Fat

Yesterday the premier explained what it was that he had had in mind for Victoria when he asked the Parliament to allow another six months' state of emergency. One thing you could never accuse him of (at the moment) is trying to please voters or anyone. He therefore must be telling the truth when he says he thinks he hasn't any choice but to do it this way. What's with Labor politicians, don't they ever learn? Look at Kevin Rudd. Do you want to end up all alone, like him?

The management of the pandemic in Victoria has suddenly become a political issue for me, following on from phases of ennui, equilibrium and acceptance, personal terror, grief, terror but existential, all the way back to the beginning and the almost overnight disappearance of my sense of reality. 

I've been watching with confusion and increasing disquiet as even the leftiest of my friends and acquaintances grow more and more quietly accepting and indeed supportive of increasingly authoritarian behaviour from the government (although they're happy to pour scorn on the police, and indeed the police are doing some really awful and ominous things - there are mobile surveillance units in Melbourne public parks ffs). The right to protest which was correctly recognised by the Left as a very important thing to protect, in May when the protests were about a progressive cause, is not regarded as worth speaking up for when the protestors are stupid and venal. Indeed it seems to be fine to see a stupid old person set upon and dragged away by ten armed cops. I am going to try to say something complicated now. The mostly very stupid, weak, confused and pathetic people who showed up at the lockdown protest on Saturday, with their incoherent and poorly designed signs bereft of the kind of witty yet sweary lines borne aloft by all the best people at all the best protests, their de trop crying and mumbling, their ridiculous conspiracy theories, those people are speaking the only language of dissent which our impoverished, unequal political culture has provided to them; they don't know how to radicalise when they have a grievance to express. But they have a legitimate grievance, and that they are protesting in kitsch doesn't make it any less genuine. Things are really bad in Victoria. 

In the public conversation about how the pandemic is being managed is a sense of there being two categories of potential damage, social / economic damage and health damage, presented by manichean conservatives as alternatives to be weighed and balanced, and by technocrats in government as a false dichotomy. Of course the real false dichotomy is between these positions. Both are correct. What is missing from the damage manifest is the harm being done to the institutions of democracy, something that should matter to both sides of politics much more than it seems to, albeit for different reasons. And you know what, when I hear the Chief Health Officer saying, and the Premier parroting him, that he doesn't take a political stance on the management of a public health crisis, that's when I reach for whatever is the peaceseeker equivalent of my revolver, and also it fucking shits me to tears.

Well, I'm dismayed by the government's apparent determination to drag out as long as possible their blunt-instrument approach to containing and stopping the spread of the virus, and next to the decline and fall of Australia's progressive instincts, and the fact that my poor son may well not go back to school till some time in 2021, what cheeses me off is that the pandemic is making me fat. I've gained 7kg since this time last year - a little bit of it in a totally fine exchange of fat for muscle over summer when I really began to get confident with and enjoy weight training, but most of it dismayingly in the other direction, since May, when I could not do a daily 20km bike commute and lift heavy things four days a week, and do yoga on other days, and when I walked a lot at work and didn't sit next to the fridge all day. 7kg is a lot and I really, really don't like it, so I've gone on a diet and I am determined to get rid of it all within three months. Fuck you, Daniel Andrews, you fucking feeder! 

A year ago: 

I wouldn't have a hope, right now, of getting that floral skirt on and as for the dress, which is a Prue Acton original actually dated 1970 on the label, the terylene is fragile and would shred if I even attempted to do up the zip. (The whole thing was utterly wasted on the man I went out with that evening, although it was completely my own fault for deluding myself that he was a passable human being - he wrote on his Tinder profile that he was only interested in 'slim women who can spell' - tosser) My point is, I looked good at that weight and I knew it and loved feeling so good in my own skin. It's not just the form and the shapes (I've always cared about my body inasmuch as it's necessary for hanging clothes off of) it's a feeling of vitality and lightness.  

For the first time in my life I've signed up to a weight loss program. This is an app based thing and it's $25 a week, and I've committed to twelve weeks. It just started today. Honestly I am struggling a little bit with the usual spiral of irritation with self at not being able to just not eat things I know I shouldn't, but whatever, it'll wear off. The approach to food is unremarkable, it's just no sugar or refined carbs, lots of protein, lots of vegetables and keeping a lid on complex carbohydrates, and general clean and sober living, and enough exercise to burn fat and keep insulin levels stable. I only started today so I have the beginnings of a sugar withdrawal headache, and I'll be tired and sleepy for a few days, but I already notice that I don't feel bloated from eating bread and pasta, both things that Leonard like and requires, and which I often eat for that reason without really wanting to.

Many if not most women in my social circle very much disapprove of weight loss talk, and a vocal minority are highly censorious about it because it is understood to be a tool of the patriarchy and expressive of hating fat and fat people. I am not up for having any sort of conversation on social media or anywhere else really about whether harbouring a desire to lose weight, and preferring the experience of living in my body when I'm thinner than I am now, is a failure of politics and ethics; it's my body, Iv'e only got the one, and that's that. So it's lucky I have this blog to whinge and complain on.

On another note I was scratching Chanticleer behind his ears and there was a horrible little bump / budding dreadlock growing on his head so I tried to wiggle it loose which he didn't like so he jumped down and ran away. 'I'm tryin' tae heal ye, ye daft wee cunt' I said to him but he paid no attention. Then a while later he got on the arm of the couch again and I scratched his head again to have another go at the nodule but it was completely gone! I assumed I'd done a better job than I realised the first time around and he'd finished it off by himself somehow. But then I looked again and it was not Chanticleer but Pompey. Whah whah whah whaaaaaaah