Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down thy hair

And here you are folks, one of the two photos of me that you’ll ever have the pleasure of viewing (;
But the point of this post isn’t solely to show off my long tresses, it’s to do two things.
a) Apologize for my absence on my blog (and your blogs) for the past two weeks. I’ve been really busy with school and intend to stay busy. I’m hoping to get caught up with everyone in the next month.
b) To talk about long hair.
My hair grew long almost unintentionally. I’ve always had shoulder to mid-back length hair but two years ago, after an incident involving blonde dye and hair loss, I swore off hair dressers and dyed it back to black. It’s been growing ever since and over the past six months, I’ve realized how amazing it is to have long hair. In South Asian culture, long hair is a sign of great beauty. I have a lot of aunts and female cousins who have spent all their free time grooming their hair. I’ve finally become one of them… and now I understand why they do it.
Long hair makes you feel feminine and beautiful… but more importantly, very sexy. There’s something extremely sensual about long locks and it doesn’t even need to have a sexual connotation. Long hair just feels good. Even if the rest of you looks like serious crap, your hair feels great.
Other people can see it too. When I redo my hair during class, I can feel eyes on me when I undo my clips. When I’m dancing in a club, boys (and girls!) watch my hair flip around and back and forth. When I’m posing for a picture, I scrunch up my hair to my face and I can perfect the mock-sexy look. It gives me that extra confidence boost similar to the one I get from a spritz of my favorite perfume except the best thing is… that I can always feel it.  There’s this constant reminder that my hair is long and it’s pretty. Even now, while typing, I can feel it grazing my elbows. I’ll admit, it’s strange to talk about it but try sporting some extensions or a wig for a day and you’ll see what I mean.
And if you haven’t read about it yet, guess what? Men prefer longer hair.

Over the past decade and a half, I’ve dated and fallen in love with a strikingly wide variety of men. I’ve lost my heart to athletes, professors, surfer bio-physicists, the next Bill Clinton, older men, much older men, even an Australian paramilitary officer living in China whose mental faculties, much like his titanium leg, had taken an irreparable hit after “the jump.” All had varied backgrounds and different standards of beauty, yet they all shared a high level of intelligence and an impressive mastery of the English language. (Some women go for the body or sense of humor—I’ve always gone for the hyper- articulate.) But when asked to explain why I shouldn’t cut my hair, even if the suggestion was hypothetical, none of these articulators could present me with a sound, convincing argument. What’s more, not a single one cupped my face in his hands and said, “Go for it. Cut it off. Long hair, short hair— you’re beautiful, no matter what.” Instead, all I got were nervous stammers and “I’m just not into it” vagueness.

This article in Elle gives you a picture of how serious men are about long locks. They’ve even thrown in some credible sources this time (including Jena Pincott, whose book I’ve read cover to cover over and over again) that really point out the advantages of having longer hair.
So here, I’m going to solve all your problems: if you have short hair, grow it out. Whether you’re doing it to raise your own self esteem or to up your value on the ten-point scale, I really think it’s worth some consideration.
If you’re really daring, you can dye it blond too. Or keep it brunette and marry a billionaire.
At the end of the day, I really do think your hair should reflect your personality (I’ve never really had a thing for the mod chops) but it never hurts to go longer (:

The most inspirational blog entry I’ve ever read

Honestly, everyone should read this. I keep coming across it over and over again. God, I love her.
Source: http://www.margaretcho.com/content/2006/03/23/beautiful/

Beautiful

March 23rd, 2006

A DJ asked me, “What if you woke up tomorrow, and you were beautiful? I mean really beautiful. You were 19, blonde, weighed 110 pounds, 5′11″ and beautiful. What would you do?”

Maybe I mentioned this before. But I can’t let it go.

Once a friend was upset about going home.
Me: “Why?”
Her: “Because you can take a cab, but I can’t.”
Me: “Why not?”
Her: “Because I am really pretty. You are so lucky because nobody bothers you. I could get raped.”
Me: “I could get raped too!”
Her: “Marg. Ok, get real now. You would not get raped. They don’t go for girls like you.”
Me: “Like what?”
Her: “Whatever…”

I am beautiful now.
The DJ says, “You know what I mean.”

No. I don’t. Just because you are blind, and unable to see my beauty doesn’t mean it does not exist. I am so fucking beautiful I have players lined up around the block around the clock waiting for me, and they ain’t even getting any then. The line is just for the wristband yo! I am so fine, 17 year old girls draw my face on their hands and pledge undying love, and lean in too close to me to ask me if I want to buy some candy for their basketball team. “No sweetie. I already bought some from those boys over there, you know, the ones crying?”
I don’t like them too young. Tastes like pee.

