Not only will Z and I be joined by my little sister for Halloween, but also one of my teammates-- my former team captain and now coach, in fact. None other than the legendary Mia Mauler, who was teaching that class at Allentown Athletix and wanted to teach it again this year but cannot swing it. (As an aside, Bill was rather rude to her about it, which only solidified her decision that she couldn't do it.)
So, alas, I am no longer eligible for a discount there. Which is OK, I suppose I'm not a gym rat after all.

Instead, I'm a bit of an idiot. I went on Amazon and bought a bike trainer so that I could use my expensive bike, which I have not ridden in two years, indoors over the winter. It was cheaper than the cheapest exercise bike by a lot.

This was not idiotic. No, what was slightly nutty of me was my decision that I would save time and sanity by decreeing that I could only read novels while riding the bike.

What's wrong with that, you ask?

I'm totally fucking addicted to reading. I don't mean that the way people use the word, i.e. I do it all the time and can't live without it.
No. I don't.
I can go months without reading a book. I do go months without it.

• Because* I'm addicted.

If I crack open a novel, you can bet your ass that within, if not sentences, then usually within about ten pages I will be completely and utterly oblivious to the world around me, and unable to set the book down. I will take it to the bathroom, not because I like to read on the toilet (I don't) but because I can't put it down that long. I will take it everywhere I go. I will not sleep, and will read it while eating. Until I have sucked the whole thing down, usually in record time. (I read extremely fast. I don't spell words out; I see the first and last letter, and sometimes when in full swing will parse whole phrases at once. I tend to skip parts of paragraphs and never realize it, so ravenous am I to read more, more, more.
Once I have finished the book I am not satisfied. I must sit and digest it. I must revisit the parts I liked best. Sometimes I hit the last page, flip back, and start over again at the beginning without even a pause. (Sometimes I get a glass of water first.)

If it's a series, it's so much worse. And in August, a friend loaned me a trilogy. A thick-spined paperback trilogy, and said I'd love it. Well, shit-- that'll take at least three days, probably four, with a sleepless night in there somewhere. I don't have that kind of time to devote to complete blank deadness to the world. ...

And while I'm doing this, raptly devouring, there is no real world to me. Z can talk; I don't notice. The sun rises and sets, and i only notice if it's too dark to read. (I don't look up, but keep squinting as I fumble for a light. if the lamp is too complex, I will get up and walk to another room with an easier light switch, without looking up.)

I'm like this when I'm writing, too, incidentally.

At any rate. Now I'm only allowed to do this while atop my bike, assbones aching and knees creaking (it is helping my awful knees, though!) and sweat rolling down my face and back.
It's a terrible idea.
Two days in a row I've had to put in a second session on the bike. The first day I barely made it 25 minutes; the book started slow. The second day, I had gotten to the interesting part. I rode for 45 minutes, and then, three hours later, could not take the suspense and crawled down the stairs for another 15 minutes on the bike, and then a guilt-induced abs-and-weights session. (My core is sadly underpowered, and I've been having serious difficulty getting back into skating because while my thighs could go all day, and my lungs nearly that long, my body, the abs and back that keep me upright on those skates, are screaming after about twenty laps.)

Today I did an hour just before lunch, and then, after circumstances conspired to make it impossible for me to attend practice, I slunk back down and did another full hour. The story has picked up. I'm more than halfway through the book now.
There are two more books.

I am determined not to cheat. I want to know how long it takes me to read a book. I want to know that I rode the whole way through that book. And there is no way, *no way*, I could devote this kind of time to tedious exercise if I weren't totally and completely absorbed throughout. The only exercise I like is skating, but it's going to destroy my body if I don't cross-train, exercise some opposing muscles. I'm having knee problems again, revisiting just a tiny bit of the dull searing pain of last year, just enough to make me frightened.
I did order myself new skates, as well. Lighter weight, hopefully closer-fitting. (My leather boots, Reidell 122s, purchased in July of '06, have slowly stretched out until they slip and give me blisters.) Higher-quality, as well, with built-in arch support and a heel cup to prevent rolling. I may need to get better arch supports, but they're bound to be better than what I'm using now, which are made of duct tape and cut-up bits of old gel shoe inserts.

