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Wednesday, August 18, 2010
We Live in the Good Body
Maybe being good isn't about getting rid of anything.
Maybe being good has to do with living in the mess
in the frailty
in the failures
in the flaws.
Maybe what I tried to get rid of is the goodest part of me.
Think Passion.
Think Age.
Think Round.
Maybe good is about developing the capacity to live fully inside everything.
Our body is our country,
the only city,
the only village,
the only every
we will ever know.
It goes on, but ends with this:
We live in a good body.
We live in the good body.
Good body.
Good body.
Good body.
Maybe I was just really dehydrated, but damn. This quote said a lot to me. This may sound crazy, but hearing this quote is the first time that it hit me that my body is the only body I will ever have. (Sorry, do I sound high right now? I'm not, I swear.) But seriously, let that sink in for a moment. You will never have Christina Hendricks's body, or Dita Von Teese's, or Kate Moss's. The one you've got is the only one you'll ever know.
I don't know about you, but there's something about this realization that's oddly freeing. It's saying, "This is what I've got. Deal with it, World." I think so much of our culture is built around the idea of somehow getting another body, as strange as that may sound. ("Get a bikini body!") I've certainly spent plenty of time buying into the idea that I could somehow have a "better body" if I just did something differently. There's no upgrading to a better body in this lifetime. I already have a body, and it's a good body.
It's interesting to think about in terms of sewing and fashion. (And I'm not just saying that so I can build a post around this, honestly.) Just like yoga shouldn't be about getting one of these mythical bikini bodies, fashion shouldn't be about wanting to get rid of yourself. ("Maybe being good isn't about getting rid of anything.") Perhaps it's about honoring yourself, as you are, while also "developing the capacity to live fully inside everything." Maybe it's accepting that 31" waist while also wanting to become fully-realized: to become a skilled seamstress, yes, but to decorate yourself in a way that speaks to the innermost part of you and makes that part feel beautiful. Not to decorate yourself in a way that says "I'm working on getting rid of this belly/these thighs, etc."
So that's the thought for the day, folks. I hope it speaks to you as well. I better go before I start leading us in Ani Difranco songs or chanting or something.
69 comments:
I totally agree. Once you can accept your body as it is, you can begin to do things that nurture and improve it, not for the sake of outer appearances, but for the purpose of fortifying and energizing it, to allow for a life with vitality and longevity. I say this because I come from a family of people who take their bodies (and the health of their bodies) for granted by consuming toxic things. Since our ability to live in and fully experience the world is directly related to how healthy our bodies are, we should spend less time working on "manicuring" the exterior and more on ensuring the foundations of our souls' "houses" are in the best form they can be. Hurrah for YOGA!
ReplyDeleteThe major thing we often forget is that all these divas have bodies that are not flawless. Many of them have short torsos, short legs, wide shoulders, wide hips, small bust, flat butt, etc. Many of them aren't as pretty as they appear when they're on red carpet, once they don't have the makeup. Most of them are just average girls that happened to be famous, and/or rich. So, we should not be intimidated by their beauty, but should emphasize our own qualities, and hide our flaws (just like them).
ReplyDeleteThis is a beautiful post Gertie, thank you! It's only in the past few years that I've been able to look at the body I have and think that it's right for me - it's not a 'bikini body' or anything like the magazines tell me I should want, but it's mine and it works for me. A close friend of mine is struggling with an eating disorder and it makes me so sad to see her chipping away at her body in the way that she is. Being thin hasn't made her happy, radically changing her body shape has made her more fragile and miserable. I wish she could look inside and see that she is beautiful and should nurture herself to be the best that she can be, you know? This has been really inspiring, thank you x
ReplyDeleteGorgeous words, Gertie! and I love that photo, it's so... joyful I think is the word and it fits the sentiments beautifully.
For me adjusting the way I think is hard but I'm making a real and concious effort to switch around the way I do. One of the best things I read compared our internal monologue to the way we talk to friends and it really resonated with me that the things I say to myself when I'm feeling crappy, I would never consider saying to a friend I love and care about. I'm not fully there yet, but at least it's now something I'm concious of and trying to accept and change.Hi Gertie,
I have found your blog a while ago and addet it to my Linklist. Lovely. I love your style. Over here we have quiet a lot of vintage influence right now too, unfortunetly I mostly meet the folks woho misunderstood the whole think, wearing 80ties style glasses and dufflecoats. I am going with you with the new look style.
Anyway, when I read your post I thought mainly of my two kids and I realised, that my body must be just fine because they are perfect :-)
Greetings from Berlin, Catherine
(just inspires to sew a 50ies vogue pattern dress for autum)Fabulous post, Miss Gertie.
My body problem at the moment is that I know I used to have a body I loved and felt happy in but it has expanded of late and I don't love the bigger version. I know I'm never going to have slim hips or be dainty, but I can and have been slimmer and I miss it. I can't fit into clothes I made earlier in the year and I don't want the tacit acceptance of my current size that would come from sewing for myself at the size I am now.
I'm trying not to hate what I have at present while I work towards getting back to what I was, but it's hard. Still, a new pilates term starts soon so hopefully I'll feel a bit more chill then. Yay for yoga and pilates!Thanks Gertie!!! I needed this. I am going to try and hold on to this all day! And beyond but you know life comes only one day at a time. And I think this mantra could be applied to my whole life. Really not only is it your only body, it is your only life. Today my goal is to embrace it all rather than try and change it!! Wow I needed that!!!
ReplyDeleteLoved this post Gertie! :) This is an extremely freeing and healthy viewpoint--I just wish I had spent more time running across positivity like this, rather than buying into the crap that society throws at us and starving myself to try and create that "perfect" body I wanted. I think slowly--sometimes at a seeming snail's pace--I'm finally coming around to this way of viewing myself and the act of adornment/dressing. It isn't so much about "hiding" my perceived flaws, but rather dressing the form I currently have in a pleasing manner that makes me feel the best about my body and also communicates my aesthetic and ideas to others. My husband often has asked me why I care so much sometimes about how I look compared to what we see as "beautiful" in the culture. I think it's about time I start thumbing my nose at the idea of "the perfect body" and start embracing my good body and being thankful for what it's capable of and appreciate it!
♥ Casey
blog | elegantmusings.comI love this post. Isn't it amazing how one thought can lead you down a brand new path and journey to go with it. I love moments like you had last night where the sky opens up and swallows you with new insight, truth and realization. Bravo! Yeah! and Hip Hip Hippity for your body, my body and all bodies. Years ago I sold vitamins and we used to say, "If you don't take care of your body, where are you going to live?"
My son had a massive heart attack at the age of 23, which the medical community has not been able to determine a reason for. Sometimes this scares the heck out of me and makes me cry and other days I remember "his good body" "his good heart", that kept beating despite all it was going through that day and I thank God once again.
Thanks for the post.Cracking post and so very true. I spent years with such an unhealthy attitude to my body. I have starved myself and over eaten. I have hated myself so badly I have put permanent scars on my body. I still have my moment as I'm sure I always will but I have come to love my body. It is the vehicle that allows me to do everything I love to do so I should treat it with the respect it deserves. Sure I have quite a big butt. Means I have something to shake when I dance. Yeah my boobs are too big. Mean I look good in clothes that have a nipped waist. Yeah I'm short. Means I can weasel ny way through crounds and rarely hit my head on anything. There is always a positive.
Now can we sing some Ani?I have never been concerned about other people's bodies, and have been a very happy sexy 16 for most of my life. I had two babies and all of a sudden I was a very unhappy 22. It didn't feel like my body. I was depressed and didn't realize it. I went to a friends wedding. It was filled with attractive athletic people(football coach was getting married). Something clicked for me that day because I have been on a fast track to weight loss ever since.
I started working out at the gym, and eating better. More important I started sewing for my girls and myself. I find that It is a great motivation for me to make a dress that fits me as I am and makes me beautiful, as I am now.
I will never fit into a size 2, or even 6. I am a big boned sweedish woman. I am so ok with that.
I would still like to be a more healthy size, I have lost 18 lbs this month and hope to loose another 18 next month.
Once again you are writing about something that feels like it could have happened to me. Please never stop blogging.Amen. Even at my, ahem, advanced age, I am continuously amazed at what my body can do. I broke and dislocated my shoulder in May and just got released from PT to work on my work. I'll probably put yoga into my mix to help rebalance myself (one side of me is much weaker than the other at this point), but the body has the most amazing restorative properties when we have confidence in it and embrace it. I'll never be 5'10" (shoot - I'll never be 5'5"!) or have a 25" waistline, but damn, I can lift a lot and ride my bike up hills. That counts for a lot with me.
ReplyDeleteYou didn't sound high when you wrote that you just came to realize that.
One night,writing something down,I realized how nice it is that every person has a certain amount of blood,just for yourself(how exciting is that?!).And that it's 'wrapped up' with/by the veins and all together,the veins,bones,muscles,flesh,are held togeher by your skin.That..somehow let me love my body with all MY bones/blood cells/muscles much more.I don't know why.I don't know if this is exactly what you were talking about,what you wrote just reminded me of that.
