Wendy McClure

Author and Professional Obsessive.

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Fever specials and daily dreams

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Chills, aches and fever mean flu, right? Or malaria? I have one of those. Last night we alarmed the nice folks at the Ukranian Village bingo game by leaving right before the final big cover-all game for the grand prize. Two very concerned people stopped us to ask us if we were sure we wanted to leave, and only one of them wanted to know if she could have our cards. It was sweet! But I was getting really achy and woozy and beginning to feel like I was grimly daubing my very life force away, so we left. I was in bed by 9:30 having a feverish, uncomfortable dream which I feverishly reasoned was so uncomfortable because the only place in my head where this particular dream was playing was at this weird brokedown second-run dream theater and in my dream of having the dream I berated myself for not dreaming a 27 Dresses or Definitely Maybe kind of dream instead. Something like that.

Now I am at home napping and coughing and just now I somehow managed to get my feeble fever brain to figure out how to embed the code to play this phone interview I did with Kim on Elastic Waist’s Daily Special show. Check it out!

Anyway, it was fun. I like how they really dug the valentine from yesterday!

Um, and I might go back to bed now. Please think lucid thoughts for me this weekend, because right now I feel like the monkey is eggplantish, and that is never funkadelic.

And by "fat girls" he means "pretty much everyone"

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I’m trying to feel just a little tiny speck of pity for this guy, who appears to have no friends, or at least no friends who support his efforts to run an anonymous and patently derivative humor website containing misspelled fake news stories, satire, and cooter jokes—or, at the very, very least, no friends with whom he feels comfortable enough to disclose that he’s the dude who posted the Lane Bryant Body Bag story just a few hours after five women were killed in an attempted robbery here in Chicago on Saturday.

Somehow the joke didn’t go over so well. I know, right!? Because the execution-style killing of five bystanders in an incident with no answers or closure whatsoever is so totally comedy gold, yet hardly anyone has shown up to give him the props that he deserves for going there, man, because everyone is so sick of these obese women who have the freaking nerve to go out and buy clothes while they’re still fat, and can you believe they actually have stores for them, encouraging them to stay all fatty jubbo and shit, and all with such complete disregard for his boner the obesity epidemic that of course he had to say what he said, lest the fat chicks of the world think they can get a death-holiday day off or something.

But no, nobody gives this guy credit! Instead of high-fives, practically all he’s getting are angry comments from fat chicks! Well, except for two guys who hate fat chicks, including some dude named Alex who keeps valiantly coming back to post like some self-appointed keeper of the flame, or refiller of the douchebag, or whatever. As for the fat chicks who are posting comments there, they don’t say they’re fat chicks, but they just don’t seem to appreciate the way the victims of a violent unsolved crime were immediately ridiculed in a feebly written Onion-copycat mock press release, and everyone knows that only fat chicks have a sense of human decency and also high standards for satire, right?

I know that all kinds of people read my site, but if any of you go over to this guy’s site to tell him how unfunny he is (and whether you do or not is up to you), it seems you automatically become a fat chick. Seriously, as soon as you click “Submit Comment,” a tub of ice cream will magically appear in your hand, and then you’ll be promptly told to put it down. This guy blames the nation’s health problems on us fat chicks for writing “obesity–coddling” blogs and eating all the pies, but clearly all our militant binging and coddling is no match for the way this guy’s site can make fresh new fatties in just minutes, just like donuts! It’s so amazing that if I, too, were into writing stale, imitative news parodies in lieu of having any kind of individual comic voice whatsoever, I would totally crap out one right now with the headline Area Man’s Website Increases Female Obesity Statistics to Include 98% of the General Population, and then I’d quote him saying some inane shit that I just made up, and hyuk hyuk hyuk har har! But I digress.

Anyway, as for all you newly-minted fat chicks, hello and welcome to the fold! (By which I mean, of course, the fatty, fleshy folds that guys like dude-with-the-website love to describe in fetishistic detail, for reasons we could have a field day with if we actually cared.) Please feel free to enjoy the privileges of honorary membership, which includes 1.) getting to eat all the pies and 2.) possessing the kind of adaptive skills that help you to be way the hell funnier than any braying jackhole whose jokes are all based on his own desperate need to keep things just the way he thinks they ought to be and, especially, keep everyone in their place. Which is spectacularly shitty just on principle, but even worse when it’s not funny.