Anyway. They don't look exactly like this but sort of do. They're factory seconds, with cosmetic blemishes on the boot somewhere. I'm thinking of painting them, or gluing decoration to them. We'll see.

Aw, crap, the "Upload" button doesn't work anymore. I know I need to upgrade Firefox, I just don't have time. I perpetually have 35-45 tabs open, just with things to read, not things I want to bookmark, my bookmarks are chaotic enough so I don't' want to save the session. It's just... too much. So I need to wait for a time that I've winnowed the open tabs down to nothing... anyway, I can't upload photos. So instead, here's a link to the photo of my new skates. Which will, if you truncate the URL, tell you where I got them, and where I recommend buying all your shit if you ever need skating supplies or clever roller-derby-related t-shirts. ("My Pivot Can Beat Up Your Pivot" is a good one, followed closely by "I just scored five times, I need a beer!")

The kielbasa thing was tasty, probably about a B on the overall scale of Things I've Made Lately. (e:zobar) theorized that it shouldn't be sweet; I wonder if that would work at all. I definitely think there should've been sauerkraut or cabbage in it somewhere because kielbasa always makes me want cabbage.

The bread pudding was more like a B+ or even A in terms of Things I've Made Lately. (e:zobar) isn't a big dessert man, and this won because it wasn't too sweet.

I'd take photos, but I know I'll never get around to getting them off my camera, plus neither dish was particularly attractive-looking.

I am going to resolve to blog with more photos in the future, but today I have been utterly useless, and will have gotten a ridiculous amount of sleep, so I wouldn't want to mess it up by being too constructive.

I am recovering from throwing a party last night. Before you all feel left out, it was a party to welcome the 2009 season rookies to the roller derby league, so I couldn't invite y'all, or I would've. It's the first party we ever threw in this house for more than, like, two other people.
(Four years ago we threw a "political party" for the presidential election. I'll let you guess whether that one wound up being a downer.)

My house is not trashed, of course. This wouldn't be right. But there are beer bottles everywhere. Full, empty, and in-between. I am planning on simply "paying it forward" with the full ones-- I'll put them in storage and bring them to the next party that happens, of course. And the empty ones will be rinsed and sorted and returned for deposit, naturally. But the half-empty ones...
It breaks my heart to pour full beers down the sink. So out of curiosity, I poured them into an empty juice bottle instead.
I filled a 32-ounce bottle with the half-empty beer bottles.

Well, hell, man. In the past, if I don't finish a beer, I'd save it to use as a hair rinse. (No lie! The natural acidity conditions the hair strand and makes it lie smoother. The odor actually rinses away.) But 32 ounces of beer! That's a lot of fucking hair rinse. It'll go moldy before I get to it.

I thought this over for a couple of hours, as I sat around totally unable to function. (I didn't drink that much, but my hangover took the form of being unable to complete a thought. I was happy and stupid as a goldfish all day today.)

Finally I lit upon a solution.
I had bought kielbasa, figuring on just chucking it in a roasting pan and eating it with some fall vegetables, as a way to get through a jar of horseradish I had to buy for a recipe that needed... 1 tablespoon. (I hate that. Horseradish doesn't last. But the recipe wouldn't really work without it.)
Kielbasa... in beer.

I cut up two onions, put a pat of butter (and daub of bacon grease, left over from breakfast) into a cast iron skillet. Sauteed the onion while I chopped up two or three carrots. (I bought a five pound bag of organic carrots for like five cents at Wegmans, in a fit of insanity. What the fuck do two people do with five pounds of carrots?? I'm putting carrots in everything.) Threw the carrots in with the onion. Cut the kielbasa into half-inch semicircles or so. Tossed it in.
At this party, one of my teammates had found my sister's Nerf gun, and much fun had ensued with people trying to shoot apples off one another's heads, William Tell-style. (Sour Grapes, #23, is a formidable markswoman, among other things. Don't fuck with her.) This was never successful, as a Nerf dart is not heavy enough to remove an apple. But the apples fell a lot nonetheless, because none of us went to finishing school. (You know how in movies they balance books on their heads in finishing school? That.)
So I had a badly bruised apple or two. Cut that up, threw that in too.

