They start off the article with a discussion of “vanity sizing.” They say size 10 is the new 14, and retailers are enlarging their sizes to make us feel as though we were shrinking, when in reality our waistlines are expanding. Case in point: i’ve been shopping at Express for jeans since high school. Back then, i wore a size 3/4. Toward the end of high school, i’d moved up to a size 5/6. But then in college, the 5/6es in the store started to seem baggy, and although my body hadn’t changed i moved back down to the size 4. By the end of college, again although my body hadn’t really changed, i was wearing a size 2 at Express, as i am today.

Now, i saw a photograph of myself that someone had taken from behind me a few weeks ago, and i said to myself “that is not a size two butt!!”

So, i launched into a Google search for the history of dress sizes and what my actual measurements would have translated to in the days of size-fourteen-Marilyn-Monroe. Alas, i could find no such size chart, but feeling incensed that Express had so misled me, i researched vanity sizing and found that it isn’t some manipulation of our collective psychosis, but a practical measure that the fashion industry has no choice but to take.

This article i came across on Fashion Incubator explains that each retailer has number or relative (S/M/L) designations which range across its garments from smallest to largest, and each retailer has a different range depending on who buys the garments. For example, if you make tutus, your “large” is still going to seem tiny to the average person, because ballerinas are necessarily tiny people. It would be impractical to have standardized sizing across all garments and retailers, because then ballerinas would have to choose among XS, XXS, XXXS. Makes sense, right?

So, the retailers aren’t just stroking our egos by making their size twos as big as sixes used to be. People are getting bigger. If you’re Express and people stop buying your size zero because nobody is that small anymore, and you start getting harassed by people for not carrying size fourteen (discriminating!), doesn’t it make sense to make all the garments bigger, but keep the old number scale?

Maybe we’re pointing the finger at the wrong industry. Maybe we should take exercise and nutrition into our own hands and stop claiming to be victimized by pop culture and the fashion industry that is supposedly slave to it. Or, just maybe, we could stop judging one another and ourselves and start to just be comfortable with the bodies that our culture produces. I think there are a lot of forces at work in this problem, but i’ve come to realize that perhaps the least of them is so-called vanity sizing.

Here are some photos of my favorite performances:

Tilly & The Wall, photo by Matt Sorensen for Rock Iowa

Girl In A Coma, photo by Laura Lou09

The Envy Corps, photo by britrockatthetop

In all, we saw:

Tilly And The Wall
Modern Skirts
Maps And Atlases
Girl In A Coma
Man Man (Nathan loved this one )
Wild Sweet Orange (disappointing)
Margo and the Nuclear So-And-Sos
Broken Social Scene (I was most looking forward to this one - pretty sweet)
The Envy Corps
Ben Harper (from afar)

Girl In A Coma took me by surprise. They’ve got a punk-y*/’90s alternative sound that i loved, and a lead vocalist with such a great voice.

To say nothing of the rain, the festival was full of people so colorful that for a moment i felt like i was back in Eugene, Oregon. There was a booth selling tie-dye, an all-vegetarian food vendor from whom i bought the most delightful coffee frappe, and a bunch of girls walking around wearing nothing but denim shorts and paint. These “painted ladies” were meant, as the artist herself said, to be “living decorations”, which i found to be terribly demeaning, but i guess it takes all kinds.

It rained lightly all day Friday and continued to be overcast on Independence Day, but by the end of The Envy Corps’s set all the dreariness had been chased away. That band never disappoints me. The crowd really got into it at this show, which can be partly attributed to the fact that by 8pm when they played, most patrons were half-saturated with Old Main beer. They put a few bars of “I Want You Back” into “Story Time” in honor, of course, of Michael Jackson, and that made me pretty happy. The fireworks display after Ben Harper was decent, and a vast improvement over the blunder last year which caused me to miss all fireworks displays altogether on the 4th.

*BTW - by “punk” i mean the original genre which arose underground in the eighties and all that sort of thing, not the whiny bands who flaunt too much eyeliner and feign a damn-the-man attitude while selling records on major RIAA-controlled labels which some people for whatever reason use the term to refer to.