Have a good day in your good body (;I've never had an issue with my body image or weight, but I started taking up martial arts about two+ years ago to help with my depression, and since I've been going to class regularly it has helped. When I was younger, I would continuously get into abusive, self-destructive relationships, and though I never hated how my body looked, I learned as I got older to cultivate self-respect and positive self-esteem, and to surround myself with people who respected me.
Society puts so much pressure on women especially to look a certain way. For a long time I didn't have a television, and even now I don't watch TV. I avoid fashion magazines and women's magazines (Elle, Lucky, Cosmo, etc). I work in the advertising industry and I know part of their psychology to sell products is to create a need for it by pushing on a woman's insecurity, and then selling them the solution -- whether that's shampoo, lipstick, or face cream. I think avoiding the media (especially media geared towards women's insecurities) helps with maintaining the small bits of self-esteem and self-respect that I've been slowly cultivating.
http://www.meladori.com/shesinfashion/Beautiful post. I had this awakening a while back. I'm a curvy girl 39,34,43; for years I was so unhappy with this but just recently I've realised what a friend my body is. Hell it produced the most beautiful baby girl on earth 10 yrs ago - I still look at her and marvel that I did that! I LOVE my body it's the best home for my mind!
ReplyDeleteI like the way this forces us to address our bodies with respect. At the end of my yoga classes, our teacher always says "thank your body for all its hard work" and saying "good body" is the same thing. Rather than being frustrated and saying stuff to our bodies like "why the heck couldn't you be more flexible? or have better balance? or stronger muscles? or just be a bit thinner?" this is a way of saying "well done body. good job. thanks for carrying me through the day" It sounds corny written down, but it does make you feel better!
ReplyDeleteThis post is so right on time for me. I recently took up jogging and now, instead of focusing on all of my flaws, I marvel at how quickly by body mends itself and how efficiently it changes to take on the stress I'm putting it through.
Today I see my body as this awesome machine. To simplify it as merely a misshapen shell is to truly misunderstand and undervalue this miraculous vehicle I'm housed in.
I would urge anyone who is unhappy with their body to take up a physical activity. Watching your body work will change your perspective.
Anyway, thanks, Gertie.The 'good body' saying takes on a whole different perspective with aging. On the downhill side of the life cycle 'bell curve' it can be very liberating to realize: hey, I'm done with the part of my life where having a perfect body is essential.
Whew, glad it's over, pass me that ice cream!Beautiful post.
I recently completed a pretty intense fitness program (and am signed up for round 3 because I loved it so much - heh). Even though I lost weight and gained muscle, the most important thing that came out of it for me was accepting my body for all its beauty and its faults. I think I'm finally at a point that I'm not just content, but really pleased with the body that I've been given and I want to keep it as happy and healthy as possible. I'll never be a bikini model and that is a-okay with me. Instead, I'm enjoying my body as it is and you're right, it's oddly liberating when you get to that point.This is such a great quote/poem that you posted today.
I recently started working out with a personal trainer, and have been doing so for a month now. While I'm starting to notice my body is stronger, I'm still the same size/shape/weight.
This poem reminded me that I need to just take pleasure in having a (stronger) healthy body no matter what, since not everyone does.
Thanks! :)
P.S. I love the happy, swirley picture with your post.We have to learn to come to peace with out bodies and accept them for what they are, every little flaw. We should not focus on the flaws, but focus on who we are inside. Who we are will radiate outward, and will make a beautiful person, body. We should work with what we have and learn to accentuate the positive aspects and downplay the negative but not worry about it. We should love every wrinkle and scar and just savor each day. Each day is a gift. We should also remember that everyone else has problem areas, too, everyone except the airbrushed models. They are only perfect in print.
Life goes by too quickly; so enjoy every minute.
www.sewingwithtrudy.blogspot.comBravo. VERY well said. Thank you for sharing...I certainly share your philosophy of dressing the body you have to celebrate it and celebrate yourself. That's what's great about making your own clothes...you can revel in what YOU want to say with your body, your self, your presentation to the world.
ReplyDeleteWow. AFter a three-day back-to-back Project Runway viewing bender (you know where size 2 models parade around in clothes designed for stick figures) this was just the post I needed to read to remind me that it's OK that I'm not a size 2. And that I can design outfits just as cute for my size 16 butt and my 42C's. THANK YOU!
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for this post, Gertie! And thank your yoga teacher for me, as well. The "good body" is such an affirming thought; I tend to look at my body's flaws ("fire plug" comes to mind)rather than its strengths (my body runs marathons!). I love your blog for the range of topics you cover--sewing and beyond!
ReplyDelete- AnonymousAugust 18, 2010 at 1:37 PM
I totally get this! I realized this about my body fully when I was pregnant for the first time and further while watching my oldest grow and develop. I understood that the human body is a miracle that growing a child and watching it grow was a miracle. I had never fully understood that until then. I have been fond of telling people ever since that you only get the one body so you'd better be good to it. There are no trades or swaps!!
ReplyDelete Your timing is perfect. I just had a strange health issue for the first time in a long (I'm 54) life. It makes you question a lot. I am a short round sort of gal and decided a long time ago that I was OK with that...that my body was doing what it was suppose to do.
Till now it isn't. I was grateful for my body and didn't mind it's short comings as long as it was healthy. Now I'm questioning our relationship.
But after-all it's gotten me this far...and while things will be different, I'm not dying. So maybe I'll chant Good Body and see how we do.Reminds me of Regina Spektor's song 'Folding Chair', which goes:
I've got a perfect body
But sometimes I forget
I've got a perfect body
Because my eyelashes catch my sweat
Yes they do
They do-ooh-ooh-ooooh
That always makes me smile :)
(BTW that's funny to hear you talk about reassuring yourself about your body because you are soooo beautiful!)- AnonymousAugust 18, 2010 at 3:30 PM
I adore that quote. Can't believe I've never heard it before. And you're far from high, that is a very freeing concept indeed.
ReplyDelete i can't tell you how much i love this post, as a practitioner and teacher of yoga for over 8 years i can tell you that there is no faster way to appreciate all that your magnificent body can do than to do yoga. you shed all the cultural b.s. and totally come into your own body in a way that you cannot understand until it happens to you. i love that you wrote a post about it!
ReplyDeleteI couldn't agree more! I've actually had conversations close to this with others a number of times now as to why I got so into sewing/designing for myself. I have my body, and my body is not anything near the standard body that clothing companies expect every female to have. Nor should it have to be. When I go into stores to shop, I often leave feeling ugly because the clothes I put on point out that I am not 'that' body. The way clothes look and fit on you can revolutionize or destroy your body image. I started sewing because I had to alter almost any store bought piece of clothing...then I started making...then I started designing. It gives control back to me and lets me decorate my body in a way that celebrates it for what it is, rather that trying to be someone else.
ReplyDeleteWonderful post. As a mother to a child with an obvious facial birth defect, it means even more to me than you can imagine. We must learn to love ourselves and each other for who we are, not how we appear, because we won't get another body. And we must teach our children the same. It would make the world a much happier place.
ReplyDeleteThis is such a fab post! I think that we all struggle so much with looks and have so much pressure to metaphorically cast off our own bodies in favor of "someone else's" and like you have said ours is the only one we've got! We all need to stop sometimes and appreciate that we have positives!
ReplyDeleteRIGHT ON.
Husband and I have been working for over a year to try and eat healthier and exercise/stay in shape. Our major motivation was watching the health problems some of our family members have had to go through that were either directly caused by or is directly affected by their diet and nutrition.
I'm never going to be an olympic athlete. I'm never going to be the type of dancer that people pay to go see. So what?
I love my body.
It has served me well, VERY well.
Ain't nobody else can be ME.
I know you think you sound a little high ;) But honestly, thoughts like those are the small but profound thoughts that make life a little more livable :)
Thank you!So true, thank you!
It's so much like sewing (I remember your meassurements post) and it's also a bit like growing up: you stop fighting (which is actually a bit, ahem, crazy when it comes to your own body and so self) and start accepting reality.
And anyway: if you cut fabric, all you can do is sew, if you cut yourself, you actually heal/grow together again. Perhaps not totally unnoticable, but so much neater than a seam... amazing, isn't it?!- AnonymousAugust 20, 2010 at 3:56 AM
The two things that have made the most difference for how I feel about my body are sex and sewing. When I first started having sex (at 18) I started liking my body a lot more. It didn't matter that trousers never fit right, when I could take them off and get so much pleasure, and excitement, and intimacy. I know I was lucky to have my first sexual experiences in a good relationship. Then when I started sewing (at about 21), I started liking how my body looked too. Turned out it wasn't my shape that was the problem, but the shape of ready-to-wear clothes.
ReplyDelete Thanks, Gertie. I've thought about this post a lot since I first read it a few days ago. I'm pretty happy with the way I look, but I feel like my body's betrayed me by being unhealty and hypersensitive, and keeping me from doing everything I'd like to do. But you're right, it's the only one I've got, so I think it's time to start working with it, rather than against it.
ReplyDelete- AnonymousSeptember 3, 2010 at 11:20 AM
How bizzare..