Two or three tablespoons of brown sugar, the scrapings of a nearly-exhausted jar of Weber's mustard, some mustard seeds.

Mixed it all up in the skillet. Then I poured in beer until the skillet was nearly full and everything floating just a little.

It's in the oven and smells really awesome. I put some potatoes in there to bake; I have no idea when the sausageness is going to be done, so I'm just going by when the potatoes are soft enough to impale on a fork and cut up and eat the hell out of. I dunno how long that'll be. Maybe an hour, all told? I put the potatoes in first thing, before I started making the kielbasa thing.

Then I was confronted with a plate full of assorted baked goods left over from the party. There was a bit of yellow cake, diced and generally smashed up (no frosting). There were cornbread muffins with whole wheat and a tiny bit of bran cereal in them. I had planned on using up some honey whole wheat bread I baked this past week, but there was so much other stuff...

I crumbled up three cups' worth of baked goods, and dumped them in a lightly floured 1.5 quart casserole dish. Then I heated 2 cups of milk on the stove until a skim started to form on the surface, whereupon I dumped in 4 Tbsp of butter and let it melt. I cooled that to room temp, and meanwhile whisked together 2/3 cup sugar, 3 eggs, 2 tsp or so of cinnamon, about a tsp of nutmeg, a tsp or so of vanilla extract, and 3 Tbsp of whiskey.
I poured the scalded milk mixture into the egg mixture once it was cool enough not to cook it, and poured that over the crumbled up bread products. That's in the oven and is supposed to cook for 50 minutes or "until it sets", based on the Internet recipe I followed most closely.

I have no idea how either dish will turn out. I could have created a monster here. We'll see.

But it's a theme dinner!
1) Waste not want not
2) How many calories can you cram down your gullet?
3) Booze.
Both dishes incorporate leftovers that would have otherwise been useless, both dishes are, let's just say, nutritionally dense, and both dishes incorporate quantities of alcohol. Yay!!!

I can't think of any better way to spend a slightly-chilly autumn evening, can you?

That's all, really. I hate everything. Everything is a pain in my ass, or oppresses my soul, or whatever. Hate it hate it hate it! I hate everything.

• does a little dance*

There we go. Hey, at least I did something constructive about it-- I added a journal here!!

AGGGHGHHH.


Oh, I posted photos of the completed rollergirl embroidery:

And Fi's cat Remi.

I'm doing my part to help Paul get the site stats up or whatever he's doing.:)

I am looking forward to the party, immensely. Fi will be in town-- she may have to go back down to Cortland to work a couple more weeks at her job, since her boss was out of town so she couldn't give a month's notice and she's very concerned with not offending these people on the way out, first because it's her first real job, second because she actually liked much of what she did there, and third because maybe, just maybe, they'll keep her on as an independent consultant working remotely to do the parts of her job that she actually liked, which would considerably ease her transition to her New Life In The Big(ish) City.
But, she has promised herself that she is going to really celebrate Halloween. It is her favoritest favoritest holiday, and she has not really gotten to celebrate it for the last five or so years, because of a combination of Leech Boy not being into it, and living in such an isolated place, and not having a ton of local friends, and just general grimness of life.
Z and I already had picked costumes, but thought it might be more fun if the three of us went as parts of a theme instead-- I wasn't married to the idea of our costumes anyway, because it would be quite difficult for me to actually make my part of it comprehensible, let alone convincing. (Let's just say I don't make a convincing man.)
So Fi and Z and B (shit, man, we all rhyme!) all have related-but-not-identical costumes. Fi is sad not to be able to wear her stilettos, but pretty easily abandoned the idea.