And by “not funny” I don’t mean in bad taste. I mean actually not funny. I mean it completely failed. It’s one thing to read something smart and sharp and precise enough that in spite of all your defenses and preconceived ideas and notions of correctness it gets through; it slays you. It’s another thing entirely to come across some bullshit that is so stunningly mangled and skidmarked and sloppy that it’s like getting hacked in the neck with a spork, and then of course it’s a perfectly reasonable response to want to punch and kick and scratch and bite back. This is just to explain why I bothered to write this. Sometimes it’s just what people—excuse me, “fat chicks”—have to do.

Update 10:45 p.m: He took down his “Fat Girls Don’t Think I’m Funny” entry but you can read this screen shot of it here to see how dopey it was. The last comment I saw posted there read, “Honey, nobody thinks you’re funny.”

Update, Februrary 18th: He’s gone extra chickenshit now and doesn’t even approve comments anymore. I’ve decided to just link to screencaps of his site instead. I gaveth traffic, but sorry, you friendless angry little clown fart, now I taketh away.

Update, Feburary 25th: Today, like two and a half weeks later, he got all lonely and tried to bombard the comments of this entry with more of his shit-sputtering failure rage! I just checked my spam filter, where his last message says, “awww…you erased my comment. Bet you wish is (sic) was just as easy to remove all your fatz from your ass.” Oh, but “Alex,” blocking your tiny and inadequate insult cock is way, way more fun than removing the fatz from my ass! Check out how I totally just gained 50 pounds because I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE! I drink it up!

Hold that thought

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Ten words I did not know were real words until I played Scrabulous: qat, ghi, hup, taw, pah, gey, ors, yoni, mana, and cowbird. I’d actually come across “yoni” before, but it was in this book, which has a distressing amount of kooky blithering mixed in with the important stuff, and I guess I thought it was just a word she made up while drinking pennyroyal birth-control tea, but what do you know, it’s for real.  And now that I write them out here, those first six or so sound like I’m counting in Quechua or something.

Ten words I’d hoped would be real words in Scrabulous but are not (along with their surmised meanings): aith (melancholy); feo (Spanish for ugly; maybe it’s caught on?); nomen (the names of many); hitee (the person who is hit); feveree (the person with a fever); sia (some kind of martial-arts thingy); kithen (plural of kith); avise (to hold fast), and nas (a benign skin growth). Oh, the scores I could’ve scored had these words been for real.

But truth be told, I haven’t even been playing Scrabulous all that much over the past week or so, since I had to write my column. Now I have another article due next week, and on Friday we’re headed to Wisconsin for the weekend, so I can’t update the way I’d like to until next month. But in the meantime please dig how these folks got in the New York Times yesterday, and especially read Mo’s recent posts (and gawk at some of the hater comments) about the awesomely complicated subject of body image and fat acceptance and the whole crazy chalupa of controversy that comes with it. I wish I could write an entry about it right now, if I wasn’t so fat and lazy. I mean, busy. Whatever! See you in February.

Various pleas to the universe

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First: Bring back the dark chocolate Bounty Bars. I know that officially Bounty Bars haven’t been sold in the U.S. in years and years, but you can find the milk chocolate ones at any one of the four or five Greek and/or Mexican produce stores I shop at, and for a few exquisite months this summer and fall, they all carried the dark chocolate ones, too. The dark Bountys are sort of like Mounds, but Bounty : Mounds :: Belvedere : Absolut. Or Barbra : Celine. Or, if this were 1984, Guess Jeans : Palmettos. (And guess which kind I owned.) But anyway, dark chocolate Bountys are awesome, and have no almond traces to poison my boyfriend the way Mounds bars do. And so we’d snag one every couple of weeks until I guess the stock was depleted, and they gradually disappeared from one Bouzouki-muzak-blaring produce-mart checkout aisle after another. Now there’s only the dubious Balkan candy, and those sawdusty honey-and-sesame-seed thingies, and, of course, the totally unremarkable milk chocolate Bountys (in the blue wrappers) to remind us of what we’re missing. O red-wrappered Bounty goodness, when will you return? And if anyone has seen them lately at other Eurotrashy grocery locations around Chicago, please let us know.