Let me introduce my situation. I have a management position in a company, and I deal with a lot of people everyday. I was hating myself for beeing so competitive sometimes that I get angry with people. I do not insult or mistreat people, but after the conversations I feel that anger that make me hate myself for beeing competitive, 'cause when people don't perform in the way I want to make the proyect in the right way, that leads me to that bad feeling.
My girlfriend show me this, saying how much that helped about his self-esteem, and I've started to read it...
And you know, I do have a competitive personallity, I want to be a better person, and make a lot of thing with my life. It's not good or bad, it's just the way I am. If I don't accept that, I cannot put that in service for someone or something else. That anger it's not good, I have to understand that I cannot change people to fit my desires, but I don't have to get rid of that part of me that wants to make things right.
Between that balance, in that aceptation of my nature, I can really start to feeling good about myself.
Maybe your body it's not the body you want, but it's the one you have.
Maybe my personality it's not the personality I want, but it's the one I have.
And that's just simply fine...
Thanks, and sorry for my bad english. I had a similar ephiphany as yours (that this is the only body you'll ever have). One day, about a year after seeking treatment for bulimia, it hit me; I will never be a tall blond with big boobs (or in other words, Barbie). You would think that would be obvious to a 5'2" Puerto Rican brunette with a wide hips, boobs, a butt and a short waist. Since then, yes I still have my hang ups but nowhere near where they used to be. I appreciate my body more and more everyday. I know now that if I nourish myself and exercise regularly, I don't need to freak out about my weight, because I am doing everything in my power to be and look healthy.
ReplyDelete- AnonymousMay 31, 2011 at 11:21 AM
I agree that this is the body we have and that we shouldn't starve ourselves or fill ourselves up with silicone to get a "better" body.
BUT - I would like to lose some weight. I don't want to stay with a 108 cm hip, which in my aesthetic opinion is less flattering because my waist and bust are proportionately much smaller, and which also makes my life difficult when sewing.
I joined the gym and started doing yoga, step class, swimming and feldenkreis. I occasionally ride my bike and go for walks. I enjoy it immensely. I am proud of myself for taking care of my health. I also suffered from depression so it is very healthy for me psychologically to exercise. I haven't lost weight yet and I've not trimmed down yet either but I feel my body getting stronger, healthier, more vibrant.
We live in a world of processed foods, of junk everywhere. This junk, and the stress, makes us live an unhealthy life and carry around extra fat that builds up through the years and slowly debilitates us (even if at first not so noticeably) and which can ultimately kill us (heart disease, cholesterol, etc). I'm NOT saying starving ourselves just to be thin is any better!!! It is probably much worse.
What I'm saying is love yourself, as you are, cellulite and all. But if you really love yourself, treat yourself well. Eat healthy. Exercise moderately. Do what you love doing, don't force it and don't overdo it. You will feel younger and better. This does not contradict the fact that all women are beautiful and we should have more heterogeneous body images in commercials and such, and as cultural role models. - Georgie PorgeMarch 20, 2012 at 6:57 AM
31"! Ha, y'all must be short if a 31" waist is fat. I'm at 36" (5'9") and while I could definitely lose a few, I'm still pretty happy with my wasp waist. At least I was until I discovered 31" was something to be tolerated as bigger than the ideal.


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Powering Your Way Through The Corners - Upgrading The Sway Bars On Your Miata
Select the correct sway bar for your Miata:
Sway Bar - Solid - Front
90-93 Miata
Racing Beat-designed sway bars for the 1990-93 Miata reduce chassis roll in turns and increase your car's ...
Sway Bar - Solid - Rear
90-00 Miata
Racing Beat Sway Bars - Production
Sway Bar - Solid - Front
94-97 Miata
Racing Beat-designed sway bars for the 1994-97 Miata reduce chassis roll in turns and increase your car's ...
Sway Bar - Tubular - Front
99-00 Miata
Racing Beat-designed front tubular sway bar for the 1999-2000 Miata reduce chassis roll in turns and increase your ...
Sway Bar - Tubular - Front
90-93 Miata
Racing Beat's front tubular sway bars for the 1990-97 Miata applications offer you the ability to further tune ...
Sway Bar - Tubular - Front
94-97 Miata
Racing Beat's front tubular sway bars for the 1990-97 Miata applications offer you the ability to further tune ...
How can a set of sway bars change the handling of my Miata?
Sway bars have two functions: First, they reduce body roll when turning. Sway bars function without simply raising the "two wheel" spring rate - that is, they do increase the wheel rate for a "one wheel" bump such as a pothole, but they do not change the "two wheel" rate for things like pavement joints. Although this may not sound like a big deal, in practice, trying to restrict chassis roll with spring rates causes harsher ride characteristics than the same roll restriction with sway bars. There are a variety of reasons to restrict body roll. For one, the steering response to a turning input on the steering wheel is much crisper and clearer if the body doesn't have to roll at the start of the turn. For another, the angles with the pavement that develop as the wheels move up and down are often not ideal. By restricting these angles, more cornering power is usually available.
The second value of sway bars is that, by adjusting the stiffness of the front bar versus the rear, it is possible to change the understeer/oversteer/neutral steer characteristics of a car, making it easier to control and generally increasing cornering performance.
How does the addition of aftermarket sway bars impact the ride quality of my Miata?
Upgrading to larger diameter sway bars on your Miata will increase the general stiffness of the ride - but not by much. For most drivers, the improvement in steering crispness more than compensates for the minor increase in stiffness. Adding a set of performance springs and/or shocks will have a much greater impact on ride quality stiffness.
Can I just change either the front or rear bar on my Miata, why both?
You can change only the front or rear bars, but depending on where the car's handling balance was at the beginning, you will probably upset that balance. Nearly all of Mazda's cars have light to moderate understeer as delivered, largely to avoid oversteer (which is the tendency for the rear to slide sooner that the front), a condition that many people are not experienced enough with to deal with safely. Racing Beat typically designs and tests all of our Miata sway bars as pairs and recommends that they be used together as a matched-set.
How does Racing Beat select the bar diameters?
Partly based on experience, partly based on the performance of the original vehicle, and partly based on testing. Not only are we selecting the bar diameter, but in the case of a tubular sway bar application we are also comparing and selecting the specific wall thickness.
Is tubular better than "solid"?
Functionally, there is no practical difference between a tubular and a solid bar of equal torsional stiffness except that the solid bar will weigh more. The tubular bar will typically be larger in diameter, which may cause some clearance and space problems; it can't be bent as sharply as a solid bar; and the material may cost more.
How will my car perform after the installation of a set of sway bars?
You will immediately notice that the car is more responsive to steering inputs; the car will not roll as much in turns; and the ultimate cornering power and speed will increase. You'll find that you are able to carry more speed through the corner, which improves straight line acceleration and speed upon exiting the corner.
Does Racing Beat recommend upgraded sway bar endlinks for front and rear with aftermarket Miata sway bars?
It is not required but adding a set of upgraded sway bar endlinks (the component that connects the sway bar to the lower control arm) along with the stiffer aftermarket bars is strongly suggested. The added loads placed on the original OE endlinks may accelerate wear on the end ball-joint, causing the link to eventually fatigue and fail. Racing Beat Heavy Duty Endlinks feature adjustable ends to avoid pre-loading the bar and durable urethane bushings that provide excellent steering feedback and comfort.
Racing Beat offers several different Miata sway bars, which bars are correct for my application?
We offer sway bars for both street and track use. If you are just getting started with your sway bar upgrades we recommend you review our Miata Sway Bar Application Guide to determine the optimal bar set to meet your requirements.
Are sway bars difficult to install? Can I install them myself?
Miata sway bars are relatively easy to install, particularly the rear bar. If you own a floor jack, jack stands, a set of metric wrenches/socket tools, then you are well on your way to installing a set of sway bars. Racing Beat provides installation instructions, replacement bushings (and clamps if required), Prothane bushing grease, and any other required mounting hardware. Need more assistance? Simply give us a call if you have any other installation questions.
Selecting and Comparing Replacement Sway Bars
We often receive questions from our customers with inquires as how particular Racing Beat Sway bar might compare to another aftermarket bar - or even to another Racing Beat sway bar.
Due to the complexities involving sway bar tubing materials, wall thicknesses, arm lengths, endlink hole positions, etc... it can be extremely difficult for the end user to choose or compare different aftermarket sway bars. For one reason, there is no "standard" test method - no two manufacturers will utilize the exact same test methods to collect and translate their data. For another, it is difficult to convert any numerical rating to an actual in-car effect.
There are many ways of "rating" sway bars. The simplest (and the one Racing Beat uses) is to compare the torsional stiffness of the bar or tube size. (One quick note - all steel bars, whether 1018 mild steel or 4130 aircraft alloy, have the same torsional stiffness - that is, resistance to twisting.)
We do this by measuring the diameter of a solid bar and raising that number to the 4th power - that is, for a .875" OD diameter bar (.875 x .875 x .875 x .875) - which is about .59. This number, the diameter to the 4th power, becomes a "rating" of the bar's stiffness. This is based on the engineering formula for torsional stiffness of a circular bar.