I was going to ask, if stilettos are right out for the new floors, what about roller skates???!! Those are my standby costume accessory of late, and since we skate on a lovingly hand-finished hardwood floor every day, my skates are pretty well-maintained.
But it turns out skates aren't part of my costume this year (OMG! I know.) so it doesn't matter. I will probably be wearing boots instead.

While Fi was up this weekend, moving almost the last of her belongings, we visited with some of Leech Boy's friends, who live in Buffalo. Fi and LB were in their wedding, but they were friends of LB first.
I was worried things might be a little awkward, but they were mostly annoyed and baffled by LB's behavior. They admitted they'd wanted to invite him to visit, because they were sort of worried about him, but they knew that if they did he'd as a matter of course bring along his 22-year-old New Girlfriend, and they had absolutely no interest in meeting her.

We've theorized that LB may be going through some sort of odd phase? But a lot of his reactions and things have made it very clear: He expected Fi to stick around after he'd dumped her, and expected her to continue to let him live in her apartment (let's be real, he never paid any of the rent, so it was hers), let him eat her food, and seems to even have expected her to continue to support him financially as he finished his program at school. He seems to have simply expected this as a matter of course, and is completely flabberghasted that she so quickly decided to move on in her life.
He must not have realized how miserable she was. She was sitting at my dining room table last night, as we ate dinner, and counted up how long she'd lived there. "That apartment was just a temporary stop," she said. "I never planned on staying at my job this long. Four years. We lived there four years as of next week. I hated it there, I was never happy, and all along, we were planning to go somewhere else."
She thought that over for a little while, and then said, "I'm never doing that again. If something's going to be temporary, it's going to be fucking temporary. I'm not hanging around like that, not for a man."

She didn't bring her portable hard drive this time so I couldn't steal the Skateboard Fail videos off it, sadly. So bummed.

Anyway. The only other thing really going on in my life is that I've decided to make my own embroidery patterns and learn to embroider. I'm astonishingly much better at it than I ever would have thought. I've had to re-learn how to draw, though-- I used to be super good at it, but had a really assholey teacher in high school who dissuaded me, so I gave it up and haven't really touched a drafting pencil in ten years or so.
But it comes back to you. I'll take some decent pictures and post them up in this piece, as I make more progress on the thing. It's time-consuming, because I'm being so particular about the stitches, but I'm really having a blast. I'm doing embroideries of roller derby illustrations taken from photos of my leaguemates-- the only embroidery pattern I found commercially mentioning roller derby is from Sublime Stitching, whose idea of derby is (understandably, but inaccurately) a chick with feathered hair and hot pants delivering a flying elbow -- which is cute, but for those of us who actually play, she's pretty clearly banked-track, as a flying elbow will get you tossed out of a modern flat-track meet. So I figured, I'd do up my own.

So far the best part has been my discovery that there is an existing embroidery stitch that gives the precise appearance of fishnet. It's called trellis stitch, though the Internet isn't backing me up on this. Maybe the little booklet I have is wrong! I guess I'll just claim that I invented it and call it Fishnet Stitch. Basically you take long stitches to make a grid, then you go back and tack down the junctions everywhere the grid intersects with either one tiny slanted stitch, or a cross stitch. It looks precisely like fence-net stockings. Maybe I'll call it Fence-Net Stitch instead...
Most of the fun of roller derby to me (OK not really, but a lot) is the Awesome Socks. Many of my leaguemates feel the same. There's always at least a handful of people at any given practice wearing tights, leggings, or socks that are worthy of comment. Last night our team captain showed up in a long fuschia empire-line spagetti-strap top, yellow booty shorts, and silver lam`e leggings. When we complimented her on her rather startling appearance, she looked down and said, "Oh my, I hadn't realized. This is just what was clean."

Anyway, so the Awesome Socks are the icing on the cupcake of every one of the embroideries I have planned.
This first one has sparkly gold fencenet stockings, because I have a spool of gold embroidery thread.
Yes. It is entirely made of win.

So my sister's coming to live with us in Buffalo.