This is a graph of how many visitors my site gets each day, and on July 2nd, last Thursday, you can see there’s a giant spike where it goes up to 32,301 visitors. Previously i’d been getting eight or twelve people a day, maybe. The total number of comments on the Tropicana post is over 150 now, and the Sierra Mist post has another 25.

Alas, i have zero new subscribers, so the number of visitors has gone pretty much right back down. Ah well, it was fun while it lasted!

I took this photo of our new hatchlings over the weekend. By now all five have hatched and are growing fuzzier every day, but they don’t have a lot of energy so i haven’t been able to get a good photo of all five yet. Aren’t they so ugly??

…and here’s what you see when you click “find more on the Tropicana redesign”:

My blog post is the first hit! Needless to say, i’ve been getting a LOT of new comments on the Tropicana redesign post. I just want to extend a warm welcome to all the new visitors to the site, and apologize for not doing a redesign of my own before you all came to visit. I had no idea that i should be expecting a crowd.

Also, we ended up with five little eggies. I probably won’t be able to resist blogging about them growing up, so, i apologize to anyone who’s bored already.

In other news: I’m selling my car. Nathan’s workplace has kicked us out of their parking garage, so it’s time for me to get rid of my vehicle since i don’t really use it anymore anyway. If my boss moves me to an office i might have a problem on my hands, but for now this is my best option.

I’ve been having a good time celebrating Michael Jackson’s life by listening to his hits and watching the videos. I didn’t fully realize how much i like and remember his work until now. Figures, eh? I remember scaring my friends at slumber parties by telling them that Michael Jackson was outside the window, coming to get us. One of them contacted me about it yesterday, which made me laugh. Nobody can deny that he got pretty weird and a little frightening-looking over the decades, but i’ve always generally liked him and i’m grateful for what he gave to the world.

Jamie is in town right now, and Nina will be here later this week! Yippee!

So now she’s spending these ninety-plus-degree days sitting on her little eggies, poor thing. She looks hot today.

I had to take this shot from pretty far away indoors yesterday, since she flies away if we get too close. Feather Butt used to sit up on the fire station watching over her, but he seems content that everything is going alright now and doesn’t seem to be around most of the time. Slowly but surely, i think they’re getting used to the fact that they’ve built their abode very close to ours.

Two little sparrows decided to build their home in our garden box yesterday! I just can’t evict them, i think it’s so cute how they’re using our lettuce as a roof and everything. I even gave them some hair from my hairbrush and they used it in the nest!

That’s my pathetic little parsley plant next to it, by the way. I don’t actually have a green thumb, it’s all just a front.

This is the first real fruit from our little window box garden, although we’ve already taken a few leaves from the lettuce and basil plants for various meals. We’re pretty proud—we call the plants our babies.

Cherry tomatoes, romaine lettuce, thyme, parsley, oregano and basil.

Nathan built the window box and i chose the paint color. We planted the babies together and water them on days that nature doesn’t do so for us. We don’t have a proper watering can, so we use our cups instead.

I noticed today that our basil plant is blossoming. So pretty.

My speed varied on this run because i was trying to go faster. There’s one big gradual hill on our route, so that prevents me from going as fast as i could on even ground. I keep trying to tell myself that distance is the objective right now, not speed, but i just end up striving for both and sometimes tiring myself out way too quickly. Nathan continues to be my bodyguard and cheerleader on my runs.

Shortly after we had walked through the door, put our things down, taken a short tour of the lower levels of the house and taken a seat in the living room to discuss weather and fishing conditions, Nathan’s grandmother decided to share with us a newspaper article about a veteran of the Vietnam war who lived in their small town and was apparently related to them somehow. She read the story of how he’d been shot at close range by an enemy soldier, the bullet ripping up through his leg and into his torso. His fellow soldiers left him for the medics to find, but more than a day passed before that happened and still he managed to survive. He was so glad that he’d been raised in a Christian home, he was quoted as saying, because his faith in God meant that he was not alone, lying there in that field.

