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Reading my RSS feeds yesterday, I ran across a post on Kotaku — of all places — about the winner of a design contest by Let’s Move, Michelle Obama’s campaign against “childhood obesity”. The challenge was to design an infographic enumerating the — oh, I don’t know y’all, I guess some of the stuff that’s happened at the same time that childhood obesity rates have gone up, along with some of the stuff being done to make those rates go back down again. Kotaku picked up on it because one of the things that happened, and which is noted on the chart, was the release of the Sony Playstation. The design of the graphic is pretty swell, I’ll admit, but I’m a little amused at how some events are linked to the enfattening of the childrens while others are not. Why isn’t the purple-tinged rise to power of Barney the fat purple dinosaur included? Barney totally promotes obesity — have you seen his rear end? — and kids love him. The first “successful” mall food court is worth noting on the chart, but the disappearance of the Pogo Ball, a popular 1980s child-torture device, from toy store shelves nationwide is not. Possibly most egregiously, why does the Playstation get a mention but the original Nintendo Entertainment System does not? While the Playstation was a worthy landmark in the evolution of video games as a legitimate form of media — pardon me, I mean as THE SCOURGE OF HUMANITY — I tend to think the NES was really the beginning of widespread home video-gaming.*

I digress.

I know it’s just a pithy representation of information that most folks couldn’t be arsed to read without some graphical interest to draw their attention, and of course it’d focus on the favored scapegoats of soda, television, and video games as causing the downfall of our great civilization. But what I really want to discuss here is not the legitimacy of the cultural landmarks that may or may not have anything to do with anything. Rather, I want to discuss our often-inappropriate use of public health information to condemn individuals.

To begin, let’s define our terms: public health, as used here and in lots of other places, refers to the study and analysis of statistical trends across populations, and the creation of social solutions to large-scale problems. For example, the now-discontinued use of lead paint in residential households was a public health issue. Once it was discovered that the lead in this paint could be ingested by children and cause serious health consequences, there was an institutional response which included education of the public (which is why we all know lead paint is bad today) and consumer regulation (which is why lead paint is no longer used on toys, furniture, or for other household purposes).

I’ve intentionally used the lead-paint example because it lacks a moral component, as many other public health issues are prone to do, while illustrating how public health initiatives are supposed to work. A problem is discovered, researched, and addressed, all on a macro scale. Lead paint was nobody’s responsibility and nobody’s fault, the many decades of lawsuits against the lead industry notwithstanding; it was rather an unfortunate outcome of a lack of knowledge about the health effects of the substance.

That said, when we apply public health to issues that do have established social and moral aspects, things get murkier. It is — and this should come as a surprise to no one — remarkably difficult to constructively discuss broad generalizations of statistical trends without also, intentionally or not, imposing those trends on one’s personal lived experience, where they may not actually be true or appropriate. For example: along with the Playstation, the graphic above places emphasis on soda consumption as a cause of fatness. Have some fat kids played video games and imbibed Coca-Cola? Certainly. Have they all? Absolutely not. Just like your one “overweight” friend is not representative of “the obesity epidemic”, one fat child is not representative of every single social trend that may be contributing to increased rates of childhood obesity.

Public health must be studied and addressed; work in this field is why such tremendous life-saving advances like vaccination programs and sewage systems exist. The problem is that, culturally, we have somehow lost the plot that public health does not attempt to address individual health issues, but looks at the population as a whole for the purposes of developing preventative measures — like vaccines and sewage-free water and uncontaminated food supplies — to curtail the spread of disease. Generalizations and categorizations are fine with when discussing the lives and habits of millions of people, but often fail when applied to individuals, because that is not what they’re for.

Furthermore, when public health approaches run up against the prevailing conventional wisdom that the “disease” in question is the personal responsibility of the person enduring it — unlike polio or cholera or cancer — then the conversation, and the cultural response, takes a darker turn. We have seen this before; public health warnings can easily stir up hysteria over the issue at hand and create or worsen existing cultural loathing of their sufferers. When HIV/AIDS was first identified as a public health issue in the early 1980s, it seemed to be primarily affecting men who had been involved in homosexual relationships, which led to its originally being called GRID, which stood for “Gay-related immune deficiency” — as though there were some measurable physical difference between people engaging in gay sex that would make them susceptible to a disease to which straight folk were immune. Because the identifiable trend was amongst gay men, two ideas emerged in the cultural consciousness: one, that it could only affect gay men, and two, that all gay men were potential vectors of the disease. These assumptions led to a lot of extreme homophobia that persists to this day, even in light of conclusive evidence that casual contact cannot result in infection, and that HIV/AIDS can, in fact, affect people who are not gay. Anecdotally, I was a kid during the HIV/AIDS hysteria, and I vividly remember feeling a little afraid of gay people, while also being hammered — too little, too late? — with the fact that touching, hugging, kissing, dirty toilet seats, etc., could not infect me.

This is an example of how public health information can go terribly wrong, particularly when it is disseminated by and through outlets that are more prone to paranoia and fear than rational conversation, and particularly when it relates to a group of people already under the boot of social oppression. But let’s return to the current story that your Playstation made you fat, and the personal accountability of modern public health narratives about fat people.

The problem with such narratives is also their purpose: they are necessarily reductive, as their purpose is to identify broad trends that might be addressed through public information projects (such as anti-drug PSA) or institutional regulation or reform (such as banning smoking in public places) and not to finger-point individuals. The inevitable finger-pointing that happens is primarily owing to the news media that have no compunction against inappropriately twisting the vastness of public health information into a narrow barb with which to provoke individual terror and guilt. Media reports use public health info to stir individual panic — and to incite a sense of personal responsibility to “fix” it — when the measures actually taken to address public health are usually long-term and not individually-dependent at all. This is how a study that finds correlation (if not causation) between soda consumption and childhood obesity is translated, by said media, into the message that an individual parent allowing his individual child to consume soda on occasion makes that parent an irresponsible or even dangerous caretaker. This is how studies that find fatness to be beneficial in certain circumstances are either ignored by news media entirely, or are magically perverted into fat-negative articles that report that this evidence seems to exist but is obviously wrong because fat people are still going to die, fatty fat fat, death die die, and nobody else is going to die. No, wait, everyone dies. I mean, some people will die while fat and some won’t.

I’ve discussed both childhood obesity and my problems with the Let’s Move campaign elsewhere, so I won’t repeat myself here. My beef is not with the movement to study these trends, or what may be causing them, but with what we do with that information. Most current public health initiatives cast obesity as a disease at best, and a menace to the American way of life at worst, and unflinchingly place the responsibility upon the shoulders of each individual to police fatness. The fat are encouraged to punish themselves, and the non-fat are encouraged to punish them too. Portraying fatness-as-disease also carries the possibilities of cure and contagion. The cure has yet to be reliably determined — not for lack of trying and economic investment — and the idea of fat contagion continues to be studied and discussed. Seriously, even. If the plan is to isolate and ostracize fat people from society as a whole, then the groundwork is well-laid indeed.

