Movie Review: The Wild Paragraphs of Telegraph Hill

This movie got great reviews and has been out for a long time. And for good reason! It is a fabulous movie. It's a documentary about a man who is a squatter in the cottage of some rich folks, and he spends his days feeding, observing, and tending to a flock of wild parrots. The parrots are too cute, and the movie isn't at all boring. My favorite part involved the man telling a tale of grief about one of the parrots. It highlighted the deep animal-human bond that can develop. This movie made me want to spend all day with my cats! Anyone want to film me? Anyway, please go see this movie! You will love it!

Book Review: Fat Girl by Judith Moore

This is a memoir by a woman who grew up fat as well as abandoned by her father and emotionally and physically abused by her mother and grandmother. In other words, it's not light reading! In fact, it's sort of torture reading it. She drew me in with her first sentence. Out with a man who she had a crush on, drinking, he said to her, "You're too fat to f__k." Hearing similar incidents from her adulthood told so directly made her feel to me, as another fat woman, like a friend. For instance, she told of a time when a picture was taken of her while she was out and about and feeling pretty. She then saw the picture and had a panic attack. She was shocked at how fat she looked. Ms. Moore is an excellent writer and her vivid descriptions of the reality of fat phobia, internal and external, are likely to resonate with anyone fat. After getting to like her and feeling comfortable with the book, she took me inside her horribly abusive and terribly lonely childhood. If the book had started out with this, I don't know if I would have continued, but I already liked her, so I joined her as she detailed a very nice girl with lots of bad luck. It's a fascinating story, and I particularly liked the descriptions of her father, Ham, another fat person who struggled in life because of his weight. She details the trauma of an early childhood divorce, parental abandonment, life with a narcissistic mother, and a tormented school experience. It's a great generational family history, very engaging and well-told. There is only one happy time in her life and that it is a brief period in which she is sent to her gay uncle's home due to her grandmother's illness. Here she is for the first time in her life treated kindly, and she loves it! Her intensely detailed description of helping her uncle prepare for a gay dinner party is wondrous, moreso because it is a moment of beauty in an otherwise awful childhood. Of course, when her mother returns, the abuse is back, much worse than before. While Ham and her uncle -the men- are likable interesting characters, the women, Grandma and Mom, are cruel and evil. This doesn't seem to be the spin of Ms. Moore; it just seems to be the way it was. After desribing her worse and worse childhood, Ms. Moore never returns to telling us about her adulthood, and at the end of the story, we find out that she has two grown daughters and that she lives alone in California with her dog. She is still fat and a successful writer. This book was given very positive reviews by David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs and was also reviewed in the NY Times Book Review. At the end of the book she also asks the reader not to feel sorry for her. I felt more angry at her than sorry for her. Others in the phat community have expressed some similar sentiments. Her self-hatred, especially of her body, is unbearable at times and an insult for other fat people to read. Furthermore, if a memoir of a fat woman were to become popular in the mainstream, I would prefer it to be something more size-positive. While this book is said to be darkly funny, it really isn't. The author is witty but it's too tragic to be anything that I would think of as funny. Some say that the book is so popular in the mainstream because the general public prefers to hear of a fat woman who hates herself, rather than one who is fat positive in any way. I don't plan to save this book but do think it's worthy to give to a fat friend. One of the reasons that Ms. Moore said that she wrote this book is because there aren't books out there about being fat that tell it like it is, lots of pain and no happy ending. I do agree that she fills a niche but the humorous, uplifting memoir, "Skinny Women are Evil" by Mo'nique, is the book that finds a permanent place on my bookshelf.

Find Your Lesbian Name

Coffee StonyLizard

Cat StrongChild

Tree NightWaters

Onyx RoundSpinster

Sycamore Tofu

These are all examples of lesbian names generated from the crafty site listed above. To find YOUR lesbian name, click on the title to this post listed above, type in your name, and then click the button to be told your SisterName. What is your lesbian name? The other option is to choose a lesbian name by continually clicking the button. Be forewarned. Reading the names is addictive.

In my liberal arts school, Antioch College, I was sitting in my Biopsychology class, and the teacher, Jo, asked us to go around the room and introduce ourselves since it was the first day of class. She didn't specifically tell us to state our name but instead said that we should say whatever we liked to be called. I listened to some of the other names: Jade, Izmoon, Cedar, Turtle, and the most notable one, MountainPeaks. Soon enough it was my turn, and without a moment's hesitation, I said, "Hi, I'm Milkweed." I barely knew the word "Milkweed" existed and certainly didn't know what it was, yet suddenly it was me! The class, including Prof Jo, nodded with dull acknowledgement. Henceforth, I had a nickname, one that worked for a hippy, Nowhere-Ohio campus. It caught on with some and not with others. However, it did teach me the value in an alias.

One Saturday night, my friend Alice and I were bored and so we took some Ramen noodles out of the free box in the student union. We put on cook uniforms that Alice had kept from a previous job and dumped the packets into a kettle to brew. Alice is a talented cook and added spices to make them smell and taste superb. Next we carried the steaming pot around the small campus, talking in what we called "short-order cook voices." Our favorite line to say was, "C'mon. Have some! Good noodles are like good women; they go down easy and expand in the belly!" Of course, that line is offensive and makes no sense but it caught on and still delights Alice and me to this day! Our peers were drinking, smoking, laughing, and opening wide for large, wooden spoonfuls of noodles. It became late, and the campus became quiet and empty. Yet we still had too many noodles. We lugged the heavy kettle around in an overstimulated confusion, our accents waning.

Then we came across the locked door of the Boneyard Boys Club. This club had been a thorn in Alice's and my side since its inception. It was started by a man who is now in major legal trouble for holding a gun at a nurse who wouldn't give him pills. The goal of this misogynist boys club was "the preservation of machismo." The feminist values of the campus just weren't of interest to these fellows. They were more focused on killing and eating goats, drinking beer to excess, and denigrating the wimmin of the campus. Alice and I were ready for some guerrilla girl action. Spontaneously we flung a few noodles at the door. Unfortunately, they stuck, making us laugh, and so we flung more and more. We became vandals, and while no one saw us throwing the noodles, there were only two goofy girls feeding the campus noodles that night. Trouble was inevitable.

Alice and I retired to our respective dorm rooms, only I decided to get in my car and leave town for the night. I wasn't ready for the fall-out and preferred to spend Sunday with my family in the nearby suburbs of Cincinnati. How surprised Alice was when just before dawn a policeman banged on her door requesting that she open up! She stumbled out of bed in her jammies and was yelled at by a local cop who told her she had been reported for vandalizing school property. And one more thing, they wanted to know, "Who and where is Milkweed?" I hadn't even told Alice that I was in Cincinnati, and yet though I'd sold her up a creek, she was kind enough not to provide my real name.

To make a long story short, the police had bigger fish to fry than an investigation into finding out who Milkweed was. Alice and I were given a slap on the wrist by the dean, a clean-up of said noodles and a public apology in the college newspaper, the latter of which contained sarcastic lines such as "We NOW understand how what we did made you feel violated." N.O.W. is, of course, the National Organization of Women. Alice and I hooted over our clever pun!

Have you ever had a nickname?