked any more. Plenty of other people think I'm attractive - including people that I consider to be pretty darn amazing. Why shouldn't I find myself attractive?

I was pointed at this link today: the website of a book called Women En Large. It's a gallery of photos of naked fat women. And the women in these photos are _beautiful_. It's awe-inspiring.