This weekend I was told a story which, although I’m kind of ashamed to admit it, because holy shit is it ever obvious, is kind of blowing my mind.
A friend of a friend won a free consultation with Clinton Kelly of What Not To Wear, and she was very excited, because she has a plus-size body, and wanted some tips on how to make the most of her wardrobe in a fashion culture which deliberately puts her body at a disadvantage.
Her first question for him was this: how do celebrities make a plain white t-shirt and a pair of weekend jeans look chic? She always assumed it was because so many celebrities have, by nature or by design, very slender frames, and because they can afford very expensive clothing. But when she watched What Not To Wear, she noticed that women of all sizes ended up in cute clothes that really fit their bodies and looked great. She had tried to apply some guidelines from the show into her own wardrobe, but with only mixed success. So – what gives?
His answer was that everything you will ever see on a celebrity’s body, including their outfits when they’re out and about and they just get caught by a paparazzo, has been tailored, and the same goes for everything on What Not To Wear. Jeans, blazers, dresses – everything right down to plain t-shirts and camisoles. He pointed out that historically, up until the last few generations, the vast majority of people either made their own clothing or had their clothing made by tailors and seamstresses. You had your clothing made to accommodate the measurements of your individual body, and then you moved the fuck on. Nothing on the show or in People magazine is off the rack and unaltered. He said that what they do is ignore the actual size numbers on the tags, find something that fits an individual’s widest place, and then have it completely altered to fit. That’s how celebrities have jeans that magically fit them all over, and the rest of us chumps can’t ever find a pair that doesn’t gape here or ride up or slouch down or have about four yards of extra fabric here and there.
I knew that having dresses and blazers altered was probably something they were doing, but to me, having alterations done generally means having my jeans hemmed and then simply living with the fact that I will always be adjusting my clothing while I’m wearing it because I have curves from here to ya-ya, some things don’t fit right, and the world is just unfair that way. I didn’t think that having everything tailored was something that people did.
It’s so obvious, I can’t believe I didn’t know this. But no one ever told me. I was told about bikini season and dieting and targeting your “problem areas” and avoiding horizontal stripes. No one told me that Jennifer Aniston is out there wearing a bigger size of Ralph Lauren t-shirt and having it altered to fit her.
I sat there after I was told this story, and I really thought about how hard I have worked not to care about the number or the letter on the tag of my clothes, how hard I have tried to just love my body the way it is, and where I’ve succeeded and failed. I thought about all the times I’ve stood in a fitting room and stared up at the lights and bit my lip so hard it bled, just to keep myself from crying about how nothing fits the way it’s supposed to. No one told me that it wasn’t supposed to. I guess I just didn’t know. I was too busy thinking that I was the one that didn’t fit.
I thought about that, and about all the other girls and women out there whose proportions are “wrong,” who can’t find a good pair of work trousers, who can’t fill a sweater, who feel excluded and freakish and sad and frustrated because they have to go up a size, when really the size doesn’t mean anything and it never, ever did, and this is just another bullshit thing thrown in your path to make you feel shitty about yourself.
I thought about all of that, and then I thought that in elementary school, there should be a class for girls where they sit you down and tell you this stuff before you waste years of your life feeling like someone put you together wrong.
So, I have to take that and sit with it for a while. But in the meantime, I thought perhaps I should post this, because maybe my friend, her friend, and I are the only clueless people who did not realise this, but maybe we’re not. Maybe some of you have tried to embrace the arbitrary size you are, but still couldn’t find a cute pair of jeans, and didn’t know why.
Back when I thought I was straight I would go on dates with boys. The boys would usually want to kiss me. I disliked kissing, but I thought that their preferences deserved to count as much as mine, and I reasoned that they probably liked kissing more than I disliked kissing. So kissing was a morally good thing to do. I also reasoned that if I told them I disliked the kissing then they’d feel guilty and enjoy it less. So I did not tell them.
I am certain I was making some kind of critical error but it has taken me a long time to figure out what it might be.
ii.
I like cuddling. I know some straight girls who like cuddling with their straight female friends but don’t want to cuddle with people who might be attracted to them because it makes them uncomfortable. But they don’t want to explicitly tell me this preference because they’re worried it’s homophobic. Ever since I learned that this dynamic was present in at least one friendship of mine I have not cuddled with any straight girls because there’s a plausible scenario in which I’d be making them uncomfortable and they wouldn’t tell me.
