The language of my fatness

One of the key points of teaching in first few weeks of AP Language is the the meaning of words, specifically the connotative meaning. At the AP conference I attended this summer, our master teacher spent an entire four hour session on how to teach how connotative meanings shape an audience, the tone of a piece, and also our own understanding of how it reads. We received a handout to distribute to our students full of word lists with similar meanings. At the top of the list were synonyms for fat. Our master teacher used us as his students to model the activity, and we spent a solid half hour conversing about how we use different words for fat for different things.

As a toddler I was chubby. Chubby is, of course, an acceptable word for fat toddlers. Even typing the phrase "fat toddlers" feels weird. Chubby toddlers are cute. Being chubby is fine. I do not have much recollection of my chubby days, but I have seen enough photos to know that I was a chubby Yoda-looking baby and toddler. I find myself using this word all of the time when talking about babies or toddlers.

At some point between kid and teen, I became husky. Husky is such a strange one. Even when I was referred to as husky by most of the people who bought my clothes, especially my grandmother, I thought it was a weird word to use to refer to a human being. What exactly does it mean to be husky? Well, the dictionary defines it as a word to mean brawny or muscular, but it also means heavy. As an eleven year old, I was certainly not brawny or muscular, but I was heavy. To make it clear, I was not exactly fat as a young teen. I was bigger than most of the people I knew, and I was certainly called "fat ass" enough to give me the impression that I was fat, but when I look back at photos, I was, by all accounts, a bit over weight. I was hefty? Husky? Chubby? I am not sure what the word was, but this was around the age when kids had all kinds of words for what I was.

Eventually I grew to being obese. I am not sure exactly when because that word, obese, is so clinical, and it has an actual definition in terms of Body Mass Index. It is an ugly word that pretty much everyone I know tries to avoid using. We soften it with the word fat, but even that is to be avoided. We dance around these words. They make people uncomfortable. I see it all of the time when I try to be open about who I am. People are uncomfortable when I call myself fat, as if by using the word "fat" I am saying I a horribly ugly, awful person who should probably be stuffed into a basement somewhere only to be seen under severe circumstances. Granted, most of this is because of social concepts that position thinness as attractive and fatness as gross. We see successful thin people on the covers of magazines, in television, etc. I do not need to go deep into this because you all know.

We want to avoid these words- fat and obese- always, but especially in department stores. No one wants a banner hung over clothes that reads "FAT CLOTHES HERE" or "OBESE PEOPLE YOUR CLOTHES ARE HERE." I mean, who is going to shop in that store? It is silly to think about because it is not like my obesity is a secret. Everyone who has vision can see I am obese. I'm not dropping any truth bombs here, but it would be improper to label clothes as such, so males get BIG AND TALL and females get PLUS SIZES. I have purchased my clothes from big and tall sections since high school. It is no less embarrassing to have a banner that acknowledges I am in the big and tall section than it would be to be shopping in the fat section because they are essentially the same thing. We all know it. The connotative meaning of big and tall is fat people. Yes, tall people, and broad shouldered, muscular people probably buy clothes in the section, but that section of the department store is for fat people.

This has been rattling around in my brain since Wednesday when I took the above photo in a store on Oregon State's campus. I had never run across Extended Sizes before. I have seen extenders for seat belts or the top button of a dress shirt, but never clothes. I am not fat, I am just an extended person. My weight extends me as a human being. My extended body could win a close race in a photo finish, as my belly just extends out a bit. What a bizarre word choice for a section of clothing, especially when we already have an agreed upon label for fat male clothing sections. The more people try to dance around the word fat because of all of the hefty negative connotations, the more squeamish I become over the words we choose to use.

I am fat. It occupies 80% of my daily life. I worry about which chairs will hold me. I wonder if my belly fat is showing at least 100 times a day. I will continue to wear a sweatshirt in the classroom even if I am hot to avoid the possibility of exposing any flesh when removing it over my head. I am hyper-aware of what food I eat in public spaces. There are a thousand other daily thoughts on the subject of my obesity. I am also smart. I am thoughtful. I am funny (okay, this is probably debatable). I am passionate. There are people out there who think I am handsome (it is pretty cool to have someone think that). Being fat does not have to have such a negative connotation. Fat people do cool shit all of the time. While I have not completely accepted my fatness, I have decided that it doesn't have to mean I am useless. I will no longer be paralyzed by it.

A Grad School Moment

I decided to go to grad school for purely selfish reasons. I am not typically one to do anything selfishly, and a Master's degree will certainly benefit my wife and our future kids in terms of a pay raise in my job, and perhaps the opportunity to pivot in terms of career, but I made the decision to go to grad school simply because I wanted to be in rooms of like-minded people. I wanted to read books and discuss them at length with smart, passionate people. I wanted to write papers about literature and have smart people read them and tell me if I have any clue. I craved this.

However, I think I often talk more about how much work it is because, well, it is A LOT of work. And, frankly, I am always slightly embarrassed about how much I love it. I do not think people really care about what I am getting out of my 6th reading of the Scarlet letter or my first reading of any of Henry James' works. It is easier to focus on what others can relate to: being busy. To be honest, there are times when I am not sure how worth it is. The last few weeks I had been feeling this. I have been sick, and feeling off my game. I have not had a chance to take many classes featuring novels/authors I have great interest in, and in my third semester, I feel run-down. Going three semesters of being a full-time student and a full-time teacher has taken its toll on me. Combine that with the usual Imposter Syndrome, and I have been feeling the grad school blues.

And then tonight happened. I am taking a class focused on the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, and we are currently reading Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, a book I find agonizing to read. I am bored out of my mind every time I pick it up. Seated next to me in this class is a guy I have gotten to know a little bit because we have two classes together this semester, so we see each other four days a week, and we were talking about the book, and I admitted I was not liking it at all. He confessed he loved it and started flipping through it showing me all of this underlines, markings and marginalia, and I could tell he was excited about it. It was totally cool. Then, it turned out it was his turn to present today. He passed around his handout, and began his presentation, and I was floored by how cool it was. He had this cool-as-hell angle into the book, gave an insightful presentation, connected it to the presentation from Monday, and then he dropped these just complex, interesting discussion questions on the class. Suddenly, this book I hated so much, this book that literally lured me to sleep, came alive in my hands. I saw what he saw, and I was able to feel a part of the class in a way I have felt detached the last two weeks.

The professor and my other peers also helped me see things in the book I had not seen before. They helped shape the book. I still do not like it, but it was a reminder that liking a thing is not necessary, as long as you can find a way into the book in some way.

Then, after class I was walking to my car, and I saw that guy and another classmate in conversation, so I stopped and we killed an hour talking literature, professors, and most importantly, their experiences in education as minority students. I learned a ton, tonight. I grew to understand my privilege in brand new ways, and I got to know two of my peers a lot better. I am not a social person by nature. In fact, I am pretty awful at meeting people and making friends, and being a regular social human person. There is no guarantee this night will have started some great friendships, but talking to these people about the beauty of Percival Everett's Erasure, the sheer brilliance of a recently retired professor, and the lack of diversity in the course selection at Sac State brightened my spirits on a night where I definitely needed the light.

Seriously, do the shit you love. Even when you are not loving it, something will happen that will remind you why you loved it in the first place.

Oh also, last week I learned I might get to write a thesis and not take the exit exam. Things are looking up for sure!