Is there a better solution? I’d propose dropping the idea of fatness as a disease, to start. Even setting aside the debate about whether fatness is universally sick-making, even leaving the assumption that increases in childhood obesity rates are both legitimate and a problem, there are better ways of addressing these trends rather than simply emphasizing the Playstation as the Devil’s Enfattener and inspiring people to banish video games from their homes (everything in moderation, y’all). If poor nutrition and a lack of adequate physical activity are negative drains on the health of Americans, these are environmental factors that can be promoted across the entire population, because it’s not only fat people who would benefit from a better understanding of food science and more opportunities to be active, and withdrawing the laser-like focus on fat people (because everyone else is automatically and completely healthy!) would not fan the flames of cultural anti-fat stigma (the same stigma that makes it difficult for fat people to exercise in public, or, in some cases, go out in public at all) in the way that Let’s Move does. Simply living in certain US cities is associated with greater risk of certain health problems, but the solution is not to remove every individual from that city; the solution is to identify the environmental factors that are having a negative influence, and to improve the circumstances in which those people live, thereby improving their lives entire.

Likewise, the solution to improving the health of fat people is not necessarily to remove them from their bodies, but to give them the opportunity to live in a world and a culture that is healthful and positive for all bodies, according to individual ability and circumstance, whether they are fat or not. You cannot make people healthy by coercion, shame, or stress. Good health is private and subjective, and stems from having options in an environment supportive of and conducive to knowing one’s body. If public health “obesity” initiatives — and the people behind them — really want to improve the health of the nation, they will remove the focus on fat scapegoats and use that energy to build parks and farmer’s markets and to give folks the time necessary to cook and go outdoors and play with their fat kids in the fucking sunshine.

It’s much more difficult to take this road, for sure. But our long-term health, both mental and physical, of all of us depends upon it.

—

* Yes, there was Atari, and other long-forgotten platforms prior to the NES, but their downright abstract graphics, lack of character-focused games, and relative expense kept them from proliferating in the way the NES would. My dad bought me an Atari 5200 when I was seven years old, a superior 2600 upgrade which was sadly a market failure. I loved that thing. Oddly, while I don’t remember receiving my first NES — and I did have one fairly early on — I vividly remember the Atari 5200, right down to the box it came in.
Damn, can someone point me to a Super Breakout emulator? I want to play it right now.

I expect being beautiful is not easy. No, really. I expect people’s assumptions about traditionally-pretty female-presenting humans get tiresome — if you are good-looking you must be stupid, or dull, or self-centered, or ridiculous. Certainly, it is possible to be attractive and intelligent at the same time, but it seems as though no one expects that to happen, nor do they care when it does. Whatever else you are, the pretty will tend to override it.

The pretty get bonus points, in life. Don’t argue. It’s inarguably, indubitably true. You can dislike it; you can find it unfair; you can try not to take advantage of it. But it will continue to happen. There are aspects of my own being that give me privilege — being white, for example, or presently able-bodied, or cisgendered — and as much as I disdain the system that imposes those privileges by valuing whiteness or able-bodiedness or non-diverse representations of gender, and as hard as I may work at maintaining a keen awareness of the advantages and recognitions I get as a result of these factors, I can never wipe them away, I can never burn them off; they are inescapable. Likewise, the pretty may be uncomfortable with the upsides of their appearance, but their discomfort does not mean the advantages do not exist.

On an individual basis, pretty is in the eye of the beholder, so when I talk about the pretty here, I am using a generalized aggregate of standardized characteristics of beauty, at least as they exist in my own local American culture. Pretty bodies are slender and having a feminine proportion from bust to waist to hips: not too deeply curved, as that is intimidating, and not curved in the wrong direction, or not curved at all, as that is terrifying. Pretty faces are symmetrical, delicate, and charming. An appropriately narrow nose, carefully-tended brows, a mouth that is plump without being overlarge. By the law of averages there will always be a certain number of individuals who possess a majority, if not all, of these attributes, and who then gain the benefits and advantages thereof. Even if said individual does not desire those benefits and advantages, and even if said individual does not believe herself worthy of them.

See, culture does not give a damn about whether you think of yourself as pretty. Culture’s interest is in your adherence to beauty standards from a quantitative perspective. Certainly there are many good reasons to see your own beauty — and none of that “inner” shit either, rather beauty in its more philosophical capacity as representative of both art and truth, neither of which need to be “pretty” to be compelling and indomitable — but merely thinking of yourself as pretty does not make you so in the lidless eye of broad cultural assessment. Given the oppressiveness of exacting beauty standards — in which I would counsel against making too deep an investment — this is not a bad arrangement.

Earlier this summer, Olivia Munn, currently of The Daily Show and formerly of G4’s Attack of the Show, took umbrage at the idea that her appearance — which, according to the highly-unscientific but extremely emphatic endorsements of many heterosexual men, qualifies as “hot” — had anything whatsoever to do with her success as an entertainer. This is just plain insulting and arrogant. Of course being conventionally-attractive plays a role in the success of women in media. Munn leapt dramatically to the conclusion that being pretty was somehow incompatible with being talented, and defended herself against an attack that no one had made: “I never tried to use anything besides my own sweat and blood and talent to get somewhere.” Which may well be true, but “pretty” does not have to be consciously unleashed in order to have an effect. Pretty can be a passive influence, regardless of the intention of the person being labeled as such. Munn may not think of herself as particularly pretty, but it’s difficult to mount a coherent argument that the legions of men who find her hot had no effect whatsoever on her success. Of course they did. Munn can dislike this. She can even be disgusted by it. But her individual, personal feeling on the matter does not change reality.

More recently, the TV drama and personal obsession Huge has provided a deep and nuanced context for analysis of the pretty in the character of Amber. Amber, blonde, blue-eyed, “the thinnest girl at camp”, borders on the otherworldly, the angelic. In the heavy heat of summer, her hair is effortlessly coiffed at all times, her eyelashes impossibly curled. She does not seem to sweat, in keeping with the poreless ideal that photo retouching has created for us to aspire to. She is naturally, unfailingly beautiful and is much admired by the straight boys, who find her appearance just intimidating enough to be appealing, but not so intimidating as to find the situation hopeless. This is compounded by Amber’s seeming unawareness of her effect on them — she is quiet, her face “innocent”, dubious in the face of compliments. Amber can steal without being suspected, because how could a face so beatific belong to a dishonest person? Amber’s pretty is so overwhelming, it intoxicates the viewer; there cannot be darkness in something so vivid and bright.