Well, I should clarify. I have three sisters. I'm #2 of 4. #3 of 4, also known as Fi (rhymes with B, right? So we match), had to share Middle Child Syndrome with me. I know. I didn't even get my own syndrome. She might've had it worse than me, because she got 3 years of being the baby before this kicked in. (#4 of 4 got to sit in Mom's lap for eight years, until she outgrew it. #4 of 4 just got Surprise Married in Reno, too, so you see where being the Baby gets you. And #1 of 4 served two tours in Iraq, so there's where being the Oldest gets you.)

So #3 of 4, Fi, has always had terrible taste in friends. This extends to men. She has terrible, terrible taste in men. She picks the ones who need her. She has just spent five years, six months, and seven days (yes, she worked it out because she's kind of a worrier and a bit OCD) supporting a man my age. Literally supporting him, to the tune of him costing her about ten grand in that five years.
He's going back to school to become a massage therapist. He couldn't afford this on his own, so she agreed to support him.
He is among 22-year-olds.
Several of them are hot.
One of them, he has decided, is his new soulmate.
He promised Fi he'd never cheat on her. He has achieved this promise by dumping her, fucking the new girl, and about a week later finally getting around to telling Fi she was dumped. To put it un-gently. So technically he didn't cheat on her, as their 'breakup' took place about ten minutes before he slept with this new girl, right, even though Fi didn't know about it at the time? That's not cheating.
Right?
This new girl "knows me better than anyone," he insists. They're soulmates.
She's 22 and has never lived on her own before. (He's a little older than me, so, pushing 30 rather hard. Balding, too, I might add.)
She doesn't know that he's thousands of dollars in debt and hasn't had a real job in years.
Basically, it's not so much that she knows him better, but that she knows a better him. Only knowing the good parts of him, she's bound to be a more entertaining companion than my exhausted sister, who is a saint but not a fool and has the terrible, terrible habit of keeping track of her finances. (Mean mean woman!)

Anyway. I don't know what he expected would happen, but Fi basically said, "Well, that's a damn shame, and I'm sorry it ended this way. The only reason I was staying in this godforsaken place was for you, so I'll be out by the end of the month-- you'll have to go too, since I was the one on the lease, but maybe you can renegotiate with the landlord. You'll need a new bank account and a new cellphone account. All the dishes belong to me and I'm going to take the one cat, but leave you with your dead mother's cat and the other cat, who loves you more. The furniture is all yours, including the bed, but all the sheets belong to me and I can actually use them so I'm taking them too. Also the video store membership is in my name so I'm canceling it. Have a nice life."

He seems totally shocked by this reaction.
But me, I know. We Kelly girls, we don't fuck around. She was heartbroken for about three days, but then she realized...
She's young, she's single, she's got excellent marketable skills (she works in sales for a clothing company and has been going to trade shows for five years), she's quite pretty (we Kelly girls all look alike, but she got the nicest, most conventionally-attractive mix of our mother's chin and our father's eyes and our grandmother's nose-- pale hair, dark eyebrows and lashes, strong cheekbones)... And she's moving to Buffalo. Without the albatross of this deadbeat around her neck, she's actually got a whole lot to look forward to.

Boy are we going to have a good time. So she's sort of guilty that she's not more upset about getting dumped, but mostly she's just relieved-- she'd never have been able to dump him without being consumed by guilt, so this way she basically gets out free. He's completely broke, and screwed, and has no way to afford anything because he's taken advantage of his family so much they won't help him anymore-- he's going to starve on the street or go begging. But he couldn't keep his cock in his pants for another six months, so it's not her problem anymore!
I think he's actually a little hurt that she's so totally not torn up over his sudden but inevitable betrayal. (All of HIS friends responded to the breakup by telling her they'd always thought she could do better!! And his family all cried and told Fi they'd miss her, and told her BF not to call them anymore!!!) But what's she supposed to do? She's been enough of a chump for five years when he at least claimed he loved her. Now that he doesn't anymore, what can he expect from her? He's lucky she didn't kill him-- I would have.