For tubular bars, make the same calculation twice, once for the outside diameter and once for the inside diameter, then subtract the smaller number from the larger to get the bar's rating. For example, compare the previously rated bar (.875" OD diameter) to a tubular bar with a stated 1.125" outside diameter and .75" inside diameter. First calculate the rating for the outside diameter (1.125 x 1.125 x 1.125 x 1.125 = 1.60), next calculate the rating for the inside diameter (75 x .75 x .75 x.75 = 1.60), then subtract the outer rating from the inner rating (1.6 - .32) for a tubular bar rating of 1.28. Comparing this 1.125" OD tubular to the .875" OD solid bar, 1.28 divided by .59 means that the tubular bar is about 2.17 times as stiff as the solid bar.
Now come the cautions: This method does NOT account for the effect of bending in the arms; for differences in shape between various bars; and most important, the differences in bushings and clamps. The good news is that, based on all of our experience, it is still a very good guide. It is especially good when comparing two bars with a similar design and comparable bushings. For example, if you have one set of bars installed, your car is balanced, and you want to change the roll stiffness, just select a new bar for one end of the car, see the change in rating, then find a new bar for the other end of the car that has the approximate same rating change - and the car will retain the same balance it had previously.
Over time, Racing Beat has found that the clamps and bushings that support the bar have a large and important effect on the performance of the bar. Rubber bushings (which Mazda uses) are quiet, durable and require no lubrication. Unfortunately, they also dampen the characteristics of a bar so much that they should not be used in performance applications. When the suspension applies a load to the sway bar, some of the motion is absorbed by the twisting and bending of the bar but some is absorbed by the bushings. The softer the bushings the lower the effective stiffness of the bar. In general, rubber is much softer and more compliant than the urethane bushings used by Racing Beat. Keep these considerations in mind when attempting to compare specifications of various aftermarket sway bars - the specific bushings used may have a significant impact on your bar rating expectations and cannot easily be factored into most comparisons.
We are often asked if there are there standard percentage increases in effective bar stiffness if the endlink mounting position is moved either inward or outward from the recommended center hole position of a sway bar.
The effect of moving the attachment point of a sway bar link on a sway bar depends on the radial distance from the centerline of the bar bushings to the original attachment point and the amount and direction of the movement. Shortening this radial distance makes the bar stronger while lengthening it weakens the bar.
The amount of change is obtained by dividing the original radial distance in inches by the new radial distance in inches. Convert this result to "percent" by multiplying it by 100 (e.g., 8"/7" = 1.14, multiply by 100 = 114 percent). Thus, shortening the arm from 8" to 7" increases the roll stiffness 14% (above 100 percent). This procedure is not exact, but it is a good approximation for the small changes usually available in arm length.

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How to change the language settings of the camera
Even though the menu is in a different language, the steps to access the language menu remain the same. However, the menu path for changing the language settings may differ, depending on the camera you are using.
MENU → / (Setup) → [ Language] → Select your desired language
MENU → (Settings) → (Main Settings) → [Language Setting] → Select your desired language →
Alternatively, follow the steps provided in the camera instruction manual for changing the language.
NOTE: The list of selectable languages may vary, depending on the product and country of purchase.


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'Fairyland': A Girl Grows Up In San Francisco's Gay Community
In her new memoir, Fairyland, Alysia Abbott describes her childhood as the daughter of an openly gay father in San Francisco while the gay liberation movement was gaining strength. Her book is based largely on her father's journals, which she found after his death in 1992.
Related Topics
June 3, 2013
Guest: Alysia Abbott
TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. It's not unusual now to see children with gay parents, but it was uncommon when my guest was raised in the '70s and '80s by her gay father. Alysia Abbott has written a new memoir about growing up in the early years of the gay rights movement in the capital of gay America, San Francisco.
It's called "Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father." Her father, Steve Abbott, was a poet, essayist and editor. He described himself as bisexual when in 1969 he married the woman who became Alysia's mother. They were both graduate students at Emory University in Atlanta. Alysia writes that while her parents shared a bed and a life, her father helped organize Atlanta's Gay Liberation Front and was the gay lib editor at Atlanta's alternative weekly, The Great Speckled Bird.
Two years after Alysia was born, her mother was killed in a car accident. Soon after, her father decided they would move to San Francisco, and the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood became their home. He died of AIDS-related complications in 1992. Alysia's new memoir is based in part on her father's journals.
Alysia Abbott, welcome to FRESH AIR. I'm so glad you wrote this book because I feel like we, or at least I, have read a lot more about what it's like to be a gay parent than what it's like to be a child of a gay parent. And I haven't read anything about a child of a gay parent at the dawn of the age of the gay liberation era. Do you feel like this gives you a kind of unique perspective on that era?
ALYSIA ABBOTT: Yes. I mean I think that the experience of being a child of a gay parent in my generation or the child of a gay parent coming of age today is very different. Most of the children born of gay parents in the first two decades after Stonewall, those children were the products of heterosexual unions, usually straight marriages.
And so in those situations typically the parent was closeted, and it would come out after the child was born, and either the parents would divorce or maybe the parent wouldn't come out. But usually in those situations the child would live with one of the parents, and because of the way the courts were set up, they were often living with the straight parent or sometimes with the mother.
My situation was unique because my mother died, and so there really wasn't anyone clearly who I was going to live with other than my father. So he was - I was living in an exclusively gay-headed household from as early as I can remember. Children today, they are usually the product of a gay couple who would either adopt a child or go through a process of artificial insemination to have a child. But it's very much they are as a couple wanting to have a child together.
So I had a very different situation when I was young. There was very few gay parents, especially few gay-headed households, so that I knew very few kids like myself growing up.
GROSS: There's a section from your memoir, from early in your memoir, that I want you to read. And this is really like your pre-history. It's about how your parents met. And so you're not even born yet in the passage I'm going to ask you to read, but I think it kind of sets the context for your birth and for the situation that you and your father found yourself in.
ABBOTT: Yes. When my parents first met at an SDS party, and my father told my mother he was bisexual, she answered: That means you can love all of humanity instead of just half of it. It was 1968, and everyone was talking about revolution. My father had just returned from a summer in Paris. The city was still roiling from the May riots when students had shouted: Be reasonable, demand the impossible.
Now in the halls of American academia, anti-war students were shutting down campuses from U.C. Berkeley to Columbia. My mother was intrigued by my father's open approach to sexuality. She never got hung up on his boy crushes like his other girlfriends had. She was only jealous of his relationships with women and, according to dad, even liked the guys he was attracted to.
On weekends they went to the Cove and to the other gay and mixed bars that dotted the outskirts of downtown Atlanta. There my mother picked out the young men my father could never attract on his own, men who'd never consider a gay encounter but who'd be up for a drunken three-way. In those early years of the sexual revolution, it was hip for young people to try new combinations.
Sometimes my mom would dress in men's clothing when they went out. Dad said she made a cute boy. Other weekends my parents hosted dinner parties, entertaining the anti-war and grad-student friends with spaghetti, cheap red wine and charades. Dad wrote about feeling satisfied at the close of these evenings, seeing himself and my mom as leaders of a salon of intellectually engaged students.
As they cleaned up after one such party, my mom suggested they marry. Landlords won't hassle us so much, she reasoned. We'll be able to stock the kitchen and house with wedding presents. My parents will give us more money. Other than that, our life won't really change.
GROSS: But of course everything changed. You know, four months after your parents married, Stonewall happened, and your father came out in Emory University's school newspaper, and then you were born soon after your parents married - was it, what, about nine months after?
ABBOTT: Yes, my parents were married in February 1969, and I was born in December 1970.
GROSS: And what you later learned was that your mother insisted on having you, insisted on having the baby when she found out she was pregnant, but your father had serious reservations. He had thought she was using birth control, and she didn't tell him that she'd stopped. What was it like for you to read that in his journals?
ABBOTT: Well, I think I was aware that I was an accident, but I wasn't aware that my mother had told my father that she had stopped using birth control and that she hadn't and had me. So that came as a surprise. I think I was also surprised by my father's reaction. The fact that he didn't want to have a child didn't jive with my experience of him as a father, which - he was always a very attentive and loving father. And so that was a surprise.
GROSS: He was seeing men, and your mother had gotten involved with a man who was a drug addict and a dealer, and he was arrested for running guns and drugs across the Canadian border. She went to bail him out. The charges were dropped. On the way to taking him back home they were in a car accident and she was killed. And suddenly your father, who wasn't really ready to be a father, was your only parent.
Your aunt had offered to adopt you, but your father insisted on keeping you. Considering his reservations about being a parent, do you feel like you understand why he kept you?
ABBOTT: Absolutely. For one thing, my father wrote about in his journals feeling this connection with me after I was born. So before I was born he wasn't necessarily very enthusiastic about having a child, but after I was born he really enjoyed spending time with me. And actually for a short period he was a sort of house husband, before even John Lennon was a house husband, working from home, trying to sell his work while my mother was working a nine-to-five job.
