I was browsing through the Program Guide section on my TiVo and I came across a listing for Teletubbies with the following episode description:

Extra toast; dirty dog; bath; magic house.

Yeah, that’s just how it is some days.

Earlier this week I read this article, which tries to navigate the weird territory between the size-acceptance movement and the usual (and lately more audible) discourse about the “obesity crisis.” Which is also pretty much what I’ve been trying to figure out for the past two years. I have this most excellent weblog to thank for bringing this article to my attention. I need to post a journal entry soon about where I’m at with all this stuff–why I give a shit about the size-acceptance movement, and why you should, too, no matter what the hell you’re doing with your body.

And I’m really curious to see how a size-acceptance group’s plan to sue Weight Watchers will turn out. The idea seems to be to take on the diet industry in the same way recent lawsuits have indicted the tobacco industry, and it seems like a ballsy but really flawed premise. The weight-loss industry doesn’t have the kind of unified front that Big Tobacco does, and I just think there’s a world of difference between “recidivism” and “addiction.” At the same time, though, it can’t hurt to have some new statistics out there.

I tried to make soap on Sunday. I don’t know how I got into this. I saw a recipe in a magazine for melting down castile soap and adding your own fancy crap, and when I was at Trader Joe’s on Saturday I saw some of the plain soap the article recommended, so I grabbed a couple bars. That evening I was out in my neighborhood and noticed this store was still open and that I could just run in and get some smelly essential oils. Wow! I thought. Maybe God wants me to make this soap or something! I had this idea that if it turned out well then I’d make a huge batch to give out as office gifts and everyone would be so charmed, because if I have my shit together enough to make fancy soap, that says a lot.

So has anyone tried this recipe and can they tell me what I did wrong? I think I left the grated soap in the double boiler too long. By the time I was putting it in the mold it was starting to get crumbly. It held together okay in the end but it looks kind of like a cinderblock and also, it doesn’t smell very special. It has a decidedly joyless Ivory smell. I might try again, because I’m stupid like that. But I probably should stick to getting my fancy soap from Shae.

Friday night I met up for the first time with a group of Chicago-area bloggers. I know–you’re like: what, you’ve had a weblog for a week? Actually, though, I joined back in the fall after stumbling across a link to their discussion group. Over the past couple years I’ve had so many people call the main journal of Poundy.com a “blog” that I got a little tired of explaining the sticky you-know-it-when-you-see it differences between technology and purpose and figured that the definitions were getting blurry anyway, so why not join the group? So I did, and finally, when they had a dinner at a restaurant not far from my place, I went to meet them. I’m glad I did.

Meeting with a group of bloggers is an awful lot like talking with Canadians. Which is to say you realize a lot about what you’re doing by seeing just a slightly different approach. What surpised me the most somehow is how many of them really are Chicago bloggers and write about and photograph the city, which I’ve really come to appreciate after spending so much time being vague about where I live and downplaying all things “local” in lieu of a sort of an Internet Anywhere. (Yes! I’m in Chicago! You probably knew that! That’s okay! Go on and continue to not stalk me!)

Anyway, it was cool. And it made me think that sometime in the coming weeks I really need to update my links.

I suppose this will be the weekend when I really start to get all goofy about the holidays. I already missed the motorcycle parade on Western Avenue but by God I’m going to ride that damn Santa Train this year. I’ve only been on it once, a couple years ago. It showed up out of nowhere at my el stop and I got on. Secular Christmas songs blared over the loudspeakers. Everybody in the train car sat in a sort of daze. I know I won’t be able to quite recapture the magic, or the tingly, dissociative sensations, or whatever, of my first time on the Santa Train, but that’s okay.

I guess I am going to put up lights in my apartment. It’s a studio apartment and too small for a tree. I tried a tree once: my first real tree, since due to allergies in our family we have always had a fake tree that we haul down fully assembled from the attic. We put the lights on it years ago and now we just plug it in and sort of fluff it up and decorate it. It’s a good thing. But one year I let a boyfriend talk me into getting a four-foot-tall real tree. It was all right. But I don’t recommend having a real Christmas tree in the same room where you sleep, because the sound of needles falling off late at night is unspeakably creepy. It sounds exactly like a family of bats has nestled deep in the branches and are trying to learn how to light matches.

What the hell is a “broken pipe?” Because the FTP log keeps telling me I’ve got one and can’t make a connection. Huh? There’s a pipe? Am I smoking one right now?