Silver Wings

I want you to reblog this if you believe that two people can be very close and physically affectionate with one another, but still have a completely nonsexual, non-romantic relationship. 

Even if the two people in question are capable of being sexually or romantically attracted to one another. 

You feel disconnected from reality a little and you desire close relationships and passion. Over the years, your passions and relationships have slowly drained and that energy that left hasn’t come back. It’s been sapped by work/school and you’re starting to feel like a shell of a person. You have a persona you put on and you preach self care, but you don’t take care of yourself. You feel like your interests are bland, and no amount of reassurance helps.

we have very fast, very associative minds that connect ideas. we have a train of thought, it just goes WAY faster than yours!

example: im thinking about dogs. that makes me think of pitbulls, which makes me think of an animal planet show i enjoy. the show connects to tv in general, which makes me think of my favorite cartoon. i associate my favorite cartoon with art and animation, and i wind up thinking about shading techniques.

Yeah.

Let that sink in.

It drives my husband absolutely NUTS- we’ll be having a conversation and in a lull between sentences I’ll have jumped ahead six topics, pop back in with a “Yeah, and-“

MY FUCKING GREAT GRANDFATHER LITERALLY FLED LEBANON DUE TO A FUCKING FAMINE AND MY GRANDMOTHER AND DAD AND I ARE ALL FAT AS FUCKING HELL.

combine that with the fact that gen x was the last generation allowed to play outside, pretty much, and the fact that everybody nowdays is working service jobs that exhaust them without working their muscles, and there is basically no way on earth you’re going to get a fit and healthy population without changing the basic structure of our society.

don’t fall for the hype. don’t focus on weight. it’s actually far more dangerous to be underweight than overweight. even with what is clinically defined as ‘morbid obesity’ it’s possible to be healthy as a horse, if your bone structure and metabolism are set up for it and you’ve got lots of muscle to support it.

on top of that, the charts for ideal weight are at least a generation out of date. they were compiled based on a population that didn’t regularly get enough dairy and fresh produce, at a time when girls didn’t do athletics in school. young women in the 1960′s were measurably smaller than young women today. their bones were thinner, they had less muscle mass, their shoulders were more sloped, they had a smaller lung capacity – society discouraged them from being physically active past the age of ten or twelve, and they finished their physical development in a sedentary setting.

boys were plenty active, but just like the girls, they were eating just about nothing but red meat and starch and some mushy greens with the vitamins boiled out. the thing where the poor get fat because sugar and fat are cheap wasn’t really happening yet, especially in rural areas; a farm kid’s diet was beef and wheat in the north, pork and corn in the south. “eat your vegetables” was such a hard sell because everything else was expensive and bland and overcooked. you’ve seen the godawful cookbook excerpts from that time. mushy green beans and fried spam on a bed of mashed potatoes, seasoned with nothing but a pinch of white pepper.

sorry, that was kind of a tangent. i guess my point is, even the people who ate well by the standards of the time were malnourished compared to the standard of today. your lunch of a matcha cucumber smoothie and a cobb salad with one ounce of ham, one ounce of turkey, and 15 kinds of fresh vegetable, would give them the explosive shits because they’ve never had that much fiber in one place before. there’s more vitamins and antioxidants in your black bean fajita dinner than they saw in a week.

so first of all, the idea of trying to be the same size and shape they were is absurd.

and second, if malnourishment in one generation primes the next two for protective fat retention, the combination of that and the incredible wealth of nutrition we have available to us today is obviously going to make us HYUGE.

When I was 125, not a single doctor was ever worried. I was constantly cold, stressed, and exhausted. I was literally always eating, and still could not gain anything. I was hungry all the time, but at the same time I would have given anything to just go to bed and sleep for days, because being chronically underweight does screwy things to your entire system

Now, a couple years into being an actual reasonable weight for my height, I’ve had a doctor, on our first visit, include ‘healthy eating and weight loss’ tips in my visit notes without even asking if I was happy at my weight. I am still mad about this. But also, I have so much more energy, I sleep better, I can actually regulate my own damn temperature, and I just over-all feel better

And here we are, cheerfully playing along, sounding reasonably competent — but everyone, when they have the attention to spare, is keeping an eye on the tuba players. They don’t come in for the first eight measures or so, and then when they do come in, what we see is:

[stifled giggling]

[reeeeeeally deep breath]

[COLOSSAL FOGHORN NOISE]

The entire band stops dead, in the cacophonous kind of way that a band stops when it hasn’t actually been cued to stop. The band director doesn’t even say anything, just looks straight back at the tubas and makes a helpless sort of why gesture.

In unison, the tuba players defend themselves: “THERE WERE FOUR F’S.”

which is 8 fortes. We were shocked until,