Photography: Short North Columbus

The Greek Orthodox Cathedral

Jeni's ice cream

Lemongrass fusion bistro

The North Market

A little bit of nature in the city

Positive messages

Everybody Knows Somebody

Everybody knows somebody.

 The National Eating Disorders Association’s Awareness Week began on Sunday, and while I intended to have this post ready to ring in the week, I found it to be enormously difficult to write. In fact, it almost ended in the trash can quite a few times, little more than a virtual memory. But in the end, I can’t remain quiet about this subject.

Statistics on clinical eating disorders are already stark – they have among the highest death rates of any psychiatric condition, and are among the most commonly-diagnosed mental health conditions in young women. Equally disturbing is the rise of something known as the Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified. The EDNOS often appears as a combination of symptoms, so it doesn’t fall easily into the categories of anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating disorder, but it is no less serious. And recent evidence indicates that the numbers are much higher than we might expect.

NEDA’s theme for this year’s awareness week is “everybody knows somebody.” I certainly know a few. Depending on how you define “eating disorder,” I may even be one of those somebodies.

In 2008, Self Magazine published a study they conducted in coordination with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The study drew from over four thousand women, and the results are startling: three quarters of American women report disordered eating behaviors. Sixty five percent fall into the “disordered eating” category, while ten percent display behaviors consistent with anorexia, bulimia nervosa, or binge eating disorder.

Let that sink in for a minute. Three out of four women in America have unhealthy relationships with food and their own body.

So you probably don’t just know somebody. You know quite a few. You may also be one, like me.

I was in the grocery store the other day, and I made a rare trip down an aisle I don’t often traverse. I avoid that aisle – in its shadows lurk empty calories and late-night body image anxieties. I had been wanting something from this snack aisle, but every glossy bag held an invisible threat that stopped me in my tracks. If only it had been as easy as reaching for the thing that sounded best, paying at the register, and going home to enjoy a snack.

Instead, I read every label, compared calorie and fat content. I thought about whether I would be able to eat only the designated portion, or if I risked snacking on more. I analyzed every piece of information weighed the pros and cons, calculated the calories I had burned that day, until any joy I would have gotten from that morsel had been wrung out of the experience.  I finally decided on a specific brand of popcorn whose nutritional content (or rather, lack of caloric content), was marginally better than the rest, brought it home, measured out the proper amount, and ate it. It was stale and deeply unsatisfying.

That moment of paralysis in the store struck me. It is what motivated me to sit down and finally put these words to paper, because I could not remain silent. It was the middle of NEDA Awareness week, and there I was frozen in the snack aisle, letting a bag of popcorn dictate my evening.

Self’s study confirmed what years of observation have taught me: that I am not alone. This is the average woman’s experience. I know this from my own life, from the stories my friends have told me, from the dialogue written into books and movies, from the magazine articles about emotional eating and how to diet without suffering. Food is no longer something to nourish our bodies, and to enjoy.  It is an enemy, a taskmaster, a dysfunctional relationship. We want it to bring us joy, but we can’t seem to shake the guilt that latches on to us.

There’s no doubt that America has a problem with food. Our obesity rates have risen steadily over the last few decades, and the fast food and dieting industries have both exploded. Our waistlines are expanding as the food industries’ wallets grow thick and we wage inner war with ourselves. When the standard of beauty is six feet tall and weighs 120 pounds, how can anyone hope to measure up?

Sure, I’m a healthy weight, but if I’d just not eaten that dessert, I could look like Keira Knightley, right?

53 percent of dieters are already a healthy weight. More than half of the people trying to shed some pounds have absolutely no reason they should do so. And I am one of them.

Unhealthy body image hurts everyone. When we feel shame about our bodies, we close ourselves off to life. When we are thinking about calories and grams of fat and whether that lack of smoothness around our hips is just water weight or evidence that we should step up our treadmill time, we are not thinking about our loved ones, our achievements, our hopes, and our dreams.  But these thoughts are pervasive. Even when we want to escape them, they chase us down. Billboards, magazine ads, television spots, web banners all promote the ideal. Photoshopping is ubiquitous, and yet we are prone to believe that what we see is real. Achievable. Necessary.

