round-up: 3/01
& come see me at LA Zine Fest tomorrow!
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m reading
Quotations
Housekeeping:
I’m tabling at LA Zine Fest tomorrow from 11AM-5PM. Please come if you’re in the area!
What I’m reading:
Everything We Know So Far About the Disturbing Killing of Black Minnesota Trans Man Sam Nordquist
As Big Publishing Gets More Corporate, Shouldn’t the Salaries Go Up?
Quotations:
I don’t usually write because I’m too busy being afraid of it. Not of writing but the it. It’s more like breaking open a fruit. Not to taste but to see what bleeds out. Here is a country. Here is a person in that country who has no papers but digs holes in the earth, plants trees, buries his shadow. The country hates him and hates me too, a little less, because I have papers. A document is a strange thing. To ask the placenta for its numerical origin. To tell the dirt it belongs to you. Poets should be concerned with how an empire makes us hate the people without papers. Who could be us, who are us, but temporarily less human because it is convenient for the jobs. The jobs are too important to stop the bombs that burn the flesh of the children who were my face as a child, but I live here, with papers. I call it my life. This language is a chain of accidents. What I’m trying to say is no one gives a fuck about your poems but write them anyway. If you’ve got a body, a pen, a shadow that follows you like a dog, then make it mean something. You are alive among flesh explained back to us as furniture. Hope is a tax. Each word—say it aloud—I am here—is a coin, a debt owed to love. Take the echo seriously. Our living is the plot to sing completion. Let it fill you, let it bruise. Greet the stranger: did you know we share a wick?
-Zaina Alsous, “To a Young Poet”
All my life I was a hammer:
I struck at everything I touched.
-MaKshya Tolbert, “Ways to Measure Trees”
Multiple trans people mentioned a commonality between ageism and anti-fatness: the older you get or the larger your body is, the more likely people are to deny your gender. Fat men and old men are seen as lesser types of men because they are weaker and softer than men supposedly ought to be. Fat women and old women have failed to keep their bodies conventionally attractive and capable of providing unceasing caretaking labor, and so they cease to be women, or even people.
I'm not brave, I'm stubborn. I want to live out loud to prove that people like me can thrive — alongside each other — in a world that is not necessarily built for us to thrive.
I am proud of some sentences I conjured. I guess I am proud of myself for not surrendering to trauma or woe, but I don't think "proud" is the right word...something more like solidarity — I feel solidarity for others who are tenaciously still alive and kicking, and I feel solidarity with those who found they could not stay, too. The living and the dead.
I find something beautiful in nearly everything I've ever read...there are small emotional intensities, image bursts, lyric pulsars that can emerge in a moment on a page, or even between line, words, in the white spaces.
I was writing through expanded understandings of death. There are the deaths that we experience in our lives, the real deaths of people we cared about, but there’s also this sense that we’re living and dying every day, every year, every time we have changes in our lives—those different symbolic kinds of deaths. In that sense, it opened up the question for me about beginnings and endings and endless change and how all death and all change also generates new life or new identity or new ways of being in the world.
We overlook how massive stress is as a risk factor for all sorts of health conditions. Not just autoimmune or chronic illness. And then we also underestimate, in my opinion, how much stress the body is under when we're not eating enough. Which is silly when you really think about it. Because of course, I mean that is arguably the most important thing we can do to keep our body feeling safe is to eat enough. And so what greater stress is there than the fear of not getting enough? That's a survival instinct.
So what’s a good rule of thumb for protein intake?
Alan Aragon, one of the OGs in the health space, put it to me this way. (This bit was trimmed in the final version of the story.)
“With the general public, a consumption of about 1.2 to 1.6g per kilogram of body weight is appropriate for just general health and maintaining muscle mass and just sort of living a normal-ish lifespan and healthspan.”
The protein insurgence is all around us. Just take a stroll through your local grocery store and you’ll see protein is being jammed into all kinds of unlikely places. In the snacks aisle, you’ll find Quest Tortilla-Style Protein Chips (18 grams a bag), which come in zesty flavors like Nacho Cheese and Loaded Taco. In the freezer aisle, you’ll see an emergent category of protein ice creams by brands like Smearcase, which offers 39 to 44 grams of protein and is “powered by cottage cheese and boosted with collagen.” There are protein cookies, protein freezer waffles, protein cheese puffs, protein Moon Pies, protein Snickers bars, and protein truffles; in the beverage aisle, protein water, protein soda, protein beer. And I was gobsmacked to learn of protein seasonings, like Devious Foods’ Protein SZN, which comes in flavors like salt and pepper and can be sprinkled on top of other proteins, like a chicken breast, for additional gains.
Brad Schoenfeld, graduate director of the Human Performance and Fitness program at CUNY’s Lehman College, says that at least with regard to body-composition goals, it’s probably better to eat a little more protein than you need, rather than too little. But with long-term health in mind, he warned against allowing protein to displace other necessary macronutrients like fats and carbs. And for those who aren’t regularly strength training, many experts say that loading up on protein is, at best, pointless. Davis explains it like this: “For the average person not lifting a lot of heavy weights, when they’re drinking all these protein shakes, it’s basically delivering bricks to a building site but not having anyone there building the house, and you’ve just got a whole bunch of bricks building up outside. If you’re not utilizing those bricks, it’s not going to do you any good.”
In the past, physicians sometimes warned about the relationship between consuming lots of protein and high rates of cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular kidney disease; now, the medical Establishment suspects these risks may have more to do with meat (for example, the animal fat) than the macro-nutrient itself. “We have even more data now that the source of the protein makes an important difference,” says Walter Willett, professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Like many in his field, he believes plant protein is superior for longevity and protecting against disease. Still, he cautions, “each of them needs to be evaluated critically because they might not be good if loaded with refined starch and salt.”
It was while J. and I once made love that I truly recognized myself for the first time. When she said my name, I realized I was that person, that he is who I am, or I am who he is. I remember, after J. had left the room, lying on the bed by myself, looking down at my naked right leg, thin and hairy, and understanding that this is my body. It had never occurred to me in such a way before. I became aware of the time and place—J.’s apartment, her bedroom—and for the first time in my life, the fact that I had found myself somewhere, here, made some innate, unspeakable sense.
He ran his finger along my scar. It reminded me of seeing a flash of lightning, then counting by hundreds until I heard thunder rumble and could gauge the storm's distance. It took thirty seconds for the sensation of his touch to travel from my scar along the synapses to my brain, axons and neurons firing and flashing, until something like pleasure quivered through me. Maybe someday I could be intimate in real time instead of feeling like an actress whose lines lagged behind her mouth.
That’s all for today—
-Despy Boutris
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