The Skinny on Jeans

So, I've got nothing against skinny people.

Some of my best friends are skinny. I even find some of them sexy.

For lots of skinny people it's just the way they were born, it's genetic and they can't help it.

Many skinny people love themselves just the way they are, while I'm sure there are lots of others who seceretly wish they were more curvy and voluptuous, no matter how hard they try.

The most important thing is to just be yourself.

I just don't identify as skinny.

It's just not my thing. It's not me.

So when the skinny jeans trend emerged several years ago, I was pretty turned off by the whole thing. The emaciated, strung out, black and white, could be snapped like a twig any second, indie rocker look, just didn't do it for me.

I don't wear clothes, nor are clothes made for my body, that have the word skinny attached to them. It would be a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron by definition.

And plus, I wasn't interested in supporting a trend that made skinny, any more popular then it already was.

So a few weeks ago when my hot fabulous fat activist friend Liz, started talking about buying skinny jeans, my eyebrows raised and my interested was tweaked.

"Really?" I asked.

"Oh yeah!" she said. "I want them tight all over!"

Turns out Liz had some hot tips on places to find hip, trendy hot babe clothes for hot babe bodies. You see if you are lucky enough to have a body bigger then a size 12, then you will also know how your options on stellar fashion and wicked styles drops by about 100% compared to people whose bodies are smaller then that. Pants are the worst, next to button up shirts that never button up in the right the places. It really is too bad, because it keeps hot babes from getting hot babe clothes, to match their own hot babe personalities and their wicked sense of style - and that really just hurts us all.

Instead us hot babes with hot babe bodies have to work extra hard to find creative ways to alter and mix and match, out of style ugly polyester fashions found in retail chain "plus-size" stores and spend countless hours at Value Village trying to juggle the best options in the men's and women's sizes.

But Liz gave me the dirt on what stores actually sold hot hipster pants that would fit my body, and she was super stoked about the skin tight all over, skinny jeans.

So when The Tourist and I went to the mall yesterday, my mission was to see for myself. When I walked out of the dressing room I wasn't so sure Liz knew what she was talking about. But The Tourist, The Tourist was so excited, well she practically ripped them off of me.

Anything that musters that kind of response is worth trying.

And after a few glasses of wine and lots of hot friend love and ass slapping, I warmed up to them too. I even let the burn by the new girl on being a few years slow to the style, roll off... eventually.

Except that, I'm not calling them skinny jeans.

Nope. No way, not going to happen.

I mean they're so tight they're Phat, don't you think?
Yeah Phat jeans. Now, that sounds better.

The people you think of

The summer before I actually came out, I was working where I used to work here in Ottawa, which is a very public place, where parents bring their kids.

I was going around and talking with everyone, and when I approached this woman with a young boy, she looked up at me. She looked me right in the eye.

I was taken aback by the resemblance.

This face, these eyes...

I have them committed to memory.

"Do you happen to have a sister?" I asked

"They are all in Germany, I doubt you would know them" she said

"...because you remind of this woman I once knew. Her and her partner owned this brewpub in my home town in Nova Scotia"

"That's me" she said.

"oh wow, well I'm Mae, I don't know if you..." I said.

"yeah, I remember you." she said

I gulped.

I was speechless. I could barely look at her, yet I couldn't take my eyes away.

I mustered up some sad excuse of a conversation, for as long as I could, and then I ran away, my heart beating, my hands shaking.

_______________________________

The other day it occurred to me that the only women I think about while it the midst of getting off, are the women I have actually got it on with. Sometimes it's just one, more often then not it's flashes and passing moments of each of them that have burned their way into my memory. At the corner against the lamp post, against the tree, in the mud, in the rain, in the car, in the car, in the car, against the wall, in the hall, in the hammock, at the bus stop, in the tent, in my parents house, in the garden, in the night, in the afternoon, in the morning, after work, in the hotel room, on the floor. I sometimes wonder why I don't have the imagination to picture it with other women, but I don't.

Well except for one.

__________________

In high school the first dykes I ever met, owned a brew pub on the wharf. I had the biggest crush on one of them. She was German and butch, with short blonde hair and always wore this white linen shirt. She had a soft sternness to her. And this look, this gaze, with these piercing blue eyes. When she looked at me, I creamed my pants. I remember going in there with my parents, and doing anything I could to catch her eye. She always looked me right in the eye and I would hold it there with her for what felt like an eternity. I remember being embarrassed, thinking that my parents must know exactly what I was thinking. She must of known. I swear it was that knowing look from her that let me know. It let me know that if I liked the way she looked at me that much, that I must be a dyke.

We went to their restaurant for our high school grad dinner. I wore a rainbow bracelet mostly just for her to see, and my best friend Laura dressed in a suit. It really is amazing it took me 10 years from then and a flight to London until I would actually sleep with a woman.

But for those 10 years, those 10 years after I left Nova Scotia and dated boys, she was who I saw when I closed my eyes at night.

When I was alone or not.

* This is her

Notes about disability culture in Canada

"The archive, Foucault has shown us, determines what we can know. There has been no archive, no template for understanding disability as a category of analysis and knowledge, as a cultural trope, and an historical community." - Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

This instead is the archive of Disability culture in Canada...

Abuse of mentally disabled in N.S. leaves cabinet minister 'shocked' - Winnipeg Free Press

"the worker held the resident's arm while in a ... chair and placed a bar of soap in her mouth."

"left on a toilet unattended in the washroom for three hours"

"worker pulled down the top of the resident's pants and poured water on him"

"worker grabbed a (female) resident by the leg above her ankle and pulled her down the hallway"