Amber — and possibly Munn — may not be able to see herself objectively. She may not know that her appearance opens doors that would remain closed and bolted against women with faces and bodies less conventionally attractive. When overthinkers like myself get angry about the advantages of the pretty, the anger explodes outward in two directions: one, in the direction of the faceless cultural expectations that value certain physical characteristics over others, and rewards women for being conventionally-pretty even against their will; and two, in the direction of the women themselves, for refusing to notice or acknowledge the up-sides to looking like they do. It is the obliviousness of Ambers and Olivias, it is the cavalier disbelief — even disregard — for the advantages their looks get them that enrages. It is their willing, if ignorant, participation in that system that sets our heads aflame. They may believe their personal perception rates higher than cultural assessment, and this would not be surprising, given the American focus on the individual, but it is false. Olivia Munn may think she is the ugliest woman in the world, and still she will succeed because men enjoy looking at her regardless of how she feels about herself. Amber may believe she is unforgivably unattractive, but so long as boys see her through the lens of conventional beauty, her own feelings are irrelevant.

This is a problem.

The Ambers and Olivias are reaping benefits from a system that rewards some women at the expense of others — the pretty over the unpretty — and tempting though it is to attack them individually for individual stupidity or ignorance, it is that system that needs dismantling, and not the women who benefit by it. The anger at individual women is a convenient diversion from the real problem, that when appearance is a factor — and for women, when isn’t appearance a factor? — women continue to succeed based as much on their ability to be pretty as their ability to be talented or intelligent. You can have pretty without the talent and intelligence, or you can have all of the above at the same time, but women who are talented or intelligent without being pretty are climbing a much steeper hill to mainstream measurements of success.

The last time I wrote about being over the idea of my own beauty, it was linked on a feminist-themed forum elsewhere, and a few of the comments observed that not finding oneself beautiful was sad to them. I won’t argue with that assessment — people are entitled find it sad, if it’s not an approach that works for them. But for me, there was tremendous freedom in surrendering the idea that subjectively feeling — if not objectively being –beautiful was a requirement of a happy and fulfilling life. This is not to suggest that people shouldn’t feel good about themselves, or even “pretty”, as the occasion warrants — my point is that this feeling should not be the necessity and the compulsion that it is, and that when it occurs, it should neither be underscored nor negated by the response of the majority, according to what masculine doctrine finds most valuable. Wanting to feel pretty, to appreciate and value oneself as a beautiful person, is a fine notion. Confronting, deconstructing, and redefining what counts as beauty is a valiant effort. But we should also be vigilant: is it personal gratification and self-love we’re after, or the advantages that being beautiful to others would afford us?

No one should feel forced to play the pretty game, though most of us born female spend our lives learning the rules and trying to get ahead, if only because we are not allowed to consider removing ourselves from the playing field. There are many Ambers and Olivias in the world — women whose pretty has the backing of cultural approval, who gain attention by it, and who still cannot see themselves as attractive, because an intrinsic part of the pretty game is constantly feeling inferior, imperfect, and incomplete. All the players can do is struggle to stay afloat; ultimately, it is not a game anyone can win.

This morning I was poking around JetBlue’s website, mostly looking to see if they’ve implemented in-flight wifi yet (they haven’t), when I ran across a new series of promotional videos of JetBlue customers explaining why JetBlue is so freaking awesome. I already knew JetBlue was pretty awesome, so under normal circumstances I’d ignore these videos, but one of the customers… looked like a big guy. I was intrigued, major airlines being so committed to the lie that “normal” customers equal thin customers, because this makes it easier to justify arbitrary and inconsistently-applied second-seat policies. So I watched (be warned, that link goes directly to an autoplay video that takes up the whole browser window).

The video shows a dudeguy sitting in a row of JetBlue seats set up in the middle of their Epic Terminal of Legend at JFK. If you’ve been to the JetBlue terminal at JFK, you know what I mean. It’s as if they remade Blade Runner and set it in an Apple Store. The dude enters the frame and sits down in the hated Middle Seat, armrests down, though as the video progresses, via the magic of editing, eventually the armrests go up. I wouldn’t call this guy fat, though fat is always in the eye of the beholder, and I’m sure some folk would. But he seems to me like a fairly normal-looking guy. My first reaction was, Good on you, JetBlue, for showing us a non-tiny passenger.

My second reaction was, Damn, that seat is still too small for him. Y’all know how I love arrows, so I’ve pointed out the telltale signs on the screenshot below.

Early on in the video, the armrest on his right is up, and the one on his left is slowly rising. His shoulders are markedly broader than the seat back, even — HORRORS — encroaching on the next seat when he leans slightly to one side. Certainly, dude is splaying all over, as dudes are oft wont to do, but I doubt he’d sit much differently on an actual plane with actual people on either side. Dudes generally don’t think as much about their space as womenfolk do. We’re brought up different. The internalized pressure I may feel to draw my limbs in as much as possible — a laughable and futile effort — neither makes me any smaller, nor does it make the seat any bigger. Instead, it just makes me feel tense, resentful, and unhappy, which probably rubs off on my seatmates, and thus these days when I fly I make conscious efforts to not obsess over whether my shoulder is touching that of my neighbor.

What we have here is a pretty normal-looking semi-beefy guy who doesn’t really fit in what is, in my experience, a coach seat that is damn generous by the standards of other airlines. A company like JetBlue doesn’t make these choices by accident, and there’s something truly compelling about seeing a bigger person talking about how comfortable their seats are (“Almost as comfortable as my couch… almost.”) even if his size is never overtly addressed in the video. People who are bigger can look and think, hey, if that guy is comfortable, then I should be too. People who are smaller can look and think the same thing. Possibly most surprisingly — and don’t think this escapes the notice of JetBlue’s marketing department — those people who’ve been put off by the often-humiliating fatty-punishing debacles of other major airlines are given the chance to see JetBlue as a “safer” — or at least kinder — option.

I still think coach seats should be bigger — not massive, but just a bit more generous, for everyone’s comfort, for the comfort of bigger people, for the comfort of people sitting next to bigger people, for the comfort of people traveling with infants, for the comfort of people who want sufficient horizontal clearance to be able to type on their laptop without jabbing their seatmates with their elbows. But in the absence of bigger seats, I’ll take JetBlue’s quiet acknowledgment that their airplanes are filled with people of different sizes, and that they are all equally deserving of comfort.

Flying is anxiety-inducing enough — for me, feeling like the airline I’ve chosen respects me as a human being is a huge relief.

And now, the end is near, and so I face the final curtain…

Previously: There was angst. Boy howdy, was there ever. So much angst. Ian likes Amber. Will likes Ian. Amber likes George. George likes Amber, but doesn’t want to get fired. Or go to jail.

In the woods, we come back to the place where we left off, and also where we began, with Will digging for her contraband food at Amber’s request. It’s nighttime, and Amber’s holding the flashlight while Will works, because Amber’s totally a pillow princess like that. When Amber halfheartedly apologizes for dragging Will out here in the middle of the night in flagrant violation of the rules, Will says it’s not a problem, she’s glad to do it: “I am so sick and being told what and when to eat.” Amber argues that Will cannot possibly hate Camp Victory as much as she says, and Will admits, “I don’t hate everything about it. I like the people.” Amber, coyly: “Like Ian?” Whoa. Will shrugs this off, but Amber presses, saying she won’t tell, arguing that Will knows who Amber likes — though in fairness this is because she saw y’all humping in the woods and not because you opened up to her, Miss A. Will deftly sidesteps the issue by proclaiming her crush on Salty Dad. Amber giggles. Why is Amber trying to be so chummy all of a sudden?