And so after my mother's death, I think my father felt like he didn't have very much. His relationship with a young man that he had while he was with my mother had dissolved, and he in a sense felt that I was all that he had in the world, and he was all that I had in the world.
So I don't think he could have imagined letting my aunt or anyone else take over raising me.
GROSS: When you were a young child, after your mother died, your father decided to move to San Francisco. So you and he moved there. And early on he had other roommates living with you, including one or two men who were drag queens. And I'm wondering what your reaction was - at a very young age, when you hadn't been exposed to much at all. So nothing - in some ways nothing's unusual when you're very young because everything's new.
ABBOTT: Exactly.
GROSS: So what was your reaction to seeing, you know, men who you were living with in dresses and lipstick?
ABBOTT: Well, my father had already been sometimes wearing dresses in Atlanta. I think for my father wearing a dress was a political statement. When we were in San Francisco and we were living with two men, one of whom was a drag queen fulltime, another one who would sort of dress up to go out, I really saw it as play.
At the time I would have been about four years old, and I liked to dress up. I liked to put on fancy scarves and the makeup, and it was all something that we could do together. I never sensed that what my father or any one of his friends were doing was weird until I became older and became more aware of what normal families look like and what normal men and normal women did.
GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Alysia Abbott, and she's the authro of a memoir about her father and her life with him, which is called "Fairyland," and it's about growing up with a single father who was gay in the 1970s and '80s in Haight-Ashbury and in the Castro in San Francisco. Let's take a short break and then we'll talk some more. This is FRESH AIR.
GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Alysia Abbott, and her new memoir about her father is called "Fairyland." It's about how she was raised in the '70s and '80s by a single gay father in San Francisco. And I should say your father was a writer and editor. He founded a small literary magazine called Soup. He had very little money, but your grandparents, your mother's parents, were helping to pay for the private school that you went to.
And I want to say, again, you know, that this is an era, we're talking about, you know, the '70s here. This is the era before the gay marriage movement. It was the era before so many gay people were actively, you know, trying to become parents or had already become parents. And your father was part of this, you know, gay men's community in San Francisco in the Castro and Haight-Ashbury that was - it wasn't about marriage. It wasn't about having children. But your father had a child, he had you.
And so you were like a real anomaly within that community that your father was part of. How old were you when you started realizing that you were something really different in this community?
ABBOTT: Well, I think from a young age I realized I was something different in this community because it was a community of, you know, young men, and here I was a little girl. So I didn't see other little girls around. So I was always - felt different. But from an early age I sort of liked this difference. That meant I could get all the attention. There was no one like me, and I felt sort of special in a way.
But I think on one level as a straight child of a gay parent I always felt like a little too straight for the gay community but also a little too gay for the straight community. So I think I felt a little bit ill at ease in either world.
GROSS: Talk a little bit more about feeling too straight for the gay community. Do you think anybody was hoping that you'd be - anybody in your father's circle or your father himself had hoped in any way that you'd be gay, that you'd be a lesbian?
ABBOTT: Oh no, absolutely not. I mean I think because there were so few gay parents that we knew that just my presence in certain situations, you know, I was a little too straight for the gay community, meaning not that my sexuality was too straight, I was a little girl, but that my presence was reminding people of the world of sort of traditional family structure and responsibility that some people were trying to escape from.
You know, I think in my dad's journals he wrote that, you know, children were sort of the ultimate freak-out for gay men that he knew.
GROSS: I have the quote right here. Let me read it. You father wrote in his journal about you: Faggots find her cute but are afraid of her. Child equals responsibility, the ultimate freak-out for the selfish and the escapist. And that makes me think your father felt between two worlds, like he was part of and wanted to be part of the gay community, but at the same time he was a father, and he had responsibilities that kind of removed him from the community as it was at that time in the '70s.
ABBOTT: Absolutely, he in some of his writing wrote about how growing up he felt like, you know, the only gay boy in Nebraska, and now he felt like the only gay father in San Francisco. And so that, you know, it made him feel a little isolated. It didn't give him as much freedom to go out.
For a while I think he would have us living with roommates because it was a way for him to get free access to babysitting so he could sometimes go out. I mean if he lived by himself with me, he'd never be able to go out at all. And I also think you can't overestimate just how exciting it was to be openly gay in San Francisco in the 1970s.
I mean Stonewall was just in 19 - had happened in 1969. Gay civil rights legislation was passing in different states. And, you know, for the first time, you could love openly and not be considered sick, not be arrested. It was a very exciting, heady time, and naturally, you know, my father would want to take part in that.
GROSS: How did he deal with the responsibility of taking care of you when he wanted to, say, go out at night? Because he was a single parent?
ABBOTT: Well, like I said, he had roommates, we had roommates that would be stand-ins as babysitters. And so sometimes he would leave me with roommates so he could go out. Sometimes he would take me out. I mean if it was a poetry reading he would take me out with him, and if it was on a school night he would just let me fall asleep on a pillow in the corner and then take me home afterwards.
So I guess the benefit of the situation was I was, in the end, ended up being very integrated into his creative life because I had to tag along to so many of his creative outings. He would eventually push me onstage to recite a poem, or if I was bored and making drawings while he was engaged in publishing work, he would take some of my drawings and illustrate his poems with them.
GROSS: Did you ever find yourself, say, at a transgressive literary event being utterly bored?
ABBOTT: Yeah, I mean I think for me, and especially as I got older, I just was like, oh, these people are so weird and I - you know, I had sort of a distaste for it. Like I - you know, it's so funny because people who are afraid of, you know, gay marriage or gay-headed households are worried somehow that children will be perverted by what they're exposed to, but if anything, everything that I was exposed to just made me more puritanical.
Like I just sort of had a, on some level, like a desire for normalcy. I was like OK, I've seen that transgressive, you know, weird thing. It's just a little too weird for me. I'm not interested in that.
GROSS: What did you see?
ABBOTT: Oh, well, I mean I think back and I think of some of the - you know, I guess some of the exciting things that I got to see, going with my father to Europe for the first time, I went to a poetry festival in Amsterdam and I got to, you know, see Nina Hagen perform onstage; she was a punk rocker at the time, and that was extremely exciting to me at 12 years old.
Or I met the poet Richard Brautigan and spent and inordinate amount of time with him, to the point where he was sort of telling me stories about how to watch out for herpes. And you know, that's not exactly appropriate, and I think at the time I was like 12 years old, but it was interesting, and I stuck around.
GROSS: What was your childhood understanding of what it meant to be gay?
ABBOTT: Well, it meant to be attracted to someone of the same sex. I mean when I was - I think it's funny because my father would write about - I think he was really amused by my perception as a child. So he would often write down conversations we had and things. And I think I was with my father in Nebraska and visiting my grandparents, his parents in Nebraska, and I turned to my grandfather and asked him: What does it mean to be gay?
And my grandfather said: Oh, that means to be happy. And I said: That's not what my dad says. And, you know, of course my dad thought that was very funny. So I was very curious about it, but you know, I do recall also my father writing in his journal that at one point, as he was getting ready for a date, I said to him: I don't understand why you have to like boys. You know, why can't you like girls? When I grow up, I'm going to like boys.
And I think in that - you know, at that point I was watching a lot of television, like "Happy Days" and stuff, and you know, I wanted to take part in this, you know, ritualization of romance that was boy-girl. It wasn't boy-boy, it wasn't girl-girl, it was boy-girl. And I, you know, I also had a very strong longing for a mother.
And so I think I had a fantasy that if my father had a girlfriend, that I might get a mother, and then if I got a mother, I might get brothers and sisters.
GROSS: Your father was out. I mean, he came out after Stonewall. And so he was out. He had no problem with that. But as you got a little bit older, your father's gayness became kind of an embarrassment to you. And one of the moments that really broke my heart reading your book, you know, your father's going out, and you know, out at night, and he says to you: How do I look?
And you say, because you're kind of embarrassed at this point by his, you know, open homosexuality, and you say to him: You look so queer. And he's of course really hurt by that. And I understand you wanting to fit in with your friends and be, quote, you know, normal, fitting in with your friends and their families. But I also figured, oh, your father must have been so hurt, and especially this is like post-Stonewall and in the gay liberation era, and his own daughter is embarrassed by him.
When you were reading your father's journals and seeing his life from his point of view, as opposed to seeing it from your point of view, what kind of like shift in perspective did that give you about your childhood?
ABBOTT: Well a pretty powerful shift in perspective. As I was a child, like any child, I saw everything through sort of the lens of myself and whether I was getting my needs met or not and whether my dad was being fair or unfair or exposing me to, you know, ridicule or not. And unfortunately he died just as I was becoming an adult. He just, he died four days before my 22nd birthday.
And, you know, I think to be revisiting the journals now, 20 years later, as a parent of two children, I have so much more sympathy for his struggles, and respect. The fact that he was a single father living among roommates, trying to find love as an openly gay man and also trying to make a name for himself as a writer, and that he was able to do that, you know, just gives me tremendous amount of respect for the struggle he went through that I couldn't have appreciated at that age, you know, nor should I.