I was reading this hippie dippie horse blog that’s all about psychic horse poetry and love and energy and letting your horses run around with no halters or vaccinations, whatever
I saw a link entitled ‘Equine Vasectomy, Castration, and the Karmic Wheel’ and I was like, ok, this will be a good one
and
i was not prepared
so firstly: the author has 2 studs who have clear psychic opinions on their junk
Jax seemed to have no issues with being castrated – almost as though he was expecting it and it was no big deal. Montaro, on the other hand, desperately wanted to remain a stallion and had already bred a mare or two when he arrived. He was so incredibly responsive to me, with such a stellar character, that I too wanted him to remain a stallion if possible. But there was one insurmountable problem. At the end of the field, the neighbour had seven mares, who all simultaneously bloomed into estrus and called to Montaro all day and night. He held it, and held it, and then bam, would go through the fence. After several days of him going through the fence twice a day, I told him I would have to phone the vet.
1. how has your neighbor not sued or shot you???
After the surgery, while both horses were under sedation, Kesia got in there to give them their first ever hoof trim, working furiously to get it done before the anaesthetic wore off. Jax and Montaro were semi-feral horses so they’d never been haltered, trimmed or handled by humans before:
2. so your horse is ‘super responsive’ to you and you have a psychic connection telling you he wants to stay a stallion, but he’s never been fucking haltered before??????
My formerly super-connected, responsive guy would now barely let me touch him. Fast-forward 6 months or so and he’s still angry. He kept saying to me, “I want my balls back!” And I would explain once again that he couldn’t have them back, and that he needed to accept responsibility too, as he also chose to be castrated because he wouldn’t/couldn’t stop going through the fence. This made no impact on him, and his anger and separation continued.
3. you’re….. expecting…. your semi-feral horse… to take responsibility…. for…….. being castrated………
So Ainsley is out at my barn, and I’ve told her that he’s still straining a lot to pee and I’m concerned that scar tissue from the surgery might be restricting things. But as he won’t let her touch him, she is just running Reiki to his groin area, with her hands underneath his belly. After about 20 minutes, she comes over to me and says, “Well, there’s only a few people I would tell this to, but… as I’m running Reiki for him,” she shows me her two hands cupped together, “I feel this weight in my hands, so I look down. And there are his balls. So I reattached them.” I gasp. “Oh my god. That’s what he meant! He meant he wants his energetic balls back!” Montaro then also wanted me to affirm this new reality, so for the next week, every time I saw him, I would visualize his scrotum hanging there and I would say “Nice balls Taro!” or “Looking good down there!” And then, all was complete. Montaro returned to being in powerful connection with me. He requested hands-on adjustments from Ainsley again, and all his anger was gone. My super-responsive, heart-connected lad was back. This experience makes me wonder about amputees who suffer phantom limb pain. Perhaps if they asked a Reiki or Pranic healer to reattach their energetic limb… perhaps their pain would cease?
4. NICE BALLS TARO. LOOKIN GOOD DOWN THERE TARO. YOU’VE TOTALLY STILL GOT BALLS TARO. PROPS ON YOUR PSYCHIC JUNK TARO.
well holy fucking shit banana. couldn’t get weirder right
HAHA WRONG.
Well, turns out when I “saw” the vet crushing the scrotum… those were my scrotum, in another lifetime. My parents sold me to become a eunuch (male who is castrated; often to guard females), I was in a fever for days, nearly died, didn’t want to live, and so on.
and then my brain fell out and i could read no more
Also yeah how tf are they not dead. If I was that neighbor I’d be having their guts for garters.
What the actual fuck
I just…
Ok so
I skimmed it
and
one of the neighbours mares did get pregnant. (?? or so I read it, it was a bit unclear) but at any rate, she got to keep the young colt, Juno. Who grew up to have his own sexual appetites.
She wanted to keep him whole, or maybe do a vasectomy-like thing instead. But she soon discovered that he would still harass the mares. She was advised that this would definitely cause pregnancies, as well as.. infections from all the sex, and he potentially could already have impregnated his own mother.
So she decided to castrate him after all. One problem: he wasn’t halter trained. (wtf?)
after the operation, she helped him heal with “herbs”
And now that we’ve dealt with the practicalities, let us float into other realms, shall we? If you thought the energetic reattachment of Montaro’s balls was out there… we’s goin’ even farther!
oh good lord what..
when I had talked to him earlier about the surgery, I had explained that he did not have to lose his energetic balls, he could keep them – just like his Uncle Jax did.
talked?
So she goes to sleep all worried about what she’s done, and has a dream (trip? hallucination?) (aka past life memory or some such) about she being castrated (her past self was a guy) and she figured:
So I was brutalized, and I have now brutalized Juno in exactly the same way. How am I ever going to get off the damn karmic wheel?