Will thinks they’re digging in the wrong place, and Amber says they should forget it. But then Will has an idea. Last week, when she was helping Salty Dad in the kitchen, she learned the secret hiding place of the key to the pantry. At the dark mess hall, Will uses a knife to unlock a window and opens it wide, saying to Amber: “Ladies first.” They enter the kitchen and Will fetches the key, while Amber worries about “security cameras”. Inside the pantry, Will goes straight to the low-fat brownies. They carry the tray out to the prep table and Will tells Amber that when she was “a kid”, during sleepovers and stuff, she’d raid the fridges at other kids’ houses, because her parents never kept junk food in the house. Amber, grabbing a handful of napkins, sadly remembers how “when you were a kid, you could could eat a brownie without feeling bad about it.” Dude, I know. Hence my screaming about the cookies last week.

Amber asks Will why her parentals didn’t show up, and Will says “they probably got caught up in work”. She then tells Amber about the far-too-small tracksuit they sent. “I’ll probably burn it.” Amber asks if she’s joking. Will: ”Well, velour doesn’t burn great.” She has burned other stuff they’ve given her. Amber: “That’s horrible. I bet it was really expensive too.” Will observes that they’re rich, so it doesn’t matter to them. Will figures they may have guessed that she didn’t want to see them, while Amber says she could never tell her mom she didn’t want to see her. Will carefully tries to ask what the deal with Teal is, but Amber’s kneejerk defensiveness makes her back down. Meanwhile, all this time Amber has been doing something odd with her stack of napkins, taking a bite of brownie, bringing the napkin to her mouth, and then setting it down in a neat pile. I used to try this, but it never really worked for me — I’d always get distracted and wind up swallowing the food, which is, after all, one’s natural inclination. Will finally asks what Amber is doing. “This way I taste it, without swallowing the calories. It’s gross, I know, “ says Amber. Will snatches up the napkins and throws them away, “No, it’s sick. That’s like eating disorder crap.” Will brings up Caitlin (the first-episode camper who was sent home for being bulimic) and Amber insists chewing food and then spitting it into napkins is TOTALLY DIFFERENT from eating food and then purging it. Riiiight. It is easier on your tooth enamel, at least.

Having each eaten about four brownies — hardly an epic binge — they head back. George is sitting in his cabin reading by flashlight when he sees Amber’s golden head float by outside, followed by Will.

In the girls’ cabin the next morning, Amber’s mom is shrieking and demanding to know where the towels are. When digging through her daughter’s chest provides no luck, she inexplicably starts ripping the covers and sheets off Will’s bed, uncovering the pink Core track suit. Both Teal and Carter’s sister ooh and aah over it, asking who it belongs to. “It’s Amber’s,” blurts Will. Teal immediately looks suspicious. Chloe wants to know why Amber hasn’t worn it. Well she’s going to wear it now! As everyone turns back to their morning tasks, Amber mouths a grateful “thank you” to Will. Oh well, velour really doesn’t burn great.

Breakfast in the mess hall. Dr. Gina encourages, in her halting and insecure way, any parents with questions or concerns to come talk to her about them. Will, in line for food, exchanges glances with Salty Dad, his suspicious, hers guilty.

Trent and his parentals sit and eat, while Trent is talking about zombies. His dad interrupts to ask stepmom what happened to her necklace, the one he bought her last week? Oh damn, the clasp must have broken. Stepmom tries to get Trent to go back to his story but he just wants to forget it. His dad says, “Don’t give her a hard time,” and stepmom says he isn’t. Ugh. Stepmom and Trent look like they could be the same age, seriously.

Elsewhere in the mess, Will is telling Becca and Alistair about a dream she had, in which she was making out with a guy only to have his head morph into that of her 8th grade Spanish teacher. “So I’m trying to decide if it’s still worth it if I forget his head exists.” Becca asks, apropos of nothing, whether Will and Amber are “friends again.” Uh, were they ever friends in the first place? Am I forgetting the episode where they skipped hand-in-hand through a verdant meadow? Will’s all, no, not at all. Becca says it seems like they’re talking more. Will awkwardly (DRINK!) says they had something to discuss. Something… personal. Oh, that’ll make Becca feel better, considering all she wants is for you to open up to her.

Dr. Gina finds Jillian Michaels 2: The Road Warrior outside and tells her she’s asked Poppy to set up another crafts table on the field, because those crafts are going like hotcakes. Why Shay needed to be informed, I have no idea. Shay then tells Dr. Gina “the new guy” will be here tonight, so everything’s peachy. What new guy? The new chef? What new chef? Salty Dad is leaving. Wait, what? Shay rambles on as Salty Dad comes out of the kitchen and begins walking away. Dr. Gina tries to extract herself to go talk to him and find out what’s going on, but is thwarted when George appears, a pack of pinched-face parents in tow, all of whom want to talk to Dr. Gina urgently.

Three-legged races on the field. Ian and Will watch as Ian’s parents laugh and try to get the rhythm down. Will remarks on how happy they look. Ian agrees, “They are happy. I’m happy too. Supposedly.” Will rubs his arm above the elbow in a tender and almost intimate way. Ian asks if she can stick with him: “I don’t want to be alone with them.” Of course she will, because, in spite of everything, she doesn’t yet realize what a fool you are. Ian is absorbed in his familial pain; Will is absorbed in her all-encompassing crush on Ian. They are together, on the field, but also brutally alone.

Inside the girls’ cabin, Becca is reading The Rules, that hateful book about ensaring a husband, when Chloe comes in. She says, out of nowhere, that her aunt has that book. Becca says she found it in the rec room, and it seems pretty stupid. Chloe sits down and says, “What?” to Becca’s questioning look. “Why did we stop being friends?” Becca asks. “I don’t know,” says Chloe. I’ve told the story already, of when I was in Chloe’s shoes here. The ex-friend in my story was angry, though, and Becca is not; she just wants to know why. Chloe says she wanted to hang out with Caitlin, with the popular group. “Which makes me a bitch. I know that. It’s not like I don’t know that. I wanted to be different. Like, a different person.” Becca says she gets it, and goes back to her book. Chloe begins, “So…” Becca looks up, blankly: “What?” Chloe: “Nothing.” She climbs up to her bunk and is silent. For all of Becca’s protestations that she isn’t mad, she sure seems to want to punish Chloe. Which is fine, but let’s be up-front about that.