Oh fuck, i thought. First his aunt’s complete disregard for me while we visited them at the pond an hour hence, reminiscent exactly of the treatment her sister (Nathan’s mother) had given me for a month or so after she found out about my atheism. Now an oral reading of this Christian tale. I was in for it. They’d been told.

His grandmother turned to me, sitting a couple cushions away from her on the couch, hands on my crossed knees. “I’d like to ask you something,” she said, and my blood started to run cold. “What church do you go to, honey?”

I glanced over her shoulder at Nathan, who mouthed the word “sorry” as he grimaced. I knew that with a single assertion, “I don’t believe in God and probably never will,” i could have opened a great truthful chasm between us, but i couldn’t do that to Nathan. I knew he’d take my side in the ensuing battle, and his relationship with his family would never be the same. It wasn’t my decision to make. “I don’t go to church.” I said with a smile, anticipating the onslaught of further questions.

“Did you ever go to church, maybe when you were younger, with your family or something?”

“Yes, when i was young i went to church.”

“What church was it?”

“I believe it was a baptist church.”

“And did you stop going when your family stopped?”

“They didn’t go with me, actually.”

“You went all alone? Well, that was very brave of you to go to church without your family.”

“I went with a friend. I wanted to sing in the choir.” I smiled again, trying to keep the mood as casual as possible. Nathan sat quietly, giving me a steady apologetic look.

“Is singing something that you’ve always wanted to do?” She inquired, and i thought maybe there was a chance of diverting her if only i could keep the conversation going in this new direction.

“Yes, i was in a chamber choir in high school, and, uh, i auditioned for the choir in college but i had never learned to sight-read music, so they rejected me.” My heart was pounding and i imagine my face was flushed a bright red, and i was scrambling for anything relevant to say.

She asked Nathan about his ability to read music, and we discussed guitar tablature briefly, but we were just procrastinating.

Finally she said what she actually had to say. She told me a story about how she used to teach a rhyme to her students and to the sunday school children about being baptized and forgiven of one’s sins, and that finally one day she’d realized that what she had taught these children was completely wrong, because no human action can save a person. The holy spirit must enter a person and give her faith, and only in this way can one be saved. She was so ashamed for teaching this little rhyme that she withdrew her family from the Lutheran church, and now they no longer attend church, but are still faithful people.

She discussed why salvation is of such great import, and at some point she made a reference to the man in the article and i had to bite my tongue not to say aloud “yeah, well, there are no atheists in foxholes.”

She told me that i should start a conversation with Nathan’s mother, and answer her questions in the same sweet and direct way that i just had, and that she could help me to pray for the holy spirit to enter me. She told Nathan that she hoped he would read the bible she had given to him every day, and that he and i would read it together and that he would pray for my salvation. Because she wants the two of us to join her in the hereafter some day, and because faith is the most important thing, forever.

I wanted to explain to her that i would never even consider starting such a dialogue, because to me it’s as good as fact that there is no hereafter, there is no supernatural soul housed within my material being and there is certainly no great creator who holds me dangling on a string above eternal hellfire. But i knew that to say any such thing would be like speaking Greek to a person like this. I had struggled to make sense of what she preached, and i knew that she would probably have an even harder time trying to understand that, from my perspective, holy entities and my own “immortal soul” simply do not exist, just as Zeus, unicorns, Santa Claus and personal auras do not exist.

So i just sat there, smiling a half-smile. Not nodding, because of course i do not agree in any way. She said that she hoped i wasn’t mad at her for saying these things and touched my hand, and i smiled and said i wasn’t mad. I didn’t burden her with the fact that she’d made me feel completely uncomfortable in her home within the hour that i’d arrived. Clearly she already carries the burden of worrying about the souls of people she barely knows, and takes it as her responsibility to see to it that we are saved. She has willfully taken the heavy and dismal delusion upon her shoulders, and in a way i wish i could save her just as she wishes to save me. But my verbal weaponry against the foe of delusion is reason, and faith has a way of evading such ammunition, especially that wielded by such an unskilled marksman as myself.