I am so beautiful lots of gay men who would never consider being with a woman say, “I am a big ol queen but oh yeah, I would definitely get it up for her! Just so I could tell my boyfriend. He’d be so jealous!”

I flashed my vagina at a show in P-Town once, because I was supposed to sing, and my vocal range is somewhat limited, and a leatherdaddy in the audience said he got an erection, and had to question the integrity of his own existence. I didn’t know whether to hug him or spank him.

I am pussy without borders.

My father told me that I was not a pretty girl and that I would need to develop a good personality in order to have people like me. My mother said, “Don’t worry, nobody hate daddy like I hate daddy.”

They were so relieved I got married, “SHE NOT GAY!!!”
Their proudest moment…A ticker tape parade and shit….

They don’t really know anything.

I have to believe that I am beautiful because if I don’t I will die. How I lived when I was convinced I was ugly: I starved myself, and fucking fucked as many people as possible- “This body is not going to last!”-but when I was fat again I was still doing it with anyone who was even vaguely interested because I thought I had to. I didn’t know I had the right to turn them down. It was my duty as an ‘ugly’ girl and I should be grateful for whatever I could get. All you had to do was ask me. It was like being a prostitute but I never made anything. I just wore myself down. With bad bad sex. Men who were way too old for me, and should have been arrested, but since it was consensual, I was saying yes to it, because I thought I deserved it. I was an accomplice, victim and perpetrator, and in the act it was like I was being punished for their crime. And that was terrible and lonely. So when some man says to me, “Don’t you wish you were beautiful?” those are like killing words. That’s my death, if I don’t pummel it into his soft, not yet completely formed radio disc jockey skull that I am already beautiful, and I wish for nothing, other than for him to go away.

I am so beautiful, sometimes people weep when they see me. And it has nothing to do with what I look like really, it is just that I gave myself the power to say that I am beautiful, and if I could do that, maybe there is hope for them too. And the great divide between the beautiful and the ugly will cease to be. Because we are all what we choose.

You can’t even get to me. I got special service, boundaries like the rings of Saturn. I am protected. I am four, five faggots deep all around me, who don’t see your name on the list, who will not let you in here looking like that, who will hold you in a cold, hard, unflinching stare or back hand compliment you until you cry. Yes I have security tighter than Ryan Seacrest’s asshole, at least as tight as his publicist says it is.

If you even had the courage to ask me out you would have to do it by mail, sent months in advance, on a single 5 by 7 sheet of eggshell vellum, signed in blood and sealed in gold and scented with a light mist of the new fragrance by alan cumming, just so I could throw it away without becoming repulsed.

My perception of beauty

It is what it is

My body is my biz

The problem

I’ve been wanting to write about this for a while but I didn’t want to make the effort.
Well, the perfect opportunity just threw itself in my face in the form of this…
First of all, I want to make it clear that I think Jessica Simpson is an idiot. Her prancing around in a bikini on daytime television and being unable to figure out that tuna isn’t chicken is not my idea of showing a polished character.
But she is a human being.
She is not fat.
She looks like what an average woman should look like. Sure, it would be really cool if we could all walk around wearing daisy dukes but it is not possible. You heard me, not possible. Biologically, we are not built to look like Jessica Simpson did in those days. Even in a practical manner, it just can’t be done. Most of us would have to quit our jobs to start working out full time at the gym and eating steam for dinner…  we wouldn’t even get close. And we’d be poor (bright side: maybe Shell will hire us at the carwash station so at least we could put on bikinis and slather polish and antifreeze all over our bodies for money).
Jessica is finally looking like a woman instead of a child. Good for her.
I want to make a distinction here. I am not okay with being overweight. In no way am I trying to tell you that being obese is okay because I honestly do believe that it contains risks that are more important than sacrificing your size 2 Prada dress. My dad is diabetic, diabetes runs in my family, and as many other overweight people, I am at risk for other issues as well. I don’t want heart disease and I’m too young to go into cardiac arrest.
But see, this is what I’m trying to say.
Yes, I’m fat. Yes, I know. I know it. So why are you trying to go around rub it in my face?
What makes people so anxious to jump on anyone who gains a little bit of weight? I don’t want this to come off in a self-centered way but it kinda does feel like a personal attack on my weight. These gossip magazines and bloggers are so paranoid about weight. So if Jessica Simpson’s 15 pound weight gain makes her a cow, what am I supposed to be, a blue whale?
Everywhere I go, I am told to be thinner. To look a certain way. To be able to fit into certain things.
Why the hell is this important? Why does my size effect you? Do I go around telling you to ditch that scarf because the colour does nothing for you? No. That is  not classy. And it is my opinion. Opinions are dangerous if you don’t keep a cap on them.
If Sarah makes fun of overweight people, Brad who never really had an opinion on weight starts making fun of overweight people, he passed this on to his girlfriend who ridicules overweight people in front of her kids who grow up thinking being overweight is a fate worse than AIDS.
I am a fat girl. I don’t know why the world likes to make me feel bad about it. It’s not like if they stop telling me that, my weight will spiral out of control. It is already out of control. There is nothing you or anyone else can do about it. All you’re doing is making me feel worse. Which, guess what, making me feel worse isn’t really helping me lose the weight.
If I lost a pound everytime an ad, a movie, a person, any one tried to make me feel bad about my weight, I’d look like Nicole Richie’s popsicle.
It is my weight. My struggle.
Even if you think I look like shat. Come on, there’s this thing called tolerance. It’s kinda nice. It means we can treat people with respect and in return be treated with respect (crazy idea, right?).
I can take a fatty joke once in a while like I can take a sexist joke. It’s only okay when we both know it isn’t true.
Being overweight doesn’t make me a bad person. It may mean I have low will power, it may mean I like chocolate too much, it may mean I’m too lazy to go to the gym…
It may also mean that half my family has a tendency to be obese, it may mean that I have been overweight since I was a baby, it may mean that I have almost killed myself yo-yo dieting, it may mean that I am too intimidated to face the fact that I might never have it in me to become thinner, it may mean that I care more about life than about my daily caloric intake, it may mean that there is more to me than the size of my jeans.

