body

Maybe it's anatomy, or running in the mornings, or Body Worlds tomorrow, or talk of organ donations, or M & A's resolutions to gym & hot yoga it up in the new year, or Mike S's musings on naked parties, or something completely unrelated...but I've been thinking a lot about my body. I've mentioned before that my body is pretty aware of me--it inevitably responds to my stress and anxiety in the form of rashes, canker sores, sleep deprivation, exhaustion. On my end, I haven't been too good at reciprocating, haven't paid much attention to my body. I make observations and pick up on the details, but I don't consider it like I do other aspects of myself. Like Aud says, I'm too self-aware...which is true, and also paradoxically the reason I become blind to certain things. So this is going to turn out to be a pretty superficial and self-centered entry, but I suppose most my and blog entries are.

Mike mentioned that at naked parties (okay, I'd never even heard of those until this conversation), you see that every body has its imperfections. I thought that was an interesting insight to have during a naked party and made me think on what I try to hide and what I value. I feel lucky to have been in environments and around people that make me loving of even those things I hide, of those fragilities. It makes the imperfections things that I seek to describe, understand, articulate.

Since running at home, I've confirmed that my feet are abnormally sensitive. Some people think all feet are unattractive, but I don't think that's true. I think it's definitely true of mine. They blister really easily, especially on the sole below my big toe, and my heels have a coarse quality more typical of someone who actually is physically active. They remind me of my dad's, except my dad stood 14 hour days and I bum like no other. And the nails on my toes just grow awkwardly.

My skin in general doesn't stay healthy for long; it dries easily because I love really hot water in the shower and probably because I was born that way. The skin that comprises the boundary between fingernail and fingertip is really sensitive to cold and sometimes cracks so that I bleed. I'm not very good at moisturizing either. While I like my hands in general, they're not attractive either. I can't keep my nails long or even nicely trimmed or maintained, because I have this habit of peeling them, which everyone thinks is disgusting and I find soothing.

Besides shying away from letting a significant other's feet touch mine and discover their lack of appeal, I hesitate to shed the shorts over a bathing suit on the beach. I've gotten used to the fact that my thighs (and calves) are bigger (the few people I've mentioned this to scoff, so to clarify, I mean--proportionally to the rest of me, okay, not absolutely). I actually kind of appreciate that now (the thighs, not so much the calves--which I'm also not really fond of because of how my skin gains a spotty quality there). I appreciate them because it's the little thought I think to myself and fold in my hands whenever someone comments on me being too small or thin. I keep it for me and then feel no urge to defend myself. But anyway so the hesitation isn't due to that; it's because I developed the inevitable stretch marks early on, before I even knew it was normal and was kind of freaked out by them. So those are there. Probably forever.

I've grown out my hair the longest it's ever been, and the tangles that arise because I don't brush my hair become particularly apparent when I'm at home and there's no conditioner to smooth them out. When I was little I never brushed my hair. When it got so tangled that my mom forced me to brush, the brush got stuck in my hair and that was a mess. I swear that ever since then, that spot in my hair grows in tangled--even after cutting it and growing back as new hair, it gets impossibly tangled in that one spot, becomes a ball of uncombable string.

Some of these things never bothered me, a few I grew to accept on my own, others were loved and cared for in a way that comforted and reassured.

My favorite bone is the clavicle, because it's what I like most on myself, the way you can feel it and how it's the most easily fractured bone in the body. I especially like where the clavicles meet, the hollow beneath your neck...which I learned in anatomy is unromantically called the sternal notch. It's an actual space, and you can press into it and feel its texture and contours different from the bones leading into it.

As much as people tell you appearances don't matter, I think senses do. Feeling the cold sole of worn feet against thick calves when you cross your legs, running ragged fingertips along an arm to relieve an itch, tugging on that mass of messy hair when you have to stop being a homebody and go out in public, holding or being held by that hollow when you are vulnerable and loving. It can be as much you as those things inside.