So I've been helping her pack up and move her stuff, and if I never see Cortland again it will be too soon. What a GOD-AWFUL little town.

But more to the point, or to the subject of the post...
The cat she decided she was keeping is a small gray girl cat. Just like Chita. Remi is a couple of years older (Remi is short for Remington, because of her gun-metal color), a few shades darker, and quite a bit pudgier than Chita, but is much more cuddly and friendly, albeit just as eccentric in her own way.
So the two of them have been attempting to divide our house up.
This morning I woke up when Remi and Chita both decided that the bed which I was then occupying was The Place to hash out their relationship once and for all. Remi sat in the corner growling. Chita would slink into the room, pop her head up over the side of the bed, and hiss. I was between them. I was the barricade. They yelled at each other over, around, and through me. It was very disconcerting, especially since it was so early I kept falling asleep.

So my house is a battlefield, but nobody's actually fighting-- just lots of shrill cussing and guttural hissing...

Anyway. I'll see if I can get Fi signed up on this site. She'll be around for Halloween, which is her most favoritest holiday ever and which she hasn't been able to celebrate for five years because she's been stuck with Idiot McBrokeypants. So we're getting her dressed up in a good and hobaggy costume (why not?!) and taking her out on the town!!! It'll be fun! So keep me posted on any upcoming parties...

And the most amusing part of this breakup, to me, is that when she was transferring all her photos from his computer (she deleted his copy of every photo of herself, and worried that this was bitchy. Why would you worry? Don't leave yourself vulnerable to him! If later he feels bad and apologizes, you can send him a few of the photos back, but don't do him any favors. Right now, he's enough of a fucking douchebag that he might use the photos to make fun of you or something. Fuck that noise) she found all the videos of him he'd made her stand around and shoot at the skate park.
Yes, he's a skateboarder. Pushing 30-- pushing thirty hard, I might add, as his birthday's this winter-- yes, this winner is older than me and dating someone younger than our baby sister-- and he's still an avid skateboarder and makes his long-suffering girlfriend stand around at the skate park and shoot...
video after video...
of him totally failing to perform basic skate tricks.

Is it just me, or are these videos about to be remade into an absolutely fucking hysterical montage?

It's a goddamn goldmine. And I promise I'll post about it here.

Looks like that news story didn't run. I keep meaning to email him and ask, but keep forgetting.

I had an awesome time at Pennsic. I posted photos here:

There are none of me, but lots of pictures of our incredibly elaborate camping setup, all of which we set up on arrival and took down before leaving. We had a sink with running water. We had a shower with a propane-fueled on-demand tankless water heater, and a platform constructed across a drainage ditch so that there were no mud puddles afterward-- it was curtained by a set of tarps, then there was a sheet wall around it, so no one could spy on you. And it was open to the sky, so the humidity did not build up. I took a shower in the rain once, and it was awesome.

Anyway, I had a great time.

In other news, the roller derby league sent a squad to a game in Syracuse, which our girls won handily-- not that Syracuse is bad, it's just that our girls are better. :) So that was fun. Photos of that are here:
and I recapped the game a bit here:
Though it's not my best work of blogging.

I am thinking of joining Allentown Athletix to get back in shape for the roller derby season. Does anyone still go? I'm going to see if I can still get the roller derby discount, but if not, I may be talking to someone about the elmwoodstrip discount. What's good to do there? I always meant to join but never did anything besides the Mia Mauler workout-- which, I have heard, may or may not come back depending on what kind of support she gets from the league.

Also, I don't know what Zobar expects me to comment on, in porn, if not the sheer amusement value of the whole thing. I mean really. Porn is silly. If you can't appreciate that, ur doin it rong.

Oh yes, I had also wanted to say, before I go, that if the news story does mention my blog at all, I wanted to link to the other blog that I had made just about size positivity issues since this blog is more about, well, you know, parties and Buffalo and lamb chops and cats. I had asked the reporter if he could link to that one but when I told him the URL he laughed and said the paper wouldn't print it.
Fat Titties

Because that's arguably my fattest part, I figured it would be a clever name for a blog. Silly me, not thinking about the media!

