Here Be Bloggins

Change of course.

It seems this whole superhero-narrative-as-thinly-veiled-autobiography isn't going to cut it. Well, not for my own self-serving needs, anyway.

Status Quoman grew out of a conversation with a dear friend of mine, who also happens to have plenty of body issues. We were talking alternaheroes, such as Captain Misanthrope and Motzi Man, and suddenly there was Status Quoman, fully formed and ready to fight to preserve the status quo. Her nemeses arrived soon after I decided to take Quoman to the streets of Gothapolis in an attempt to elevate the Status Quo. Through Status Quoman I'd achieve a healthy state of body and mind! I'd write a story every day! Maybe I'd do a webcomic! Maybe I'd gather a following on the Weight Watchers boards! Maybe I'd change the way people think about bodies and the large female form!

Life sometimes gets in the way of success. Fittingly enough, raising my real-life status quo a bit did that trick.

This isn't to say that Status Quoman stories don't pop into my head all the time; they do, and how. It's just that Status Quoman has evolved. She's turned into more than a one-woman body-accepting machine, mainly because I've realized that the battle that Quoman fights for me is more complex than simply learning to value the corporeal hand I've been dealt.

Vague enough for you? Let me explain.

On my way home today I was thinking about my weight. This happens regularly, which is just lame, but going on. A young man came onto the subway. He was trim and young and athletic -- and his face was ravaged by extreme acne. Now, being a self-conscious young woman, I often compare myself to others (I wish I could be as thin as her, wish I could pull off that outfit -huh huh huh, get it? Anyone? Other thirteen-year-old boys?). Not always negatively, of course. Sometimes, like today, I compared myself positively, though still in a negative fashion -- I may be fat, but at least I didn't get cursed with a scarring skin condition. Which got me thinking...

Like so many large young people, a good part of my body acceptance problems stem from my parents. Okay, I'll stop being oblique -- my mother. I love my mother dearly, but she has always struggled with my weight. I am the only overweight one in my family -- my mother, father, and brothers are all trim. I've been raised to believe that being overweight is a tragedy, that everything else I've got going for me is eclipsed by this one fatal flaw. And I do have a ton going for me; my genes, as compared to the rest of the family, could not be better. The uncomfortable inheritances that nagged my brothers skipped over my genome. I have never battled acne, I have light, sparse body hair (yeek), I somehow managed not to inherit The Nose, my eyebrows are great without plucking, and, being a woman, I haven't spent my whole life worrying about which X chromosome from Mom might be responsible for potential male pattern baldness. As far as superficial beauty goes, I got dealt a pretty swell hand. The one missing card is the skinny-without-trying card, and believe me, it's a big'un.

I have struggled with this my entire life. I have been on a diet since age 11. Dieting is my status quo. Fighting an eating disorder is also my status quo. My status quo has remained remarkably steady for the past 25 years. I've been questioning my sexuality since developing a giant, terrifying crush on Anne P. from biology class in eighth grade, but have never fully resolved this as part of my identity. I've been a vegetarian for years (cut out red meat at age 14, going on five years now of full lacto-ovo vegetarianism) but haven't really made inroads into how that fits into my sense of activism, which I strongly feel it should be in spite of my refusal to join the ranks of (h)angry herbivores. Even my sense of style, or lack thereof, remains undetermined; my wardrobe contains items from middle school that I know make me feel unattractive but somehow can't seem to unload. For 25 years I've gotten interested in one thing, done it full steam ahead for a while, then gotten lazy and stopped.

Perhaps this is my problem: laziness is my status quo. Or perhaps the status quo in general is my problem.

Time to change that. Status Quoman from now on will be energized. She will discuss matters of body, brain, science, and faith. She will tackle feminist topics with wit and aplomb, which in actuality will probably involve a fair bit of stumbling about in the dark. She won't be afraid to get esoteric or nerdy or even scholarly. She will write about news articles and plays, about catastrophes and discoveries, about the way the honeysuckle a few feet from her front door smells, and why that should mean something on any old Tuesday. There will be no specific special focus to this blog. It will simply be the musings and adventures of a feminist, fat, (sometimes) furious, Jewish, science-minded, indeterminately queer, indomitably optimistic everyday superheroine.

Status Quoman is me. Ready for my saga? Let's go.