Also, we wish the universe could bring back the little bitty grocery store around the corner from our place. We don’t know how long it was open; we thought it had opened shortly after we moved to the neighborhood because we went by and saw a “Grand Opening” banner inside, and we thought, hey, let’s give this guy our business, because he just opened and it’s the nice thing to do. And then after a year we realized that the banner was still up, and then we wondered if perhaps the owner kept it up all the time because he read in Ghetto Grocer Monthly that it was good for business if people thought you’d just opened; but by then it didn’t matter to us, because we liked that it was close, and that it was a half-decent produce store where you could get eggplants and ginger and lemongrass and coconut milk. And the guy was nice, too. And then on New Year’s eve afternoon we went over there to get limes and it was closed, with all the signs down and the windows ominously covered, and it appears to be very profoundly gone, and we are sad, and we hope Mr. Owner guy is okay.

Final plea: That How To Look Good Naked keeps on being an impressive show. I’d heard good things about it, but sometimes I can be really steadfastly cold and tiny-hearted when it comes to unabashedly cheerleaderish love-your-body sentiment, and I figured the show would be just a lot of chirpy encouragement to Love Our Curves with help from Carson Kressley, the Magical Gay. And while I guess it was a lot like that, I wasn’t at all prepared for how sniffly and verklempt I got during the first ten minutes, possibly because Carson and the girl on the show were both so very open about the distinctly fatty nature of her initial unhappiness and not just making vague mumblings about being “too curvy” or “plus-sized.” But while I was won over, I still nurse an icy little shard of skepticism in wondering how long it can keep going, how many bits of Jedi self-estreem wizardry can Carson really have—he won’t always get to work the miracle of the better-fitting bra, will he? Or the “really great skin” thing? But maybe an even better question is: so what if it is just the same little tricks over and over? So what if they only interviewed the nice strangers on the street, the ones who looked at her picture and said she was pretty? So what, maybe my stingy bitter soul will be saved after all? We shall see!

What I did at BlogHer

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View from balcony at Navy Pier @ BlogHer Saturday party I did the panel. I think it went well. I hope I made sense. I’m trying to remember why exactly I was getting all worked up about THE MEDIA! and AMY WINEHOUSE’S ARM! but I swear there was a point there. The other panelists were great and lots of people got up to speak, and, well, I’ll have more to say about the panel later, but I’m grateful to everyone who came.

Also: I collected eight thousand business cards. I had lunch with Rachel Kramer Bussel. I saw lots of cute little bitty bald babies that belonged to BlogHer mommies. I broke my sunglasses and walked halfway down the pier to a sunglasses kiosk and searche in vain for something without rhinestones or hood ornaments or big gold sconces. I drank froofy drinks with Weetabix and Sarah and KATE HARDING! and Laurie. I met my favoritest food blogger. I deeply hoped the out-of-town-attendees would understand that the rest of Chicago does not have the same techincolor douchebag circus atmosphere that Navy Pier has. I got lots of swag. I met Shauna! Shauna is a punk rocker! I met Jennette, who is indeed awesome from all angles. I met Jen and BlogHer Laurie and SJ and Jennifer and Corinna. I went to the books panel and met Ariel (whose book I blurbed, and yes, you should buy it.) I saw both live and dead birds in the exhibit corridor. I sold about a dozen copies of my books, including the copy of the Mackerel book that I bought myself just so I could give it to Amy Sedaris. I ate Yahoo jellybeans and drank Dove Courtesy Pina Coladas, which tasted like coconut and new-found confidence!!! I bummed drink tickets off of kind strangers. I carried way, way too much. I slept all day Sunday.

Thank you, ladies. I had the fun.