On Self’s website, next to the article about the prevalence of disordered eating, was a link to join the “Self diet club.” I don’t know about you, but that unsettles me.

This is not a problem restricted to a small few who can be labeled “mentally unwell” and put aside and ignored. This is a widespread issue, and it is only worsening. About half of children between six and twelve are concerned about their weight, and eighty percent of ten year olds have been on a diet.  If we don’t respect our own bodies, how can we ask our children to? How can we ask our friends to be kind to themselves if we can’t say nice things about our own bodies?

Disordered eating is on the rise. It has become the new normal. But it doesn’t have to stay that way. Do what you can to change the conversation in our media. Challenge ads that objectify women or that promote an unrealistic or unreachable ideal. And don’t forget that men suffer from these same standards. Ten to fifteen percent of eating disorder patients are male. Learn about different body types, and remember that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And even on the worst days, appreciate your body for what it does for you every day.

Mine can carry me across the finish line of a half marathon. It can dance when my favorite song comes on. It can offer an embrace to those I love. It allows me to feel a wide range of emotions, not just cerebrally, but in every nerve and every muscle. It is my window to the world, and your body is the same for you. It is not to be punished or reformed, but to be loved, respected, and cared for.

I can’t always remember to do those things. But every day that I do is a small victory. And every person who is working to change their inner dialogue and our global conversations about beauty and self esteem is lifting the cloud cover just a little bit more.

Because life is so much more than what we see in magazine ads. Happiness is not a size zero body; it is learning to love the world – and yourself – for the natural beauty. And yes, even flaws are worthy of love.

National Novel Writing Month

It’s early November. Halloween is only just over and the Christmas decorations are already making their appearance in local stores. But for many, the frenzied holiday shopping will have to wait another month: all their free time in November has already been claimed. If the roads seem quieter, it may not be your imagination. If the coffee shops and libraries seem more crowded, they probably are. Take a look at these newcomers (or the occasional regular who seems more settled in to their usual booth than normal.) They are part of a larger group, a silent and industrious movement that happens once a year.

Some sit in the corners of busy coffee shops, hidden away with their laptops and take-out cups filled with coffee. They jump a little and glance up as customers nearby laugh loudly, but only moments later, they’re deeply absorbed again. Their fingers tap on the keyboard, creating a din that’s nearly audible over the voices and the sounds of espresso machines and milk frothers. Or they perch on a chair in the solitude of their homes, their laptops balanced on their knees as they build up a momentum of written word.

These people are WriMos (or NaNos, if you prefer.) They are participating in National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo), an annual event that involves writers from all over the world. Between 12:00:00 on November 1 and 11:59:59 on November 30, the participants scramble to write a 50,000-word novel. Tens of thousands of participants (over 256,600 signed up in 2011 and 36,843 finished their novels) write works the length of The Great Gatsby or Catcher in the Rye. Some write even longer novels, by some miracle of time management. This year, I will be one of them. After a three year absence, I have decided to recommit my Novembers to the somewhat absurd, often infuriating, and always rewarding pursuit of writing a novel in 30 days on top of an already demanding course load, work schedule, and generally busy life.

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Photography: "Autumn Bliss"

Last weekend, I went to the Circleville Pumpkin Festival, to see the giant pumpkins and get some photographs.

 

The day after, I went to my old high school and took a walk on the cross country trail to get some photos of the beautiful fall colors before they fade into winter:

Can you see why this is my favorite season? :)

Sex, Pistols

About a month ago, a new PC game showed up on Steam, as part of their Greenlight program that allows customers to vote on the next games to be offered on the site. The same day, Steam took it down, later citing inappropriate content. On the game’s page, Steam left a message saying that: “the item has been banned for either violating the Steam Terms of Service or the Terms of Service for Greenlight.” It must have had some pretty questionable contact to be removed from a server that also sells Grand Theft Auto.

