Marina Rose Martinez

I found this image on ffffound.com



So I thought I’d answer it.

 

It’s not much, but I like it.

Water who feeds us

Dirt from whom we grow

And

Fire who kills us and makes us strong.

When I was younger, and single, I totally hated this type of romantic bullshit. Well, fuck what I used to think is what I always say

So on our way to the gym, we saw this adorable graffiti in our apartment’s parking lot.



And then later, I felt that there weren’t enough pictures of Batman and Robin love, so I requested the use of my sweet boyfriend’s sketch pad and awesome new copic markers.

“You’re not going to draw Batman and Robin porn, are you? Don’t use my sketchbook if you’re just going to draw porn”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, love”

So, instead I drew him a picture illustrating how very much I love him.



I also feel the need to clarify that, despite the language used in this picture, I still do not believe in the state of being “in love,” it’s just that “If we were Batman and Robin, I think we’d still maintain an intense and abiding love for each other, born of mutual knowledge and respect” just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Consider it artistic license.

And yes, I’d totally be Batman. You know it.

Last night I was at the gym and there’s a guy there that I see often, has a bum knee, does a weird sort of loping thing on the elliptical that favors his good knee and takes the pressure off his bad one. Its not unusual for him to be at the gym, but It is unusual for him to be shout-talking across the elliptical bay to a body building enthusiast as he’s stretching out for the night. Because one thing I’ve learned at the gym, is that we don’t really talk there. Leaving out the creepy old men who only come to stare, we’re all kind of grossed out by everyone else. And except for the ladies in the cardio-strip-kick-yoga class, we’d all much rather be doing this alone in our house if only we had the money.

So while talking to your fellow gym-member is not taboo, it is out of place. Especially at what I like to call Friday Gym, which is where the sad, the fat, the old and the obsessive tend to make up the ramshackle gathering of about 10 patrons. If we decided to have a Friday Gym hockey team, they could buy the rights to the documentary and turn it into a Disney movie.

Anyway, after the body building enthusiast is gone, The Loper gets off his elliptical and scouts out the rest of the gym. There’s two huge, ornery looking fat dudes, a younger black bodybuilding enthusiast, one of the creepy old voyeur-guys, a 40-something business guy (running with his bluetooth phone headset on-as if anybody calls you at Friday Gym), an older asian lady on the weight machines, me (also on the weight machines), and a small 30-something lady running on the treadmill.

The 30-something is definately not here to talk. She has her ipod on, is running at a good clip and she is doing this on one of the three fancy treadmills our gym has. These treadmills mean business, they have about a million settings and an incline max of, like, 80 degrees. They’re not fucking around. Which makes it interesting when The Loper heads over and climbs onto one of the punier treadmills sitting next to hers and begins to shout-talk to her. 30 feet away, on the calf machine, I can hear him shout-asking her questions over the sound of my ipod. Judging by the silence between his questions, she is probably not answering him or using one monosyllabic word at a time.

I remember right after I got hired at my current job, I had mistaken another bus rider for a co-worker and by the time I realized that I didn’t have to be nice to this stranger, he already knew my name, which he yelled down the street the next day as he ran to catch up to me like we were old friends. Except that we weren’t old friends, I was a woman riding public transportation alone for 2 hours at each end of her day and he was a slightly creepy dude definately 10 if not 20 years my senior, possibly with a personality disorder.

Feeling really stupid for talking to him the day before, and not knowing how to say “look, I thought I had to be nice to you because I thought that we worked together. Ordinarily I would have never talked to you because I don’t talk to strangers, please go away” to this generally non-threatening but totally annoying man, I chose the cowards way out and yes-ed and no-ed whilst walking really really fast and looking around the street for someone I actually did know to maybe come and save me. It took 2 days for him to get the hint.

Back at the gym, The Loper shouted “have a nice work-out” in a slightly resentful tone at the running woman—who definately didn’t say anything back this time—as he walked towards the locker rooms, and I began to think about conversational rapists.

There are friendly people who are nice and like to talk to other people. That can be me or pretty much anyone on any given day. Someone is looking at a product that I’ve used in the market like they might want to try it so I say “I’ve used that, worked like a dream” or “I wouldn’t recommend that, love.” They can take or leave my friendly overture as they see fit. Elevator banter etc, all fits into this sort of friendly strangers talk. It’s nice, it reminds us that there are other people in the universe, or our market, or our workplace, or whatever. The key is to be able to notice when someone is open for a quick friendly convo, and when they’re closed

The conversational rapist is unable to unwilling to interpret another persons open or closed sign. They are the person who shakes the door of the store even when it is locked. Then they cup their hands around their eyes and look in. Then they go around the back and get in through the service entrance, walk around, and pick things up like a normal shopper except that they are totally not supposed to be there. And they act like it’s normal to have to talk to someone 100% in questions even though that’s not how conversations go, and they walk really supper fast to try and keep up with you and keep asking you questions that you barely answer, and they get resentful and tell you to ‘have a nice work-out’ when they obviously didn’t really want you to have a nice work-out or they wouldn’t have climbed up next to you in the completely empty treadmill bay and started shouting questions at you over the sound of my ipod and yours.

But of course the kicker is that the conversational rapee only makes it worse (in my experience) for not saying “I don’t want to talk to you.” We are faced with a person who possesses an inability to read signs, and instead of reading it for them, we just try to make it larger. Eventually it will work, by incrementally increasing the volume of our body language, chances are they will notice at some point, but it would be so much less a waste of time to just say “I don’t want to talk to you.”

