One of my scattershot snaps of my brain..

[annwfyn]

• I appear to be suffering from hay fever this summer. This happens sporadically, and inconsistently, and only started when I was in my twenties. In fact, I can remember the day it started. I was living on Causewayside in Edinburgh, and was walking home from university. There was this huge bank of flowers by the side of the road, and as I walked past it, I could feel my eyes just prickling up.
  
  I'd never had hay fever before, and never thought of myself as the kind of person who did. I don't think I've ever quite adjusted. Even now, I find myself muttering darkly about how I've got this lousy cold that just won't shift, even as the pollen hangs heavy in the air. It's taken me about a week and a half this time to work out that there might be something seasonal about these sore eyes, throat, and slightly snuffly feeling.



• I'm feeling crazy anxious about university at the moment. It's the lack of feedback. I genuinely don't know how I've been doing. I think I'm OK, but I'm not sure, and an increasingly insistent voice (which may be paranoia) is hissing 'you know you're going to fail'.
  
  I hate this feeling. I just want this term to be over with.



• molez leant myself and pierot the first half of Season 2 Supernatural on DVD, which we watched over the weekend with great determination. I have come to the possible contraversial opinion that I actually prefer Supernatural to Heroes. The world seems a little darker, the characters slightly grittier, and I love the way it juxtaposes the crappiness of the lives they live in the eyes of most (credit card fraud, drifting from motel to motel) with the incredible importance of what they are doing.
  
  I did have a slight ARGH! ANOREXIC ACTRESS moment in a couple of episodes - the girl who plays Jo looks too thin for her face, and that bothers me.



• On another note, I am discovering that my rant about the emaciated frames of women in the media is becoming a reoccuring one, but it is something that bothers me. I don't like people who look too thin for their frame. I don't think it looks nice.
  
  I also intensely dislike the fact that the media is increasingly pushing an ideal of beauty which is actually unhealthy. Keira Knightly is taller than me, and weighs 7 and a half stone. There is no way she can do that while eating healthily. I lived with my li'l sis when she was rowing at competition level. She is about half an inch taller than me - she's 5'8". She had to keep her weight down to 9 stone - that's 126 ib, I think. She did this by exercising for about 30 hours per week, and then not eating a lot. No chocolate. No dessert. She watched what she ate constantly, and basically ate as little as she could eat while keeping herself fit enough to function as a serious athlete.
  
  This was to keep her nearly 2 stone - 28 ibs - heavier than Keira Knightly.
  
  It's not reasonable that the ideal of beauty presented on screen and in photos constantly is one which requires starvation (and all the requisite lethargy, inability to concentrate on anything, depression and other neurosis which come with that). It's not reasonable that girls are constantly told that they aren't pretty unless they start starving themselves.
  
  I swear to god, in my mind, Kate Bosworth as Lois Lane is a symbol in my mind of all that is wrong with the world. We're glamourising something we should be pitying.

Comments

[wildrogue.livejournal.com]

Completely agree. It really struck home for me with supernatural when I realised that the teeny stick insect woman playing a vampire was none other than Tara from Buffy - you know, the one who looked huge compared to the rest of the cast.

There was going to be more here but it turned into a whole post so has been shifted to my own journal. Mind if I reference you?

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

That is completely fine. I'm happy with this debate spreading whence it will.

And you are right about Amber Benson. I have some friends who actually met her in her Buffy days - when she was generally known as the heavier girl on Buffy - and were quite shocked by how tiny she was in real life. It's very very scary imagining what Sarah Michelle Gellar actually looks like.