Ok, I'm so sorry, but GET OVER YOURSELVES.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against pride. I have a lot of it myself. In fact, of all the deadly sins, pride is probably the one I partake in most regularly (that and envy. Mmmm, envy). But there's pride, and then there's pride.

Aside from the fact that the whining about Wall*E is totally misplaced - the fat people were the heroes! They fought the evil AutoPilot! They returned to repair the sins of their skinny-yet-irresponsible ancestors! - I'm really not certain that you have a leg to stand on, or an overly fleshy buttock to sit on, by complaining about a movie that says an inevitable result of sitting around all day and slurping sodas is obesity. IT IS.

But the larger point is that obesity isn't something to be proud of, or ashamed of, or anything of the sort. It is simply a state of the body, one which is not healthy. Like having a broken ankle or a protein deficiency. The human body evolved to be moved around and exercised, it evolved to eat mostly green things and a bit of meat, and it evolved around small inputs of sufficient calories to sustain it, but with a capacity to store against leaner times. We and squirrels diverged at least 10 million years ago.

So unlike squirrels, fat is bad for people, not good: it puffs up your arteries so that your blood can't flow through them properly. It negatively affects your brain and your sleep patterns. It produces diabetes and gall stones, affects bone mass and muscle composition, and makes it more difficult to do things that the human body was built to do - run, jump, and bend. Active fat is better than inactive skinny, but fat itself - all other things being equal - is not good. These Fat Pride organizations are attempting to act as if Fat is a-OK. But it just isn't.

And I say this as somebody leaning towards the the Roseanne side of the BMI. I'm not proud of being fat. But I'm not ashamed, either, and this is where these groups are missing the point. Fat is a health problem, not a moral problem, and the people who participate in the Fat Pride movement are mixing up the two. We don't live in a world of five cardinal virtues and seven deadly sins anymore (and if we did, gluttony could not be wished away by pride anyway.) Until we stop feeling and start acting, being fat is a public health crisis, because it is a symptom of a sedentary lifestyle and unhealthy food.

Taking pride in your body is fine - fat or thin, we're all somebody's cup of tea. But taking pride in the symptoms of an unhealthy body - I have broken leg pride! I need to wear glasses to read street-signs pride! - is just kind of weird.

Hi! I am tired. I have been tired since forever, and I blame it entirely on Winter. Winter is stupid. I hate you, winter. Go away now.

But there is hope. This week I started on some new medication, medication whose sole purpose it is to fill in the gaps left by the medication I'm already on, and also to ameliorate some of its minor side-effects as a bonus -- the worst is that I sleep badly. I mean, I've always slept badly, probably because of my deviated septum, but I used to at least get to sleep before I would sleep badly. I used to be out like a light when my head hit the pillow. Now, not so much. Now I worry. I worry and I worry and I worry and this sometimes goes on all night long. Hopefully a daily injection of norepinephron will help with this; my doctor is enthusiastic, but it's easy for her to be enthusiastic, because she has a medical degree and also she can GET TO SLEEP AT NIGHT.

Also, and this is really weird, my attention span lately completely sucks. It has shrunk to about ten seconds, five if I'm reading philosophy. I am easily distracted by shiny objects, and I have to keep forcing myself back to what I was doing, because if I don't consciously keep a leash on my brain then my eyes will pop away from the page faster than Lindsay Lohan's rehab stays. So it's maddeningly hard to get things done at the moment, which is just perfect for my last semester of 3rd year -- the year with the most reading. Sigh.

Anyway, enough about me, upright crusader for mental illness and women's rights, friend to working folks and wearer of Doc Martens. I have some reading to do! Which is why I'm posting on my 'blog. Obviously.

Man, this winter is just totally kicking my ass.

I'm sick of snow.

This morning, which is always my earliest morning of the week, and a MONDAY, I managed to make it onto the bus. Then I stumbled into a coffee shop and bought a $2.00 cup of shame before hauling my butt to my class (late, as usual). As I was listening to my prof lay out the lesson plan for the class, I absent-mindedly backed up my laptop half an inch... and nudged my full, undrunk coffee... right into the garbage can that was in front of my desk.

Crap.

Also, the terrible cold that I had all reading week is gone, but it left me with congested ears. Half of every day is spent in eerie silence, and the other half - after swallowing and hearing a "crack! pop!" in my inner ear - is shriekingly loud. Loud, soft, loud, soft. Loud. Soft. All day long.

Somebody please give my eustation tubes a good talking to. Please. CRACK, POP.

And then this daylight savings thing. I don't mind falling back, but springing forward gives me hives. Every year it's the same. I'm not a morning person, and waking up an extra hour early hurts me. It hurts me in the soul.

And lately it hurts me in the computer, too, ever since some large brains decided that an extra hour of daylight two weeks early would save the world enough energy that it would let them continue drilling in the Alaska Wilderness Reserve without qualms for an extra year or two.

In theory, the two-weeks-extra change would have been ironed out what with all the Windows patches and Java patches and database patches that I installed this time last year. But no, of course not in real life, only in theory. I got several emails throughout the day from the person filling in for me about all the various things that screwed up this weekend. I now officially hate computers. Sigh.

Also! My PDA started to act up, coughing profanities about the time change and vibrating uncontrollably for minutes at a time, right in the middle of my classes, so I spent the day alternating between freaking out about being late for things and then freaking out about being early for things, and having to readjust my timezone settings. (And yes, of course I applied the fixes, I applied them weeks ago.) I fixed it, but not before wanting to strangle Bill Gates. Personally.

And! Midterm results come trickling in: a steady string of C Plusses. Sigh. I blame February for those.

Last but not least: last night I crashed out for a nap at 3:00pm and woke up at, like, 10:00pm. Oops. I needed the sleep, except that all the reading and phone calling I was supposed to do on Sunday night ... didn't get done. Aargh.

Have I chronicled my miserable existence enough for y'all? Ok, good. I'm tired now. At least I got my tax return and paid my student fees. I've never been so happy to be broke.