On the field, kids and parentals are doing that thing where you race whilst carrying an egg on a spoon. Such a waste of eggs. George is supervising. Ian’s parents, followed by Ian, followed by Will walk by, and George puts his egg-basket down and chases after her. She stops and faces him. Oh, this should be interesting. George: “I know you were out after lights-out last night. I’ve decided not to tell Dr. Rand.” Will’s face is totally unimpressed. “Is that so?” George, being the big man here, tells her he’s hoping that another chance will inspire Will to follow the rules henceforth. Will: “Like the way you follow the rules?” George blinks, looks away, and you can almost see the sinking feeling in his chest. He changes tactics, and suggests that while Will may not care about getting thrown out, Amber would. Will’s gaze is unbreakable. She knows she has George dead to rights, and now he knows it too. “You’re worried that I might get Amber thrown out?” she smiles, not a little ironically. “Don’t tell me what to do again. Ever.” Oh, snap. Will turns and walks away, leaving George with the look of a man who’s been hit with a fish. Will is outstanding.

In the boys’ cabin, Alistair is sweeping. It must be his job on the chore wheel! He finds a necklace, ostensibly the one belogning to Trent’s stepmom, at the same time as Dante comes in and calls him “Athena”. Alistair, not turning around, grasping the necklace to his chest: “Yeah, don’t call me that.” Dante wants to know if Alistair got his note. He did. Well, he didn’t say anything, so Dante was just wondering. Yeah, he got it. Dante wants Alistair not to hate him, and Alistair says he doesn’t: “To be honest, I’m not really dwelling on it.” Oh, then we’re cool? Yeah. Dante needs absolution, closure, something — don’t we all — but Alistair is not going to give it to him.

On the field, Trent and his parentals are sitting together in the shade when Trent’s dad spots Amber sitting at the newly-added craft table. See, I knew that would figure heavily in the plot! Dad refers to her as Trent’s “girlfriend” and asks if he’ll introduce them. Trent wants to leave. For anywhere. Instead, his stepmom says she’s tired and should go lie down, which is probably just a flimsy excuse for giving Trent and his dad some alone time together.

At the craft table, Amber’s mom continues to defy the upward limits of annoyingness. She says, coyly, of their Parents Weekend photograph, that they should take another picture and get George to be in it. When Amber bristles and says he’s busy, Teal says she’s “no fun”, grabbing Amber’s craft project — a frame for their photograph — and looking it over. “Ugh, I look like my mother,” says Teal, and Amber says she doesn’t, like she’s probably said it a thousand times before. Then Teal brings up the track suit, and asks where she got it. The truth. “Will gave it to me,” Amber says. “The girl you hate,” says her mom. Amber tries to explain that it wasn’t really a gift, so much as Will didn’t want it. Teal doesn’t believe it, and in a creepily sing-songy cadence, observes: “You’re not friends with her. That’s what you said.” She accuses her daughter of lying, and Amber asks why she’d lie about that. Teal: “How should I know what you lie about?” She then asks, maintaining her inappropriately chirpy-yet-accusatory tone, whether Amber is stealing again. Amber says no, and Teal raises her voice, causing the rest of the table to turn and look. “Do you mind? We’re having a private conversation.” Ugh, how humiliating. Teal stalks off in search of a cigarette and Amber sits alone, looking not so much mortified as sad and small, as though this has happened to her before.

Chloe finds Trent’s stepmom alone in the boys’ cabin, crawling around on the floor, and asks if she’s lost something. She’s looking for her necklace. Chloe is sympathetic: “I hate when I lose jewelry. The worst is one earring.” Once they’ve given up, Chloe gets a little awkward (DRINK!) and asks stepmom if she’ll give Trent the note she’s brought; Chloe was going to leave it on his bed. Stepmom says sure. After another strained silence, Chloe asks how long stepmom has been with Trent’s dad. Stepmom realizes that Trent hasn’t mentioned her at all to anyone, and she starts crying. Is it the pregnancy making her nuts? Who knows. She knows she can’t expect Trent to just open up to her: “I’m not his mother.” Chloe says it’s good that he has her anyway, and tenatively hugs the sobbing stepmom. See, I knew Chloe would redeem herself to me in the last episode.

Dr. Gina finds Salty Dad in the office, writing something, which he hands to her. She rips it in half and hands it back. “I don’t hate you. I just want you to go.” Dr. Gina’s rage, simmering, comes to a rapid boil as Salty Dad tries to explain. He was married to Joyce, the name on his arm, and they had a daughter. Dr. Gina has a fifteen-year-old sister. Her response to being hit with this emotional two-by-four is to whisper, “I don’t care.” Apparently this kid has been getting in trouble, and unless Salty Dad comes to fetch her, Joyce is going to put her in juvenile detention. Oh hey, bring her back to Camp Victory! She can be friends and co-hooligans with Will. Dr. Gina does not give a fuck about his other family’s problems. “Where were you when I was fifteen?” Salty, resigned: “You’re right, I should have been there.” The doc, yelling: “I don’t want to be right!” There does come a point, with our anger at our families, our friends, anyone who’s let us down, that we are no longer satisfied to be right, or justified, or correct. We want to be fixed. We want to eat brownies and take our parents for granted. We want to lay down the burden we’ve been carrying, the rage and the loss, to be put back together and to be whole again. She tells her dad she hates him, but then asks her sister’s name. Saying it aloud brings Salty to the edge, and he tears up, and they hug each other, which is as close to wholeness as any of us can get.

Fatty tug-of-war on the playing field: Carter’s team beats Trent’s, as Carter’s tiny sister cheers them on. Tiny sister chats up George, asking him how Carter is doing.

Ian finds his mom, and asks where his dad is. Everyone turns to see him carrying on with Amber’s mom, eventually picking her up playfully, at which Ian’s head almost explodes and he calls, “Dad!” Dad has the grace to realize he’s making a bit of a spectacle and comes scampering over to Ian and his mom, after setting Teal down to be dragged away by Amber. Will, trying to change the subject, asks if Ian has played any of his songs for them.

In the rec room, Will sings to Ian’s guitar for Ian’s parentals, drawing the attention of Trent and his dad, who were playing ping pong, and Chloe and Trent’s stepmom, who just came in. Stepmom tells Trent he should go play drums with them — Chloe told her he played — which results in some tension with his dad, who asks in astonishment, “You play drums?” Trent says he’s no good, but Chloe has said otherwise. Eventually Trent barks at them to drop it, and the song can’t survive the interruption and stops.

Trent, even more embarrassed, apologizes and says they’ll go. But Will stops him, saying to Ian: “Maybe he can give us a beat.” Ian: “We have a beat.” Actually, dear heart, I don’t think you and Will are quite in sync. Will tells Trent to join them, giving him the chance to demonstrate that his dad may not know him as well as he thinks. Trent, almost angry, does so. And they play the song. The whole thing. And it’s great. And lest there be any lingering doubt, Will is absolutely the hottest thing at this whole fucking camp, and when these fictional kids look back ten fictional years down the line, they’ll marvel at how they could have overlooked her.