I mean I think that kids should be protected from all of their parent - you know, they don't need to hear all of their parents' trials. They want to be able to enjoy their childhood. But I was able to revisit his journals with a lot more of a sense of forgiveness and sympathy, really.
GROSS: Alysia Abbott will be back in the second half of the show. Her new book is called "Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father." I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross back with Alysia Abbott. Her new memoir, "Fairyland," is about being raised by a single gay father in San Francisco's Haight Asbury in the '70s and '80s. It was a formative time in the gay liberation movement, but there were few openly gay single fathers. Her father identified as bisexual back in 1969, when he married the woman who became Alysia's mother. When Alysia was two, her mother was killed in a car accident and Alysia and her father moved from Atlanta to San Francisco.
GROSS: For several years, you spent some of your summers with your mother's parents in, was it Illinois?
ABBOTT: Yes.
GROSS: And my impression is that they were, you know, middle-class suburban family - which was a very different life than the life you were leading with your father. Because he was, you know, he was like you were struggling artist type, who didn't have much money and it was a kind of a very bohemian life. What were the some of the things that you liked and didn't like about the more conventional lives your grandparents had and the more conventional life you led when you were with them?
ABBOTT: Well, I would get very excited as summer approached and I knew I was going to my grandparents. I loved the sense of comfort and space that their world offered me. It was a completely different world than what I knew with my father. So my father and I would be living in an urban center in San Francisco, in an apartment we shared with roommates or later, you know, an apartment we shared alone. But, you know, he wasn't the cleanest - he wasn't the best housekeeper. There wasn't always a well-stocked fridge. Things didn't always work. Our car was eventually towed when he stopped paying parking tickets on it. And here I would come to my grandparents every summer and they would pick me up in this beautiful Lincoln Town Car with windows that would go up and down with the push of a button; and the house was very clean, and smelled clean, and there was TV in every room, and delicious food, and I can go to the swimming pool whenever I wanted, to the country club that my grandparents belonged to, or we could go out to dinner. It was a very comfortable world.
But at the same time, when I was at my grandparents, I sometimes dearly missed my father. I felt there was something unique in our family and that it was just the two of us. And so I felt that I had sort of the unadulterated, you know, love - that I was his sole focus and he was my sole focus and I loved that. And at my grandparents I had an aunt and uncle who would come with their kids and we had to kind of negotiate are plans or, you know, I wasn't the single target of attention and affection. And furthermore, when I did go to my grandparents, my father was not present. And it wasn't just a matter of him not attending those visits with me and, you know, frankly, to go from San Francisco to rural Illinois, you know, maybe he would have preferred to stay in San Francisco; but he also, he wasn't pictured anywhere and he wasn't asked after, and my mother, as well, because she died in a tragic car accident when she was only 27, she wasn't pictured and we didn't talk about her. It seemed there was something in the story of my parents that was a little unpalatable. And I, in terms of learning about my mother, I would sort of do that on my own, digging through drawers and finding pictures. But I felt like there was something from my world in San Francisco that we just - wasn't talked about and so that I, that made me a little self-conscious, I guess.
GROSS: Let's talk a little bit about how AIDS affected your life and the world that you lived in. You write how when the AIDS epidemic hit San Francisco - and you were still living with your father then, people started disappearing, the neighborhood started changing. You were living, then, in Haight Asbury or the Castro?
ABBOTT: Living in Haight Ashbury.
GROSS: And your father tested positive for HIV in 1986. So, can you describe a little bit how you are world started to change when the AIDS epidemic hit?
ABBOTT: Well, I don't recall when my father tested HIV-positive. Actually, I learned that date 1986, in reading his journals. I think at the time I was aware, as anyone reading newspapers and watching television was of the AIDS epidemic and I was scared. I was scared because I knew my father was gay and that that made him more vulnerable. And that made me scared to talk, you know, to be open about my father's sexuality because being gay in that era was so closely aligned with this fatal, disturbing disease. And so I think I had a lot of fear around it generally. But before I left for college, my senior year in high school, a close friend of ours died of AIDS and he had been - I had gotten to know a lot of people in our neighborhood in the Haight and I got to know a lot of my dad's friends, but this particular friend I became very close with and had a crush on and he went to my birthday party and he even bought liquor for my friends and I once when I was a teenager. It hit me when he died. I never got to say goodbye to him. Like a lot of men, young men - he was only 31 - like a lot of young men in the city, he didn't want to share his decline with very many people. He basically went into hiding and didn't tell anyone about it other than his lover and his roommate. And so my father had heard he was sick and I had suggested we go visit him, but we never did. And time passed and I really didn't know what was going on until my father got a call that he had died.
And my freshman year at college I wrote an essay about him and as well about the homophobia that I had seen at the time in San Francisco when the AIDS epidemic was hitting very hard. Some men would be targeted, in the city, for violence and there would be anti-gay graffiti scrawled on walls or on the back of bus seats. And this affected me and so I wrote about all of this in this essay about how, because of Sam, I was now going to stand up against homophobia and I would, you know, defend gay men. But in this essay I never even write that my father is gay and I never even wrote, you know, that he might be HIV-positive which, at the time, he was. So I was aware of what was going on, but I think that I probably had a lot of denial or fear about how the AIDS epidemic was going to hit me at home.
GROSS: When you're in your early 20s, and living and working in Paris and you became aware that your father was getting very sick with AIDS, you got a letter in which he described the progression of his illness, and then you wrote back to him. And I have to tell you, I just, I found your letter back to your father just, kind of, upsetting.
ABBOTT: Oh no.
GROSS: Yeah. I'll read you the excerpt and we'll talk. You wrote: Dear Dad, I received your letter yesterday. Sometimes reading a letter from you can be depressing. You complain so much about your bad health and ill luck. I'm not asking you to censor those aspects of your life, but if you accentuate, less, the negative, I would enjoy your letters more.
And I'm thinking gosh, your father is, like, dying of AIDS and you're complaining that he complains too much about his bad health and, you know, he has no family except for you and you're in Paris.
ABBOTT: Actually, I was in New York when that letter was written. Sorry to correct you.
GROSS: Thank you for correcting me. OK. OK. It seems like a very uncharitable letter. So tell me what was going through your mind when you wrote it - if you remember.
ABBOTT: Yeah.
GROSS: I hope you don't mind me saying that. I'm sure you understand what I'm saying.
ABBOTT: No. It's OK. I mean I've grappled with these feelings too. I mean, part of the experience of writing a memoir is to confront earlier versions of yourself and versions of yourself that, you know, you can be critical of and say how could I do that. But I know at the time, I wasn't fully able to absorb or be aware of what he was going through. I had yet to live with him with AIDS, so I had moved away to college in 1988 and then he had started to manifest full-blown AIDS in 1991, which is approximately the time he wrote the letter. And so in a lot of the earlier letters he wrote me, I would describe my sadness or fears about him becoming sick and he would sort of downplay them and say well, there's no reason to cry before I die, and we're all going to die one day. And he would, often the letters would be taken up with, you know, funny anecdotes. He didn't really dwell too much on his health. And so I think I let myself believe that he really wasn't that sick or he could still have a long time to go. And when he came out to Paris to ask me to move home I was really blindsided and I was upset. I mean I was upset that my life as I knew it was ending - even though it really wasn't. His life was ending. My life was just beginning. But from the perspective of a 20-year-old, I felt that I was going to have to give up everything and go home and take care of him and my life would be subsumed by illness and death and I was really afraid of that.
GROSS: I just want to say I really understand that and I didn't, I didn't mean to - you know what I mean? I didn't mean to sound harsh in what I said. I, you know, I just think like when one is young, one is very typically, like, absorbed in your own life and creating a life and figuring who you are and what your life is going to be, and I think you feels so tenuous about everything, about your whole future and your identity that like a major disruption, like your father being really sick, being terminally ill, yeah, I can understand the denial.
ABBOTT: Yeah. So I mean I think at that time I just, I wanted to kind of proceed as forward and so I, you know, proceed as everything was normal and I, you know, we had both been the sorts who liked to complain sometimes, like that was part of our inside humor. And so I kind of thought he was just complaining a lot when in fact, he was just sharing me - sharing with me his decline.
GROSS: Your father had, you know, earlier had some drug problems. He went to Narcotics Anonymous. He gave up drugs. He started meditating at a neighborhood Zendo, Zen Center in the Castro, and became very committed to Buddhism. And when he was dying, like at the end, this was after you'd come home to take care of him, he spent the last few weeks of his life at a hospice for men dying of AIDS that was next door to the Zen Center, and it was created by the men who ran the Zen Center. And you were his only family, so you were with him at the end and he had friends who were there too. And I'm just kind of wondering about the experience of being like the only, you know, blood relative who was there for him at the end, but knowing that he had, you know, that he had your friends who were there too.