And I wish this was where it ended but…

If you have time, watch this video.
And take some time to listen to these young, absolutely gorgeous women talk about what society expects of them.

Even if you have a few seconds, at least watch the part where the black kids pick the white doll as the “good” doll and the black doll as the “bad” doll.
This takes it to a whole new fucking level.
I am so angry about this. I cannot even explain it to you right now.
I’m brown. I’m not black. When I grew up in the east, everyone was trying to have lighter skin but that was okay (it was kind of like tanning) because everyone was brown. We were all brown together.
Now where the hell do you get off trying to make black kids think they need to be white?
I don’t even think I need to say anything about this. It is explains itself. There are so many things wrong with that.
It makes me sick.
Really really sick.
Because now, it’s not that you’re not good enough because you haven’t changed yourself to fit the barbie ideal. It’s the fact that you’ll never fit into the barbie ideal no matter how hard you try.
I am so terribly depressed for those kids and I know that all we can hope for is a overhaul of the whole social system in North America.
Because what is the alternative? For every self-empowering ad, you have 80 million ads telling you that you suck.
We need change.

Mirror mirror on the wall

This depression is getting ridiculous.
It all brings me back to the fact that He had once humiliated me and how I am ever going to make him take it back. How do I do it? My fucked up logic tells me to lose weight.
In my head, if I’m skinny, I’ll have everything.
I’ll have him.
If not that…
I’ll be able to find an equally hot, rich, sweet guy.
I’ll be able to work at a high end resteraunt and make a ton of tips.
I’ll have attention from a lit of guys.
I’ll have the satisfaction of being equal to my beautiful friends and sister and more beautiful than my old friends and cousins.
I’ll have everything I want if I lose weight.
But I can’t, because I’m weak. I eat too much and I can’t stop myself.
When I overcome my weakness, I’ll be able to get skinny. But then my new inner strength will get me confidence, a man, a good job. I don’t really need to lose weight. Well, I do. But something I need more than that.
If I had will power, I could have anything I wanted. I could have the world.

Burn baby burn!

So my cousin and I bought this pilates boot camp DVD a few days ago at Chapters. Today is technically the first day we should be starting it.
Diet and exercise is a funny concept. Your body stores fat because it thinks that’s what’s good for it. It expects you to burn it off while you’re hunting and foraging for food. We have evolved that way. Fat is supposed to help you and make your life more convenient.
Funnily enough, in modern day times, fat is a pain in the ass. It’s anything but convenient. You spend all this energy trying to get rid of it.
So now what? Do we need to unevolve ourselves or something so that fat will be a thing of the past? Or are we just going to keep looking for ways to make it impossible to get fat using technology. Hits a little too close to Brave New World for my liking.
It’s funny how fat is sometimes still an attractive feature in places like Barbados but I wonder if it ever had a chance at being a mark of beauty. Extra fat is also usually associated with age.
Maybe one day that will change. Like the plague and capital punishment, it’ll slowly start fading away and start being looked at as another bother assigned to the olden days.
Meanwhile, I’ll still keep working at my fitness DVDs.