They finish to applause from the room, and Trent’s stepmom asks what their band is called. Trent starts to brush it off, but Ian says, “We don’t have one… yet.” Chloe steps forward, breathless and beaming, “That was so good,” and Trent envelops her in his arms and kisses her, right there, in front of his parents, and everyone. All together now: Awwww.

The last of the parents are leaving. Ian’s dad demonstrates the convertible top on his new Porsche to Ian. Oh dude, you think the divorce will suck, you just wait until you see who your dad chooses to date in the early post-divorce era. It will be horrifying. Speaking of horrifying, here comes Amber and her mom, who is feigning indignance that Ian’s dad might leave without saying goodbye. She blabbers on how his Porsche and her car which is not actually her car but just kidding, no not really. Amber, oblivious to everything, watches George flirting with Carter’s tiny sister. Her whole face trembles with the impending tears, and she runs off to cry in private. Again, followed by Ian.

Amber sits on a rock and cries while Ian approaches and says, “It’s no big deal,” I guess referring to the fact that Amber’s mom is cuckoobananas, except Amber could not give less of a shit about her gooneybird of a mom right now. Ian presumes she’s upset because Teal’s behavior was inappropriate, and tells her it’s not like his parents are “together… anymore.” Finally, Amber gives us her patented “…what?”, the one that says I’m trying to wallow in my self-centered angst here, which I note without judgement, as that is the longing of most teenagers much of the time. Ian continues, and Amber begins, “It’s not..” before realizing she can’t explain, so she gives up and just says “thanks.” Amber says she needs a tissue and Ian leaps into action, offering the sleeve of the button-down shirt he’s wearing over his t-shirt. Amber is slightly repulsed and says no, to which Ian asserts he doesn’t mind. “Anyone would mind. I mind,” says Amber. Ian takes off the button-down and proffers it again, arguing that “snot receptacle” is one of the made-up “five uses of clothing”. Eventually Amber takes it and delicately blows her nose on it. She then tells Ian, “You’re like the nicest person I’ve ever met.”

Oh Ian.

He is overwhelmed. Amber can’t believe she’s “freaked out” like this, and says: “You know how you could let yourself believe something, and then you realize what a total fool you were to even hope for it.” Ian’s all SHHHYEAH, totally. He says he can’t believe they’re having this conversation. Amber asks what he means. Oh, here it comes. Ian tells her about his crush on her. “I mean, obviously, I didn’t think anything could happen.” Amber: “Why not?” Ian: “‘Cause, look at me.” Amber stands up and strokes his face, and then she kisses him, quickly. No sooner does she pull away than Ian kisses her. There is an uncertainty in Amber’s face, as though she’s asking herself, “Why did I do that?” So what if she knows Will likes Ian. He’s there, he’s convenient, he likes her. He’s not going to cast her aside or push her away. What she wants… almost ceases to matter.

Oh Amber.

There have been a lot of strong feelings about Amber as a character, from love to loathing. But I’d hazard a guess that the Amber hate isn’t really hate, so much as it is the weariness of having known girls like Amber — girls who were pretty without believing they were pretty and yet who managed to levy their allegedly-nonexistent beauty to get ahead, and to get attention. It’s the lingering anger from those of us who spent our youth having to remind ourselves every day that sure, we’ll never be a pretty girl, but we can be the interesting girl and that’s enough. It has to be enough, for us. Beauty is currency amongst teenagers, and adults, and what Amber lacks in socioeconomic status she makes up in manipulation. Who can blame her? She uses what she’s got to get ahead, and there’s nothing shameful about that — but she shouldn’t pretend things are any different than they are, and that if she were an ugly girl from a low-income background her life and her opportunities would be very, very different. Still, Amber wants to be validated, to be told how pretty she is every single day (even as she refuses to believe it), and to have the attention of all the boys, even the boys she doesn’t want. Nothing we have seen over the past ten weeks has indicated that Amber is especially smart, or particularly talented, or invested in anything other than social climbing. The power to draw male attention is the only power she’s got. Who can blame her for using it?

And really, we can’t blame Ian either. Amber is the dream girl, the one who’ll make all your buddies jealous, even if they’re only marveling “how’d she wind up with him?” Of course, the difference is that we can follow the story where the quirky, nontraditionally handsome guy gets the pretty girl, but the unpretty girl never gets the hot guy. Not without a makeover, a conversion to bring her up to his level, in which eyeglasses and frizzy hair and a lack of fashion sense are cast aside, repaired, and rebuilt to create a girl who is now as pretty on the outside as we always knew she was on the inside, except the inside kind of pretty doesn’t really count for us, does it? Not for the girls. The inside pretty can’t make up for an external failure. In no concieveable turn of events would Will wind up with George, for example. It’s too unbelievable, unfathomable, more than can be asked of us, the audience. Even those of us who’d want it to happen wouldn’t believe it. Because it never does. So we get Ian and Amber, sure, why not — Ian’s got charm and magnetism. Will’s charm and magnetism gets her nothing — in fact, it’s almost a liability. Boys have charm and magnetism. Women have looks.

Back at the parking lot, Carter’s tiny sister is telling George that they should “stay in touch… unless you’re seeing anyone.” Oh! George is all, well, sort of. “Well, nothing serious? Like, you’re not in looooove, or anything?” George is silent. “Damn, “ says tiny sister, getting the message.

Will wanders into the kitchen and is brusquely informed that Salty Dad has left the camp. She gets The Look, that dull-eyed expression Will has when she’s upset but can’t bring herself to show it, and leaves.

Alistair is in the bathroom of the boys’ cabin, with a pair of scissors. He methodically, meditatively cuts the neckline out of his t-shirt, and puts on the found necklace, and studies himself in the mirror, half-smiling, measuring how he controls his representation, how he wants to be seen. It’s a sweet and deliciously ambiguous scene, and Harvey Guillen acts his ass off in it.*

The campers are assembling for a post-parentals campfire. Alistair strides up confidently, comfortable in his altered shirt, and his sister stares. Dr. Gina has them gather around, and acknowledges, “It may have been hard to have your parents here… and then to have to say goodbye.” It’s hard for her, certainly. Dr. Gina hesitates, clears her throat, and seems lost, until Poppy begins singing the camp song, and Dr. Gina joins right in. The other campers pick it up — even Will, until she sees Ian and Amber approach. Holding hands. Ian can’t stop smiling. Will’s face freezes as though she’s been stabbed from behind, as though she never saw it coming. George sees it too, sadly. Will starts breathing deeply and has to get up and walk away.