This is especially relevant to me because, as a person who regularly doesn’t understand non-verbal communication I would appreciate a little heads up once in awhile. I’m sure I get a little conversationally rapey on occasion. And while it does hurt a persons feelings to have to be told “I don’t want to talk to you” it doesn’t hurt as much as being treated shittily while you’re just trying to have a friendly convo.

At least I think that’s good advice. I don’t actually recall being told “I don’t want to talk to you” by a stranger except for when I was collecting signatures supporting gay marriage in Orange County. But I got told a lot of other things while I was doing that, “I don’t want to talk to you” being one of the more positive experiences in the bunch.

So, even though the purpose of this blog was to write something funny about people who don’t interpret social cues vary well, I’ve sort of made myself wonder if I’m more of a conversational rapist than I already thought I was. Like, I know that I misinterpret social cues, like, constantly but I really hope I’m not that retarded. But I probably am. I think that we all are at least once in awhile. It’s like drinking. A little conversational rape here and there isn’t such a big deal, it’s when you find yourself doing it every day, and people at work are starting to make comments, or your wife leaves you, so you conversationally rape alone in your house with the lights out that it really becomes a problem.

Ben and I joined a gym around the end of May, and except for one week that I was sick, we’ve gone every Monday, Wednesday and Friday since then and I’ve started to notice the different categories of gym people.

I have made an MS Paint about it, although it seems that I forgot to mention the crazy muscle dudes which our gym seems to have a lot of. Maybe I’ll break them into subcategories and make another paint just for them.


Click on the image to see a larger version.

I’ve been meaning to write a blog post about how my recent weight loss has been making me crazy in the head (moreso than usual at least.) I even wrote one recently and never published it, because it was very long and convoluted and had references to Greek mythology and I totally wasn’t joking. And once you’re making references to Greek mythology with your serious pants on, it’s time to give up the ghost.

So, don’t know if this is ever going to see the light of day, seeing as it’s proved to be a difficult task for me to articulate the myriad of rainbow feelings I’m having in regards to this issue, but here goes.

I’m starting to loose weight, just as a side effect of me being in a better job, where I make enough to eat good food and where I’m happy, so I want to take care of myself and be active. I’ve been in the job a year now, so this is about the point where other people have started to notice the effects of my healthy activeness, but the crazy started way before that.

This blog is so hard to write because I want to write everything, from my anorexic-bulimic early teen years, to my feminism, to the non-stop business of college that took priority over maintaining my physical health. I want to understand and I want to be understood. I want this craziness out of my head, trapped inside words where it can’t fuck with me anymore. I’m positively schizophrenic about this issue, and I have been since I had hardly begin to loose weight.

When I first started to change my habits, I knew this storm was coming and I’ve tried to baton down the hatches as best I could, but a year after starting regular exercise I’m quite insane, despite my efforts to avoid it. Which mostly means that I try to deny my weight loss… while simultaneously being desperate for someone to notice it and praise me… and then when I do get praise for it, I feel filthy and sad… except for that 13 year old anorexic me in my head which yells “yay!” and thinks that this means that we’re finally worth something… and then the logic tends to kick in and I thank them for the compliment which is nice but has nothing to do with my inherent value as a human being…. and then feels deeply disappointed that loosing weight is what passes for an accomplishment in our society… and then feels like I should be praised to choosing to be healthier, and I’m just being grumpy… and then feels like putting value judgments like that on what’s basically a side effect of taking care of my physical self is just ridiculous… and then wonders why I didn’t have this sort of experience when I graduated from college, a much much harder and (I think) more valuable accomplishment in my life. There’s at least 10 more things that go on, but those are the main ones.

There’s also the issue that I worked really hard to live in my whole body, to love my whole body and appreciate my whole body. I know that eating well and exercising is just an extension of loving my body and taking care of it, but I’m sad to see the fat go. Maybe it’s living and growing up in LA, maybe it’s being a woman or growing up with violence, but I feel so encouraged to hate my physical self, and I think that other people feel this too. They have absolutely no concept that I might be sad to be missing a part of myself, of my body that I made myself love completely. I know that I’m healthier like this, that I feel better, but I’m still loosing something in the process.

There’s also the issue of safety. It’s not so present in my mind now that I live closer to work and drive there, but when I was taking the train in from Anaheim, the more weight I lost the less safe I felt on the bus and the subway. In my experience there is a direct correlation between how thin I am and how sexually available strange men perceive me to be. There’s also a direct correlation between how fat I am and how I am able to command the attention of those around me. It could just me my confidence, but I feel less and less able to make demands when I need to, to ask store clerks about things, to call attention to myself.

And of course, I feel the need to point out that I’m no supermodel here. Despite the weight loss, I am still shopping in the fat end of the store, designers still don’t make clothes in my size and no one would consider me petite. I hope and pray that this remains the case because I just don’t need the drama of being considered attractive by the rest of the world. (Don’t get all stupid on me for saying that, you know what I mean.) The logical, grown-up part of me just wants to be healthy, to not have knee pain, to be able to run and play without stopping if I don’t want to. Yes, there is an angry little girl in my head who can’t believe that we’ve even been alive this long, and worse–that we’re fat. But she’s not in charge. I keep telling myself that I know my worth, at any weight; that I should focus on how I feel physically better and better every day, that I’m caring for myself, and that I even feel more sane aside from all this weight bullshit. But sometimes when people congratulate me on loosing weight, or when they don’t, when my old clothes are falling off me, or when they’re not falling off enough; the crazies come creeping into my head, making me consider weight loss to be a goal and a value rather than a side effect, and I get kinda strange. Because despite being years behind me, my head is still filled with great new ways to make my weight and weight loss the one deciding factor on weather or not my life is worthwhile. And when I play by those rules, it never is.