Before I get into the details of this particular game, I want to point out some of the most popular games that have been sold through Steam or comparable services: Left 4 Dead, Doom 3, multiple iterations of the Call of Duty series, and most infamously, Grand Theft Auto IV. Most of these are well-known, even outside the gaming world, but it doesn’t take a lot of scrutiny to figure out that they are structured around violence: most of them include references to war, death, and violence in their titles. Now, to be fair, some of the “greatest hits” in the gaming world are games like Portal and Minecraft, which involve no violence and focus instead on puzzles, creativity, world building, and other engaging and positive activities. The gaming industry, like the film industry, has a rating system intended to keep young children from games with inappropriate content, so violent games are rated M, for 17 and older, but that doesn’t stop many “underage” teens from playing these bloody and brutal games.

So what was the incredibly offensive content that caused a terms of service violation and got this game removed from Steam’s Greenlight page? It must be worse than the mechanism in Grand Theft Auto – or GTA – in which you can have sex with prostitutes and then kill them. This behavior is not only possible, but is encouraged by the gameplay mechanics, because having sex with a prostitute raises your health. The drawback, according to the wikia page for GTA, is that it costs money – a problem easily remedied by killing the hooker and taking her money. The sex acts, while not shown in great detail, are also not skipped over (NSFW). This is not objectionable to Steam.
And it definitely must be worse than the scoring system in Manhunt, which encourages you to carry out grisly and sadistic murders. In that game, your score is dependent on how gruesome the executions are (Disturbing images abound), and you are rated from a low “unimpressive” to a high “extremely competent.”

In fact, it is an erotic game called Seduce Me, which focuses on building relationships – yes, sexual ones – with characters in the game. The sex appears to be all consensual, and from what little I have seen of it (the game has yet to come out, but the developer has gameplay clips up as a preview), your actions in the game have consequences. So while I can’t make pronouncements about the detail of its content, I can say that from what the developer released, it seems rather, well, harmless.

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Choice for the Choiceless

It’s that time again. Political ads frame segments of your favorite television show. Signs pop up in yards, inspiring rage or camaraderie. Bumper stickers become ubiquitous. I have only been eligible to vote in one election in my short life and have only been tuned in to three, but already I’m growing battle-weary. And I sense this same fatigue among many of my generation. We often hear that the youth vote is in the tank for Obama. But what we don’t hear a lot is that the youth vote isn’t as excited as it was four years ago. In fact, a Gallup poll this summer reported that only 58 percent of the 18-29 demographic plans to vote this year.

This is our future that is being debated. This is our country, our leaders, our government. And yet, there is a sense of helplessness.

I watched two debates this week: the first presidential debate and “The Rumble 2012.” The presidential debate was first, and within five minutes I was already yelling at the screen and fiercely regretting my decision. And I was not just shouting at Romney (full disclosure, I’m one of those youth voters who will be ticking the box for Obama this year, though my reasoning behind that is more complicated than one might expect which we’ll get to later). I was shouting and shaking my fist because both candidates were up there delivering false or exaggerated sound bites rather than honestly addressing the real problems that are facing our country. Romney was proclaimed the winner, and fact checkers everywhere revealed the gross exaggerations and blatant lies that won him the debate. They also revealed a smaller though not insubstantial number of lies and gross exaggerations from Obama.

”The Rumble” was an online, live-streamed debate between Jon Stewart of The Daily Show and Bill O’Reilly of The O’Reilly Factor. Although it was less formal than the presidential debates, and largely intended for entertainment rather than substance, it brought up a number of interesting and complex issues. What intrigued me the most were the audience questions that were read in the final segment of the debate. Many of these questions addressed the issue of trust. Why should we vote for Obama over Romney? Or Romney over Obama? How can we trust either presidential candidate? They both lie. They are both vying for the job of commander in chief of the largest military in the world, leader of arguably the only remaining superpower, the position called “most powerful man in the world,” and “leader of the free world.” High stakes lead to high risks. How can we believe that either candidate or either party can be trusted with our future?

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Photography: "Fallen"

"Fallen."
El fuente del angel caído in Parque Retiro in Madrid.  Available for purchase on FineArt America.