Granola Bat

(Content note: Talk about weight gain, weight loss, and sexual harassment.) Something happened yesterday that hasn't in years. I was cat-called as I walked from the parking lot into the CVS to pick up my prescription. It was frustratingly common in my teens. In my 20s, it was ubiquitous. I literally could not even walk from my front door to my car without some douchebag loudly commenting on my tits or my butt, or some other means of asserting that my body was there primarily as an object for his amusement. The one good thing about severe clinical depression hitting hard in my late 20s, pulling me into its depths, and packing 60 pounds onto my 5'1 frame, is that I hit this amazing Limbo that I didn't know existed - a land where you're too fat to be visible to serial harassers, and too thin to be visible to fat-shamers. It's entirely likely that my white privilege had something to do with this. Black ladies of similar height and build to me still complain...

Affirmation, by Michael Coghlan All has not been well at Casa Granola. It's been a little bit of one thing after another. Some minor health troubles and a little mental-health backslide for me, and a tragic death in the family for David. He's currently in the Chicago area, with his family, to inter his 38 year old brother's cremains in the family plot. The funeral was a week ago. It was, of course, a shock when he died so suddenly, at such a young age. David's grief manifested into physical pain and awful dreams. Last week was hectic and tiring enough to keep me from the gym for the whole week, and I ate a lot of feelings. I know that a profound loss never becomes OK. It becomes more possible to bear over time, and that is generally the best we can hope for. I don't have any platitudes, just love and sorrow for the family. While we come to the other side of the past couple of weeks, and bring ourselves back to some sense of normalcy, I've gotten back to ...