Will is still walking, furiously, panting, through the woods, when Becca runs after her. “I don’t feel well, okay? Go back to the fire,” Will says, her voice uneven. Becca tries to grab her arm and says she can talk to her, but Will doesn’t want to talk. “I didn’t ask you to follow me.” As rough as Will is here, I am sympathetic — there are lots of us who need solitude to sort our shit out, to get our feelings under control. Will is breathing hard, trying to keep it together, when Becca says, “Screw you, Will. I am so damn sick of trying to be your friend when you obviously couldn’t care less about me.” Of course. Of course Becca chooses now, this very moment, to finally snap. She expects Will to talk to her, to admit what just happened. “Do you think I’m stupid?” she asks, rhetorically. “Do you think I don’t know?” To be clear, the primary reason Becca is so sure of what’s going on is because she betrayed Will’s trust and read her fucking journal, even knowing how terrified Will was of anyone finding it and reading it. It’s a little ridiculous for Becca to try to take the high road. And I like Becca. But I think she’s in the wrong here. Will is a cynical, sarcastic introvert who plays things close to her chest. If she were a guy, no one would think twice about this. But it’s unfair of Becca to expect Will to be something she’s not — to be Chloe, like Chloe was last year.

Dr. Gina is covering the fire alone, when Jillian Michaels: Judgement Day approaches and demands she be allowed to help. She blathers on about Dr. Gina’s dad, saying he’s a good guy: “The way he cares about you? See, I never had that.” Well, neither did Dr. Gina, until recently. Dr. Gina seriously does not like talking to Shay for any longer than absolutely necessary, and thanks her for finding “the perfect chef” to replace Salty Dad.

As she walks away, Dr. Gina sees Will sitting on a bench across the pond. She goes over to her, asking if she hadn’t heard the evening bell. Will, matter-of-factly: “I broke the rules. Last night I took some brownies from the kitchen.” Dr. Gina knows already. Salty Dad told her. Will: “So that’s it, right? You have to throw me out.” Will wants to go home. As much as she hates her parents, as horrible at the tennis-douchebag bullies from school may be, home is better than the cold, empty certainty that things never could have turned out any differently. Dr. Gina says it’s not so simple, and she’s giving Will yet another chance, a chance Will doesn’t want.

“What were you like, when you were fat?”
“I hated myself.”
“And now you don’t?”
“Less.”
“And that’s it? That’s the big improvement? You hate yourself less?”
“Yes.”

This is why the doctor cannot understand Will, cannot understand that fatness isn’t always a literal weight dragging everyone down, that Will might hate herself for lots of reasons — her inability to open up, to trust people with her feelings, to be honest with Ian — but being fat may not be one of them. And this is where we leave things, with Will and Dr. Gina looking at the stars over Camp Victory, both of them having fought and survived another day. Until tomorrow.

—

* I spoke to Marianne on the phone after this episode, mostly to spoil her on the big moments. When I was describing this scene I said that it ended when Ian, fresh from his kiss with Amber, bursts into the bathroom yelling, at which Marianne said, “Because he needed to get behind a locked door and take care of business.” I thought this was very funny. This then evolved into a brief discussion of the masturbation habits of boys at camp. Marianne suggested there might be a mutual understanding about bathroom use for this purpose, and I wondered if maybe they’d just wander out into the woods to handle things in the beauty of nature. Because it is a natural act and nothing to be ashamed of, am I right?

Tonight the season finale of Huge will be aired. Are you bummed about that? All of my protestations about returning to non-recap-centric blogging aside, I am going to miss this show enormously (ha) when it’s done. This summer, for the first time ever, we’ve seen the evolution of a series that openly criticizes mainstream body culture, that makes the case for size diversity, and that acknowledges that fat kids laugh, and fight, and have crushes, and love themselves and hate themselves and struggle with figuring out who they are, just like kids of any shape or size. This is a series that normalizes difference, that embraces the outsider-ness we all feel, sometimes. And it has also introduced us to an incredible cast of kids who, in defiance of Hollywood standards, have demonstrated that a young actor can succeed at bringing us a character and a story without relying on ridiculous eyebrows, epic amounts of mouth-breathing, and some truly lucky genetics (see The Secret Life of the American Teenager for an illustration).

I want this show to go on. I want these characters’ stories to continue, and I want the producers and the cast and the crew to keep making them. I want to see a second season. But this is not a foregone conclusion. Huge needs our support for this to happen: ABC Family needs to hear from y’all that you want more.

Send an email through the ABC Family feedback form letting them know how much you dig the show, and that you want a second season.

Hit ABC Family with your Twitter-based demands for more Huge at @ABCFHuge and at @ABCFamily. Or give them a shout on the Huge Facebook page.

Send a dump truck of mini-muffins to ABC Family’s physical address at:
ABC Family
500 South Buena Vista St.
Burbank, CA 91521-6078

And it may be obvious, but: watch the show via a legit source. Full episodes are available on Hulu and on ABCFamily.com. If you watch it anywhere else, your ratings don’t count. (EDIT: Unless you’re international, in which case your ratings don’t count no matter what, so watch however you like.)

I’ve noted before that when I was a teenager, the show that had the most profound effect on me was My So-Called Life. This show made me feel less alone, even occasionally understood. It helped me find the courage and conviction to stop trying to force myself to fit in, and told me it was okay to stand out — it was okay to be myself, even if it got me in trouble, even if it made people stare, even if I was not perfect, not beautiful, not always smart, not always good. Without My So-Called Life, I may still have become the noisy upstart I am today, but I’ve little doubt it would have taken me far longer, and I might not be quite so brazen, without that early influence of teen-culture-busting. Huge is operating in much the same way for those kids — and adults — who don’t see themselves represented in the mainstream. With Huge, fat kids and weird kids and nerdy kids and maybe-queer kids and kids who just aren’t sure what they want to be yet all have a story to turn to. This is important. My So-Called Life had one season before it was cancelled; I think we can do better with Huge. But first they need to know you want more.

Make some fucking noise. Don’t let this end too soon.

A million thanks, my loves. For reading, for participating, and for being yourselves.

It’s Friday, I have clothes on, and I am trying to revive this habit. The green cropped cardigan came from Target; I can often smush my fatness into their XL sweaters and I make the most of that fact. The navy and white polka-dot dress is by Jane Bon Bon. The white cotton slip underneath is vintage, from eBay, and after I won it I received a strongly-worded email of abuse from the person I apparently outbid. Grey sneakers are Converse, by way of Marshalls.

Have a peachy weekend, y’all.

It’s Friday, and welcome to your playlist! I’m trying to give these playlists little themes. I suppose some of them are more obvious than others.

1. “Beetlebum” // Blur. I was positively passionate about Britpop in my early twenties — this was the height of Oasis’ popularity, after all. And then Damon Albarn started listening to Pavement and we got Blur’s self-titled fifth album. (Some people blame Graham Coxon for this, but I blame Stephen Malkmus.) At the time, it was a major departure, and for about a week I hated it. Until I started listening to it. “Beetlebum” was the song that kept me coming back to give it another chance.
2. “Phenomena” // Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I was not a huge fan of YYYs first album — like my old complaint with The Muffs (remember The Muffs?), I thought they took too many pefectly good songs and ruined them with tuneless screaming. I also think “Maps” is the most unduly-praised and overrated song of the aughts. Thus, I only came to appreciate them with their mostly-scream-free second album, off of which “Phenomena” is taken.
3. “Do I Move You” // Nina Simone. Nina Simone is one of my idols — and not just musically, but politically and intellectually as well.
4. “Addicted to Love” // Florence and the Machine. Is my love of cover songs overwhelmingly apparent yet? I have a particular soft spot for covers of culturally-oversaturated songs, that make efforts to sound very different from the original. Satisfying!
5. “Koop Island Blues” // Koop. Fans of So You Think You Dance may recognize this one from a couple seasons back. I already owned it, on one of the Mystery Albums that magically appear on my iPod without my having any idea whatsoever where they came from. Koop make shifty, velvety eletcro-jazz that sounds like it came off decades-old vinyl. Highly recommended.