YES I'M SPEAKING AT BLOGHER

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And “BlogHer” sure looks mighty Gaelic when you write it all in caps. WI’ NAE WEE BAIRN O’ BLOGHER YE’LL ME BEGET. Oh, I have no idea what that means. But today I had a slight lull in between all my freelance-writing- for-fun-and-profit adventures to post about BlogHer for those of you who are coming next weekend, those of you playing at home, and those of you who might not even know my site at all. Way back in the early days of this site I had a FAQ section that people could read to find out where I was coming from, and it worked pretty well back then. So here’s a few Q’s that I’ll A right here, and feel free to ask more in the comments. Or just, you know, comment.

What’s this panel you’re doing and who else is going to be there?
It’s called Our Bodies, Our Blogs and the description is here. I’ll be on the panel with Laurie of Body Impolitic and Yvonne of Joy Unexpected, and Jenny at Big Slice of Life is going to moderate. Other BlogHer attendees who’ve mentioned they’ll show up and take part in the discussion (and they better) include Kate Harding, Weetabix at Elastic Waist, Jen from Angry Fat Girlz, Shauna (yes, that Shauna) and the notorious PQ. And anyone else who wants to drop a line in the comments and introduce herself (HINT HINT).

What business does a Weight Watcherer like you have being on a body image panel?
Yeah, apparently this came up in a discussion elsewhere. Initially I sort of shrugged off the question and simply pointed out that I stopped doing Weight Watchers about two years ago, just to put to rest any concern that I’d show up and totally ruin everything with my weight-watcherly ways. Like I promised I wouldn’t wear my fancy tape measure cinched around my awesomely trim waist, and I would also try not to get up in the middle of the panel and twirl the hell around like Lynn Redgrave.

Lynn Redgrave!!!

Not like people who do Weight Watchers are actually like that, ever, but still.

Then again, even when I was doing that program I still had things to say about the way our popular culture regards fat women and about the way we appear in magazines and in the eyes of self-entitled douchebags who didn’t like the Dove ads, so maybe I didn’t have all my brain cells completely replaced by POINTSâ„¢.

Though it’s also it’s worth noting that the person who took issue with my place on the panel put the question in such a way that almost suggests that by being “smart, witty and clever,” my weight-watcherness was even more problematic, because God forbid anyone associate That Program with anything other than mandatory self-hatred. I could go on, but instead I’ll refer you to Jen’s and Erin’s reactions, which are much more thoughtful than anything I can manage right now.

Okay, but where are you with all this stuff now?
I gained back the forty pounds that I lost on Weight Watchers in 2001-2002, and all this evidence that most diets fail after five years sounds pretty intriguing to me these days. Intriguing and, um, true.

But I’ve also gradually lost thirty pounds since October from being more active and eating more vegetarian/vegan. It’s true I don’t write about the body stuff as much as I used to, and part of the reason is that I’m simply doing more offline writing than blogging these days, but it’s also because after more than five years of writing online about this, I’ve gotten weary of doing this elaborate dance. You know, where you feel like anything you say about changing your eating habits must be prefaced by the statement that you’re doing it to be healthy and not just a shallow dipshit, and that you’re focused but not obsessed, and that every time you happen to mention pushing yourself a little harder than usual during a workout you must issue the disclaimer that, yes, you like it, and yes, it feels good, and no, you really do not need to just give yourself a big hug right now.

Because yes, people have written in to say things like that over the years. So I don’t put the food and body stuff in my life up for discussion so much any more, which is fine, because I don’t feel like I need to write about them as much. When I do, I tend to write about the stuff that kind of thrills me: the bike thrills me. For fuck’s sake, soup thrills me.

Would you say you endorse WW?
Well, no, there are a lot of things about Weight Watchers that I disagree with. Feel free to ask me if you want to know, but I haven’t felt a need to write about it online. Maybe sometime I will, but I don’t feel like going there now.

Would you say you endorse fat acceptance?
Sure, same as always. I’m never going to be thin. Sometimes it’s not as simple as that, but you know what? Sometimes it is.

Any other advice for BlogHer?
Wear comfy shoes. You’re gonna walk your fucking head off at Navy Pier, you know.

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