But anyway. That's where I've been putting my thinky posts about body politics. (Different from the body politic, of course.)

Well, I'm going out of town tonight (headed up to Hamilton to see the Madison, Wisconsin travel team take on the Hamilton league's travel team, in what should be an exciting bout). Then I'm getting home way late, and tomorrow morning I'm getting into the car that I'm loading up today (Yay for getting a ride to Canada so I don't have to load the car tomorrow at the crack of dawn!), and driving down to Cooper's Lake in PA for my first visit to the Pennsic Wars.
I'm very excited and have been working really hard to get ready.
To the point that I'm really tired and stressed-out and now just wish I was spending two weeks lying in bed instead of camping. But that's OK. I am pretty sure that once I get there, I'm going to have a blast, so I'm trying to just not think about how much work I still have to do right now. In a minute I gotta get up and start packing stuff, but right now, I'm totally fine. Yes.
So, I'll see y'all in two weeks or so. I will have my phone so anything urgent, people can text me with. I doubt anything will really be that urgent, though.
To find out what happened with the news and all that stuff, go check with (e:zobar). No, he is not coming with me-- he decided he just couldn't keep a straight face and anyway, he has work to do and a kitty to feed and a lot of beer to drink and the couch to keep warm, and so on.

Anyway-- hasta la vista, and if y'all have a party without me, take pictures, huh? Have a good rest of July / beginning of August.

So yeah. We're going in for a photo shoot with the Buff News. I guess the guy decided that me and (e:Zobar) were a good illustration of the article.
I had suggested I could wear my roller derby uniform, as it's quite form-fitting but athletic. I linked to that photo of me in it, that was taken for last season, and they called today and said it was too much skin for the Buffalo News to print! How funny. I said I'd wear some leggings underneath.
I'm bringing that, and showing up in a normal outfit-- a tastefully boobalicious shirt from Bravissimo because it's the only fitted shirt I own that fits me, plus some jeans that have a little stretch. The idea being to show my body shape without being gross about it-- nobody needs to see anybody's naked thighs in the newspaper, regardless of the fatness or not of said thighs, in my not terribly humble opinion. (e:Zobar) will be wearing one of his more form-fitting t-shirts. We'd joked about having him pose nude, but I bet the News wouldn't print that one either.

I'm worried about the story, of course. I am not exactly eager to be the poster child for the unrepentantly fat Buffalonian. Fat people will say I'm too thin; many people will just call me a fatass. And I fully expect that no one will believe that I eat the same as Z and exercise 10-20x more than him. People don't understand metabolism, and even my doctor just assumed I was lying when I told her how much I exercised.
This could go wrong in many many ways. I look a lot better in my normal clothes than in my uniform, but I just want the roller derby in there just so people understand, I'm not lying when I say I'm active and athletic. You can't even participate in a bout without having skated a certain number of hours that season and especially in the month leading up to it, it's part of our bylaws. Most people don't really know that, but there it is-- the fact that I am entitled to wear that uniform means that I absolutely cannot be lying about the amount of exercise I get.
I don't really have any way of proving that I eat what I say I do, but they want to photograph me holding a bunch of vegetables, so I can at least hope the article will make my case there.

I say from experience that nobody's going to believe me, just because I'm used to it. (Seriously. My doctor. Who I went to with an overexercise-induced injury. Did not believe me because the number on the scale was too high. Nobody who works out that much can weigh that much.)
Because the point I'm trying to make is that in order for me to meet the requirements for a "healthy" BMI, I would have to go on a starvation diet. I would have to get fewer calories than my body requires to maintain itself. And that is what I am protesting against. That is what, to me, "size-positive" means. That is what I mean by Fat Acceptance. I am the size I am, and do not need to diet, because I am already doing what my body needs to thrive, and this is the size it settles at when I treat it properly.

But you know, I'm glad the story is being done. I don't know who else he'll talk to for it, and what they'll say, but I'm glad my point of view is in there.

So anyway. Wish me luck, I guess.