The visit went on and religion was not mentioned to me directly again. Nathan’s aunt continued to deny my existence except for perhaps four words at most. We ate in different rooms or at different times. The two dogs at least did not discriminate - one hates everyone, the other simply wants attention. His grandmother was always polite and kind, but as we four visitors left the next day my alienation was undeniably spelled out. The two grandchildren got warm hugs and kisses goodbye. Nathan’s sister’s jewish boyfriend also got hugs, and everyone began to exit through the front door. I offered a weak “thanks” and a little wave of the hand as Nathan’s aunt became engrossed in holding the dog’s collar and his grandmother clutched her sweater around her with a smile. I exited the old house knowing that they were glad to be rid of me, though they know nothing whatsoever about who i am or what i have to offer. I am human, you know, i thought. I can feel your rejection and - look! - i can even cry.

www.qwantz.com

I’m curious as to why you have [been reading so many books about religion] and what you’ve come up with.

Well, i guess it started because i began reading the atheist blog Unreasonable Faith, which led me to watch some YouTube videos featuring Richard Dawkins, and the stuff he had to say gave me a lot of hope that maybe other people see things the way i do. So i read The God Delusion, and i got a lot of flack for it, since Dawkins is apparently “arrogant” and his ideas are “illogical.” Thus, i’ve picked up other Atheist books in order to broaden my knowledge on the subject, though i’m still getting through the big NY Times bestsellers, and some might argue that they’re more sensational then sensible.

I think they’re brilliant. But at the same time i’m getting tired of hearing the parts about how the Bible features all sorts of cruelty and contradicts itself anyway. I’m not really interested in the Bible. I’m interested in God and why people cling to the idea of his existence despite a complete lack of evidence.

People will look at some little coincidence in their own life as “evidence” for God’s existence, and overlook all the times they’ve prayed for stuff that didn’t happen or - what i think is the biggest point of all - the question of why God would have made us at all, just to jump through his little hoops and heap praise upon him and join him in the playground of Heaven after our trial-run on Earth. People just want existence to have meaning and death not to be final. But they don’t consider that life might be just as stunningly beautiful without a divine plan, and that death might be just as easy to deal with if we realize that we’ll be only as aware of our state after death as we were before we were born.

Also, people think that without God there’s no reason to be good. But first of all, there are millions of people who have committed atrocities in the name of God throughout history, and millions who continue to do so to this day; bombing abortion clinics, toppling the Twin Towers, genitally mutilating girls and baby boys, burning women alive for the crimes of their brothers. Teaching their children to feel guilt and shame. And those who choose to be more like Jesus have done just that - made a choice. If you can choose to follow Jesus rather than the God of the Old Testament, you can figure out for yourself that it’s not okay to cheat and steal and kill.

I’ve gotten pretty passionate about all this, because 1. i’ve been judged negatively and held at arm’s length by certain people just for standing up and owning up to being an atheist. I agree with Dawkins that atheists need to speak up and come out of the closet so that people can put their stigmas to rest, as we’ve all made strides toward doing with respect to gays. There’s something wrong with the fact that atheists pretty much cannot get elected to the highest offices in this nation. And 2. i really think that people are missing out on some important stuff in life by deluding themselves with the idea of the importance of God. We can be good people and stop fearing death and enjoy life to the fullest and connect deeply with one another without attributing everything to some imaginary entity watching over us like Santa Claus. We’re not children anymore, so why cling to such a juvenile point of view?

It’s largely about the language, and the culture that influences it. The Pirahã have no words for numbers or colors, and the author and his family failed to teach them how to count to ten in Portuguese in eight months of instruction. There are other absurdities about the language which undermine Noam Chomsky’s theories about linguistics. The second half of the book goes on about this a bit much, but it was interesting nonetheless.

While only a small portion of the book is dedicated to the discussion of religion, the final sentence of the book suggests that what he observed about the lack of religion among the Pirahã may be the most important thing he learned from them over the decades spent among the tribe. I neglected to write it down, but it goes something like, “The Pirahã are happier and more stable than any Christian or other religious person that i have ever known.” What little Everett does say about religion and the objectives of missionaries is eye-opening, and terribly interesting.