ABBOTT: I mean I felt like it was a privileged position. You know, as I had, growing up I always felt we had this privileged relationship that, you know, somehow I was number one in his heart and he was number one in my heart. And it was almost a romantic idea for me, which helped me get through the difficulties I had of growing up motherless and in the situation we are in. And so on one level it was very hard for me to be nursing for my father and making end-of-life decisions with him without the help of another family member, or just dealing with the day-to-day of a dying person. But on another level, I liked having that all to myself. There were friends who could come in and help but, you know, in the hierarchy, I was the daughter. It was a privilege place to be. And at his funeral, you know, I was able to make a lot of the choices about what would be read, in what order, what pictures would be put up. And I felt in being able to do that was a way of being close with him and, you know, it was sort of an expression of our intimacy, I guess.
GROSS: My guest is Alysia Abbott. Her new book is called "Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father." We'll talk more after a break.
This is FRESH AIR.
GROSS: My guest is Alysia Abbott. Her new book "Fairyland" is about being raised by a single gay father in San Francisco in the '70s and '80s.
How did you find your father's journals? Did he leave them for you to read?
ABBOTT: He didn't leave them with a big sign saying: read this, but he didn't burn them. He didn't destroy them when he knew he was sick. Basically, I was clearing out our apartment in Haight Ashbury because I was, I wanted to move, and was in the closet digging through boxes of stuff and found a huge stack of journals which I'd never seen before.
So I was always aware that he kept journals when I was a little girl but I had never seen the journals from when he was with my mother. And at that moment that I found those journals I read about my mother's death for the first time. And, you know, that was quite intense for me.
You know, especially because I was reading all of this without having him around to ask questions of. I had to sort of make sense of it on my own.
GROSS: You wanted to have a more conventional life than your father and, I mean, you know, you're married to a man. You have two children. There's a limit to how conventional your life can be in the sense that one of your children, your youngest, is autistic. And it sounds like he's fairly high on the scale of autism.
ABBOTT: Yeah. I think you might actually say he's on the low functioning scale.
GROSS: The low functioning scale. Right. Exactly. Right. And it's really not, you know, just as, like, your father wasn't expecting his life to turn out the way he did, you know, you wanted to give your daughter, you know, a sibling which you had. You know, a playmate which you never had at home. And you had, you know, a second child and it turned out differently than you expected.
ABBOTT: Well, it's interesting because my son - I named my son Steven so his name was Steven Abbott Howe. His last name is Howe. So he was in my mind, I think when I knew I was having a boy I wanted to name him Steven Abbott because I wanted him to be able to live the life of my father's that was cut short. I mean that's a big burden to put on a child.
But there was an idea of I wanted this sort of generation to be able to redeem some of the loss of my the last - of my father's generation. And so to discover that my son may be, you know, have severe developmental delays and be non-verbal or might never be able to live independently, you know, yeah, that's disappointing. You know, we call him by his middle name so we call him Finn. So he isn't Steve.
He's not my dad. He's Finn. He's very much Finn. But, you know, just as the experience of growing up with my father helped me to be more tolerant and open to difference, you know, the experience of raising my son, you know, forces me to learn to let go of things that I can't control and try to, you know, adjust expectations. I don't know if that makes sense.
GROSS: You know, I want to quote something that you wrote in an essay about your son. And this is in the context of saying that you had your second child in part because you wanted a sibling for your daughter, for your first child. And when you found out that your son was profoundly autistic, you wrote about your daughter:
(Reading) She'd still suffer the loneliness that afflicted me growing up. She'd still have to care for us alone in her adult years and would now bear the extra burden of a disabled brother.
How old is your daughter now and how is she responding to having an autistic brother?
ABBOTT: My daughter is seven now and she is incredibly loving to her brother. You know, a lot of her projects she does at school - just last week I saw a flag that she made at school. All the children were asked to make flags and some of the kids made national flags of the country that their parents came from or U.S.A. flag or a boys keep out flag. And she made a Finn flag: I love Finny.
It's like she's wanting to raise and wave a flag of her love for her brother. And I feel sometimes like she wants to give him the voice that he doesn't have because he can't speak. And she wants to sort of have the experiences that he may not have. And so, you know, she really impresses me in her generosity in that way. I think - you know, it's very complicated.
Because, you know, as parents, you know, we're supposed to sacrifice ourselves and our needs for the benefit of our children because we love them. But it's a great - it's hard having a child with severe special needs who will outlive you and you have to plan and think for them. My father was a, you know, I had to manage his care but he was dying and at one point he died. And my life moved on.
My life will always have my son in it. But I would hate to say he's always a burden. You know, I love him very much. But my daughter doesn't see him as a burden at all. I mean, I think it upsets her when he tries to bite her or attack her. I think it upsets her when she sees, you know, the stress that he causes in our life.
But her love for him is remarkably pure, I feel, partly because she can't remember a time before he was born. And so she can't imagine a life without him.
GROSS: My guest is Alysia Abbott. Her new book is called "Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father." More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
GROSS: My guest is Alysia Abbott. Her new book, "Fairyland" is about being raised by a single gay father in San Francisco in the '70s and '80s. Your father strikes me from the way you describe him in your memoir as somebody who wanted to be, you know, really honest with you about his thoughts and his feelings and his life in a way that maybe most parents aren't quite. I don't know that that many parents are as open about their lives as your father was with you. And I just wonder as a parent whether that's left you wanting to be equally open or to be more protective of your feelings. And protective both for your children's sake and for your own.
ABBOTT: Well, on the one hand, I really appreciated my father was so open with me about what was going on in his life and even, you know, his problems - was a demonstration that he trusted me or that he felt that I was mature enough to handle some of that. And I do feel like with my daughter I'd like to respect her maturity and treat her as not just a child but someone who's capable of having opinions that are interesting and worthwhile.
But at the same time, you know, I think because of how I was raised I didn't have such a protected childhood. Like, there were a lot of situations where I had to sort of be adult before I was ready to be adult. You know, not the least of which was having to come home and take care of him on my own. And so I don't want Annabel, my daughter, to feel burdened by worry.
You know, including taking care of her brother. I don't want her to - you know, I want to be open. I don't want to hide and lie about what's going on in the family or things that I work with. But I also want her to be able to just be able to play and be innocent. And I - yeah. I feel like that - I think I've learned from my experience being raised by my dad that I could - that's something - I don't need to tell her everything.
GROSS: You know, a lot of your memoir is based on your father's journals and on letters he wrote. And my impression reading your book was that he had meant - he had intended - those journals to be read by you at some point so that you would understand more of who your father was. Did you feel at ease reading them? Like it is what he would've wanted.
ABBOTT: Yes. I was of two minds about reading the journals. On one level, I felt like, you know, journals are private and they're personal and you write things in a journal that you don't say to your closest loved ones. And there was part of me that felt like I should respect his privacy. But then there was also another part of me that felt like, A, we had been through so much together, meaning I'd cared for him as he was dying of AIDS in the last year of his life and had - you know, that's a very intimate transaction, a very intimate relationship. I didn't feel like there was anything new that I would discover, or I felt that this was, you know, an extenuation of our intimacy. And then, B, I found actually in one of his journals he had wondered who he was writing for and he said maybe for Alysia that she might one day know where her parents were at.
And so when I found the journals I really saw them as a gift from him, in terms of they allow me a way to understand what he was up against, what he was struggling with. He records things in our life together that I would otherwise have no access to. Because when you are raised by a single parent without any siblings, who do you have to share memories with? You know, that person dies and, you know, then you just have the memories in your own head.
And you can't sort of verify things. And as I was working on the memoir again and again I could come across episodes and be like, yeah, I remember that. And then I could get more detail from my father. And so it was like a reflection of myself and our life together.
GROSS: Well, Alysia Abbott, I want to thank you so much for talking with us. I really appreciate it. And I 'm glad you wrote the book.
ABBOTT: Thank you so much, Terry. It was really great to be on the show.
GROSS: Alysia Abbott's new memoir is called "Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father."
GROSS: You can download Podcasts of our show on our website freshair.npr.org and you can follow us on Twitter at nprfreshair and on Tumblr at nprfreshair.tumblr.com.
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.


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Affordable Care Act overview
The Affordable Care Act is the nation's health reform law enacted in March 2010. It contains numerous provisions designed to expand health coverage to 30 million Americans; increase benefits and lower costs for consumers; provide new funding for public health and prevention; bolster our health care and public health workforce and infrastructure; foster innovation and quality in our system, and more.
Many Americans have misgivings about the Affordable Care Act. A CNN/ORC poll conducted in September 2013 showed support for the law at 39 percent, down from 51 percent in January 2013. Opponents say the country can't afford the ACA. They say it won't cut the cost of health care, but will expand the deficit, weaken the economy and cause employers to cut jobs. The Republican-led House of Representatives has voted dozens of times to repeal all or part of the law, but those efforts have gone nowhere in the Senate, where Democrats have the majority. President Barack Obama has postponed implementation of the so-called employer mandate until 2015, but shows no indication he will back down on what many consider to be the signature accomplishment of his first term.
The law consists of two pieces of legislation: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act (HCERA). Jointly they are referred to as the Affordable Care Act or ACA. The information below comes from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.
How the ACA may affect NebraskaBecause of the Affordable Care Act, the 87 percent of Nebraskans who have insurance will have more coverage choices than before. And for the 13 percent of Nebraskans who don't have insurance, or Nebraska families and small businesses who buy their coverage but aren't happy with it, change is coming.