Apparently, by forgiving those who had done it to her.. past self? She had to write all this out and draw what “forgiveness” looks like. It looks like this guys:
Perhaps this is the central message of Jesus – that this balancing the wheel of karma, can take a very long time. But we can balance it another way: By forgiving all those who wronged, abused, tortured, hurt me; I can then forgive myself. And I can use this mechanism actively in this life to avoid generating any new karmic debts.
Perhaps by consciously – with full intention – giving the ultimate (his life) Jesus created a third alternative to a previously dualistic reality; yin/yang, dark/light. The3rd alternative is forgiveness.
My little atheist mind is spinning. I thought I kind of understood spirituality, but these are some advanced acrobatics. She even drew it:
the next day I askedboth Kumba and Juno to forgive me. And I forgave myself. […] You can see in the video how Juno trusts me to massage right near his incisions a few days after the surgery. If that isn’t proof that he’s forgiven me, I don’t know what is.
totally. That can’t be explained in any other way.
Also, Juno’s mom was pretty calm during the operation, which can only be interpreted like this:
Dare I suggest that she felt/knew this was the best option at this time and was anchoring both Juno and me with her peace and tranquility?
No. That literally cannot be it.
When Juno was going through the worst of the pain the day after the surgery, I was doing Pranic healing for him (streaming in blue/white light from my iceberg) and I said to him, “Oh sweetheart, I know it hurts, and it doesn’t make any sense. And you just can’t imagine why I would do such a thing to you. But do you trust me? Can you trust me that I have done this for a very good reason, that will benefit you greatly in the long-term?
that’s it. I’m done. Where did you find this stuff?
And let me just say:
Hi there new followers. I’m so sorry. Please forgive me, and then yourself, so we can all get off this karmic wheel.
that shitty little yin yang heart sketch is where I really lost my will to live
They exist in Haiti. Thats how my great great great grandfather died.
Wait hold on someone explain this to me I’m so lost lol
The belief is Haiti is that certain women can live under water and will lived there for years… These women are extremely beautiful and men being men can’t stay away from a good looking women are seduce and then dragged under water and are never to be seen again… My great grandmother was one of these women… One day her mother sent her to go get water from the river and she never came back 10 years later they see her come up the road in all white with beautiful jewelry all around her body sing up a storm.. When her family asked her where she was she told them she was under water… thats the story my grandma always use to tell me growing up
All I can think of right now is trying to explain this in 100 years or to aliens. You would have to have knowledge not just of Shrodinger’s thought experiment involving putting a small domestic feline in a box with radioactive material and assuming it is now both alive and dead simultaneously, but of a series of children’s books published in the 1960′s and popular in the late 1980′s/early 1990′s around which a conspiracy theory revolves involving the general members of society believing the fact that they collectively remember the book series being spelled a slightly different way is an indicator that we’ve somehow skipped into an alternate universe.
And you’d have to try to connect all those dots based on a photo of a DVD box and 2 words.
Wish people didn’t use “social construct” to mean “fake”
Exactly. Fucking everything is a social construct at least in part. Language is. Politics is. Science is! Yes, its social construct cannot grossly contradict observed reality for long without correction because that’s part of the way we’ve constructed it, the purpose it exists. But its structures and classifications and ways of looking at things are social constructs.
It’s what we DO. It’s how humans deal with the world, because we are highly social creatures in the main and very little that we do does not involve dealing with other humans.
it’s messier than that, i’m afraid.
my spleen is not a social construct, it’s a busy meat item that objectively exists. the word ‘spleen’ and its use to denote anger or bitchiness as well as to describe the physical organ, those are social constructs. so if you say ‘spleen is a social construct’ are you saying my internal organs aren’t objectively real, or are you speaking from the assumption that the social construct of spleen-as-ire is the only one under discussion? well, nobody stops to discuss that before launching into discourse with elbows swinging.
so when someone says ‘gender is a social construct’, well, some of them mean it’s fake altogether, and some of them mean there are a lot of social constructs attached to it. and then you’ve got people going “excuse me, my experience of gender is direct and empirical, it is as real as peanut butter and jelly.” and some of those are in fact talking about direct experience of gender, and some are talking about direct experience of social constructs of gender, and not realizing there’s an extra layer of abstraction between themselves and the experience, because it’s never not been there for them.
so that’s how you end up with people using the exact same words to argue opposite points. it’s a mess.
just moving along like everyone else 