I also finished The End of Faith by Sam Harris this month. I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as Dawkins’s The God Delusion. It made its own good points, but i felt that the discussion of “spirituality” (which is really an allusion to extreme concentration achieved through meditation and altered states of perception from drugs, but nothing having to do with a metaphysical spirit) was rather irrelevant and confusing. I think Harris should have left that for another book on so-called atheist spirituality. I’m trying to read such a book right now, and it seems so far to just be a defense of certain aspects of religion.

I’m also reading God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens. I was hesitant to pick it up, since Hitchens seems rather arrogant in the videos i’ve checked out on YouTube, but i figured i’ve read two books by the so-called Four Horsemen of the Atheist Apocalypse, so i might as well keep going. The book is well written and illustrates with jaw-dropping fact after fact how religion really does poison everything. (And that’s the subtitle, not my own assertion. Though i’m beginning to agree whole-heartedly.) And we’re talking present-day stuff, not just the Crusades and Inquisition and all that.

The first is a screenshot from @robbyg (that’s how we refer to Rob on Twitter), which i like for two reasons: 1. It’s an ad for the Dell Adamo, and 2. It has a lovely misuse of “it’s.”

Excessive Apostrophe

What they meant to say, of course, is, “in a class of its own.” It’s is a contraction of it is or it has, whereas its is the possessive form of it.

The second image is a photo i took this Tuesday of the menu at Granite City. The apostrophe is mysteriously missing:

Missing Apostrophe

The phrase “a chocolate lovers” makes no sense. The possessive form of “lover,” in this case - as with most nouns - requires an apostrophe. Lovers is just lover pluralized, whereas what they meant to write is, “a chocolate lover’s dream.”

Also, as a bonus, i’m pretty sure your self in the following sentence should just be yourself. Yes? Anyone?

The cake, by the way, was delicious.

Lookie! I planted parsley seeds and they finally sprouted!! I’m pretty excited about this, as you can tell. I think usually this activity is a person’s first biology lesson as a four-year-old, but i don’t think we ever actually planted seeds individually at my school. This is the first time i’ve ever grown something from seed, and i’m probably just as thrilled by it as i would have been as a preschooler.

We’ve been out running, picnicking, going to shows and generally enjoying Spring. It’s wonderful, but i still can’t wait until summer so that i can stay out past sundown without a jacket - provided the mosquitoes aren’t too bad this year.

As you can see, this is my actual x-ray. Pretty cool, huh? My feet aren’t nearly as bad as the ones in the other image i posted, so sorry if that one freaked you out.

I was sick for a week and didn’t run in that time, but we went for a jog yesterday and my feet seem to be holding up just fine. I’m pain-free.

Hanging out at the cemetery

It started storming that night and didn’t really stop until last night sometime. Saturday Nathan took me shopping and then to his Mom’s place to have dinner and watch a movie. Yesterday i started to feel a little under the weather, so we took the papisan out on the terrace and had tea and watched the rain for a long time, which i couldn’t have enjoyed more. Nathan made me wild rice & mushroom soup and we watched Milk, which we both enjoyed.

Today i feel a bit sicker, with a sore throat. I finished The God Delusion and am now reading The End of Faith. It’s interesting to me how these two “New Atheists” have such different ideas about spirituality. So far Sam Harris seems to think mysticism is cool, as long as people’s lives aren’t dictated by ancient scriptures.

I highly recommend The God Delusion, but i’m told that Dawkins is really just a narcissist and a propagandist and that his positions are illogical and make no sense, so i guess i still have some research to do. I suspect that people just don’t want to believe what he has to say, because it all made perfect sense to me, and didn’t strike me as being the least bit corrupted by greed or self-love. To each his own, i suppose.

Whatever you believe, Spring is truly awe-inspiring, and i hope all of you are enjoying it as much as i am.

I had a pretty funny episode yesterday where i tried to re-heat some pizza and ended up setting off the smoke detectors and running around turning on fans and opening doors in a panick. I do something along these lines about once a year, and i sincerely hope it never results in an actual fire. Smart people do dumb things sometimes, right?