Soon, the new online Health Insurance Marketplace will provide families and small businesses that currently don't have insurance, or are looking for a better deal, a new way to find health coverage that fits their needs and their budgets.
Open enrollment in the Marketplace starts Oct. 1, with coverage starting as soon as Jan. 1, 2014. But Nebraska families and small businesses can visit HealthCare.gov right now to find the information they need to prepare for open enrollment.
Cheaper prescription drugs for people with Medicare
$15,175,406 in total savings for 24,070 seniors, averaging $630.47 in savings per person in 2011
Free preventive services
359,000 people and 197,647 seniors with Medicare get preventive services for free
No more lifetime limits on care
701,000 people no longer have a lifetime limit on their care
Health insurance on your parents' plan
15,280 more young adults under age 26 now have insurance on their parents' plan
New rules on how insurers spend premiums
564,000 people protected by the 80/20 rule that requires insurers to spend 80 percent of premiums on care and quality
Coverage through a pre-existing condition insurance plan
174 people who were uninsured because of a pre-existing condition now have coverage
Affordable Insurance Exchange
$6,481,838 to help states build new marketplaces where consumers will have the same kinds of choices as members of Congress
Money for public health
$5,800,000 in grants to improve public health
Community health centers
$12,800,000 to support and expand community health centers


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Top Lists on SuperYachtFan
The Biggest Yachts, The Richest Yacht Owners, and more!
Top Lists
The Biggest Yachts, The Richest Yacht Owners, and more!
What started as a 'yacht spotter' hobby, turned into a fast-growing yachting site with thousands of unique daily visitors.
In 2009 SuperYachtFan in its current format was published online and soon the focus changed from 'yacht photos' to 'yacht owners', creating the Super Yacht Owners Register. A database with more than 1,450 yacht owners.
This was an instant success as many people around the world are interested in, or curious about, these multi-million dollar yachts and their wealthy owners. (Luxury travels of the Billionaire Boys Club)
The SuperYachtFan team is active in Investigative journalism. We spend a lot of team researching and deeply investigating yacht ownership structures.
Our reporting is copied and/or used by many international media companies.
With thousands of daily visitors and a strong growth rate, SuperYachtFan became one of the largest 'superyacht sites'. We realize the most organic search traffic of all known yachting websites.
We are active on social media including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok.
The details about yacht ownership as stated on this site and in our Yacht Owners Register are sometimes based on rumors. Often actual yacht ownership by the private individuals mentioned can not be confirmed, at least from a legal point of view.
On the other hand… where there's smoke, there is fire ;-)
This site is for entertainment purposes only.
The content of this website and all associated media are subject to copyright.
We reserve the right to publish any information submitted to us.


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SikSilk has landed at Footasylum!
SikSilk is the new urban clothing brand that is relevant, self-assured and the latest authority on street styling. With direct influence from American sports apparel, we've selected the stand-out styles from the collection for you, 'throw on and go' kind of pieces that you can make your own. The vests, jerseys and t-shirts are all styles that will fit your look, it's not about conformity and more about repping a brand how you want.
- About the brand -
SikSilk is an outspoken and confident new fashion brand that inspires people to create their own individuality through what they wear. Founded in 2012 and influenced by music, art and life experiences, the collection is for people who want to express their own personality and wear things their way.


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Lopez sings 'Happy Birthday' to Turkmenistan head
NEW YORK (AP) — Jennifer Lopez sang "Happy Birthday" to the leader of Turkmenistan during a show, but her representative said she wouldn't have performed there at all if she had known there were human rights issues in the country.
The singer and actress performed in the former Soviet bloc country on Saturday night. A statement released Sunday by her publicist said the event was hosted by the China National Petroleum Corp. and wasn't a political event.
However, the country's leader, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, did attend. Berdimuhamedow has been criticized for oppressive rule by human rights organizations. Human Rights Watch describes Turkmenistan as "among the most repressive in the world."
After a United Nations visit last month, Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights Ivan Simonovic said the country had made progress in the area of human rights, but "a lot more work is needed to complete this process and to ensure practice is in line with international standards."
Lopez's publicist says the event was vetted by Lopez's staff: "Had there been knowledge of human rights issues any kind, Jennifer would not have attended."
The birthday serenade was a last-minute request made by the corporation to Lopez before she took the stage, and she "graciously obliged," the statement said.
Lopez is the latest celebrity to face scrutiny for performing in countries or for leaders with human rights violations.
In 2011, Oscar-winning actress Hilary Swank profusely apologized after attending a birthday party for Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, who had been accused of torture and killings; she said she didn't have a full understanding of the event.
Beyonce, Nelly Furtado, 50 Cent, Mariah Carey and Usher were paid handsomely to perform at parties linked to the late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. All later announced plans to donate their performance fees to charity and said they hadn't known the leader was connected to terrorism.
Lopez has no other performances scheduled in the country, her publicist said. Her performance fee wasn't disclosed.
Follow Nekesa Mumbi Moody at http://www.twitter.com/nekesamumbi


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Gevlon: Don't help dumb people because I have absolutely no evidence that they cannot be helped. (My interpretation)
For the most part, M&S are made, not born or chosen. Read up on child development and the role of proper nutrition and early education. A capable child may be born, but in an unstimulating environment, their mind won't develop; they will grow up stupid, by no or fault of their own, but only by the environment. If there was more support for poor children, they'd be less stupid. Your antisocial tendencies actually create more M&S rather than reducing them.
and how would you give more support to poor children? Children cannot trade. You can only give to their parents who will spend it on smoke and booze.
Is he really this stupid? Where the fuck does he even get the idea "children can't trade"? It's completely irrelevant. And the smokes and booze, seriously, that's... that's just the sort of retarded lazy stereotype that a moron would use.
Children do not need to 'trade' or own or be directly given any money. Instead there can be these things called 'schools' in which children are 'taught' and unless the parents somehow know how to extract knowledge from their brains and sell it for crack, the 'school' won't be used to buy the parents drugs. Furthermore, at these 'schools' the children can be given lunch and dinner, which will be digested while they are there, meaning that unless their parents steal their blood, the children are the only ones getting the food.
There are ways to help children without helping terrible parents. Unfortunately, some people are so busy hating the world that they lack the free mental resources to think of these. Like I said, free public education and free lunch and breakfast for sufficiently poor children. Or public libraries where children can go to learn as much as they want. These were really fucking obvious.
Of course no system or solution is perfect. There will be some kids for whom school is a waste. In an ideal world they would be sent somewhere else to kill each other and smoke crack as they wish. Unfortunately that's not legal. Schooling them will be a waste, but waste is inevitable in any system.
It is unjust to reject all children who lack the ability to pay for their own schooling (by that I mean, whose parents are too poor to pay for it) simply because a significant portion will be wasted. To use a minority of moronic children to justify the abandonment of the majority is little different than the indiscriminate killing of civilians practiced by terrorists. It is the bedrock of civilization to not punish the innocent for the crimes of the guilty.
Furthermore, it is harmful to have large uneducated populations. Without education, they are more prone to violence and social unrest. How so? School isn't just about geometry and history; it's also a place where people are taught to follow rules, to respect authority, to be civilized. It serves no one to have large populations with little hope of employment and no respect for rules (including rule of law). That is an easy recruitment center for enemies of civilization; criminals, foreign enemies, terrorists, whoever.
I'm not saying we need to be nice or the stupid people will attack us. If that was the case I'd just say to shoot them while we have the element of surprise.
What I am saying is that we should not reject the upcoming generations purely because their parents lacked the means to educate and develop them. To do so is actively encouraging the growth of a worthless, unruly population. No one benefits when the world turns into Brazil: massive ghettos of uneducated idiots surrounding tiny enclaves of the inherited rich. Of course we also should not be France, whose excessive government support has discouraged employment, which impairs the social integration of Muslim immigrants, fueling discontent. The middle is almost always better than the extremes.
Some days I think Gevlon is just selfish and lacks empathy. Other days he appears to be incapable of anything approaching rational thought or seeing the possibility that he is wrong.
His title should have given it away: "Challenge for social(ist)s"
He somehow has the ridiculous idea that social people; those who acre about their fellow human beings, are the slightest bit interchangeable with socialists. Obviously there would be some link between caring about other people and an economic system of government ownership for a collective good. But socials are far more likely to not work through government, but on their own. It's called charity. Socials don't demand that the government take over industry. They give money to charities and volunteer and take an active role.
As I think about this more, I can only conclude that Gevlon's grasp of English is so poor that he does not realize that social and socialist are not synonyms, and despite sharing a root (social), they do not share the entirety of their meaning. Or, he's only reaching logical conclusions given his initial assumption: Everyone else is so incredibly stupid, they can barely breath without government subsidies for air. When you start from that, it's not hard to see how he could reach all sorts of conclusions which would seem ridiculous if you started with more reasonable assumptions such as assuming that reality exists and is not merely an illusion created by aliens.
It's so easy to be angry and point out the flawed thinking of fools. I shouldn't be so lazy.