It probably comes as a surprise to no one, at this point, that I like the fat boys. I also like the fat girls, but I am inclined to think that the sexualization of fat men’s (or male-identified) bodies tends to receive less attention than it does with the females. This is undoubtedly because women are under far greater and more specific cultural pressure to be sexually appealing than men are, and thus the sexualization of fat women’s bodies is a heated and popular topic of conversation.

However, what is occasionally lost in these discussions is any recognition at all of a) what pressure does exist for men to be attractive, and b) the fact that men, unlike women, tend not to create spaces in which they can talk honestly about their hypothetical feelings of inadequacy. The fact that women often bond over diets and aspirational beauty culture is problematic, for sure, but women do have the option to talk about these pressures with one another in a frank way. Worrying about your appearance, most specifically your size, is a woman’s problem, and not something your typical red-blooded straight cisgendered man is allowed to openly discuss, at least not without having his sexuality challenged by any homophobes in the room. As I recently observed on Fatcast, fat’s tendency is to fuck with gender on a equal-opportunity scale. Culturally-speaking, fatness exerts a masculinizing (or defeminizing) force on women’s bodies, and a feminizing (or emasculating) force on men’s bodies, and if you identify as falling outside the convenient gender binary, well, then it tends to strip you of any sexual identity at all, so far as mainstream recognition is concerned. No matter how you identify and present yourself, gender-wise, fatness is going to fuck with it.

In the course of these recaps, I’ve focused a lot of attention on sexualizing and even objectifying (in a good-natured way) the male bodies. And yes, I do think a certain degree of friendly objectification can be positive if it helps us to see our bodies — no matter what we look like — as sexified vessels of awesomeness. A goodly portion of my urge to stubbornly conceptualize the sexy fat man is because, indeed, I really do find them attractive. Hell to the yeah. But that’s not the only reason: the secondary impetus for my relentless demands for boys’-cabin pillowfights and less clothing is because framing fat men’s bodies in these terms is a process of queering mainstream standards of sexual attractiveness. Here I use “queering” not to mean “making it gay” (although that’s fun too) but to mean taking sexual convention and fucking it up, turning it inside out, and challenging its assumptions. I’m not queering the individuals or even their bodies — what I’m queering is how we read bodies as sexually attractive, and trying to bring a sexualized, semi-objectified (in a pleasant way, I promise!) fat male body into the light of day. Being attracted to fat bodies specifically, if not exclusively, is a queer-ish way of seeing the world, and it’s not one we get to see represented very often.

I’m not arguing that everyone universally has to find fat people attractive. That idea, no matter who’s discussing it, tends to draw the accusation that fat people who want to talk about beauty standards are only interested in being validated, told, “You’re attractive too.” Personally, I don’t give a shit about being found attractive by random strangers; I really never have, which explains many of my sartorial choices over the years. But furthermore: you get around in this world for long enough and you come to understand that sex appeal is utterly unique to the individual, fascist beauty standards notwithstanding, and that there are loads of people out there attracted to all kinds of bodies — just some of them are more ashamed and silent than others, because what pushes their buttons isn’t in line with what is considered “normal” or acceptable. Thus, instead of arguing “WE’RE HOT, DAMN IT, AND YOU SHOULD AGREE,” I would rather argue that the concept of finding fat bodies attractive be recognized and even respected as a valid and real possibility, without being fetishized, pathologized, or otherwise made freakish or secret or embarrassing.

Of course, when I explain it like this, it’s like the least-sexy thing ever.

All of this evolves from the fact that this past Sunday, Ari Stidham — the actor who plays the highly-crushable Ian — turned eighteen, and a whole heaping helping of you, my adored chubbalos, let me know it, on Twitter and Facebook and even via email. Which is hilarious and brilliant. There have been many impassioned votes in favor of dirty-fying the recaps (even from my imaginary teenage boyfriend), but I’m inclined to think they’re just dirty enough for our purposes. I should leave something to your filthy imaginations, my dears. I’d hate to be responsible for y’all getting lazy.

Previously: A game of truth or dare ended badly. I know, I didn’t see that coming either! Also, Dr. Gina banged the Tennis Douchebag King in the back of his truck, and Amber and Will reluctantly bonded. With puke.

Will and Salty Dad are shooting hoops on the empty field in the morning. Will says she’s looking forward to parents’ weekend, mostly so she can rip hers some shiny new assholes. Salty Dad: “Well, family time is always special.” OH SALTY DAD. You are a treasure. I also love how Will is making baskets even though she is of a wee height, in flagrant violation of the conventional wisdom about who can succeed at basketball.

Later, in the girls’ cabin, Sierra is in the bathroom, wailing hysterically. Poppy asks if anyone said anything to her, and the girls all say no, while Will says, “She’s never not crying.” Poppy tries to remind the girls that living in close quarters means there are going to be things that “rankle” people, be it fights over who gets the shower first, to someone walking around topless — this with a glance at Will, who says, “Come on, they’re just boobs, people.” Chloe assures her they don’t want to see them. Uh, is there any room for me in that cabin? Caitlin’s bed is still unoccupied, right?

Poppy sends Carter, Chloe, and Mystery Girl Camper — my apologies dear, I don’t know your character’s name — to fetch Sierra. Man, occasionally I’m amazed at how epically tall Carter (Ashley Fink) is compared to the other girls. Body diversity for the fucking win. When they’re gone, Poppy tells Becca that she’ll be her “make-believe mom” for the weekend, “like Wendy in Peter Pan!” Becca seems unthrilled. I guess the kids whose parents can’t make it get Poppy as a consolation prize.

Sharing circle! Dr. Gina wants to talk about parents’ weekend. Evidently having their parentals visit means they have the option to leave the confines of Camp Victory and eat out, and Dr. Gina asks them to make “healthy choices”. Then she asks who’s excited about seeing their folks. Will, Chloe, and Trent are! Ian is not. His parents fight constantly, so being around them is kinda stressful for him. “At home, at least, there’s like, Facebook.” Oh, if Ian were but a real boy I would totally Facebook-stalk him. And then Dr. Gina supplies: “Or, cake.” Hell, why not both? I know I personally deal with stress not by playing Rock Band or going to the gym, but by eating cake whilst using Facebook. One of you needs to create an “Eating cake whilst using Facebook” fan page. I would totally click the “like” button on that.

Dr. Gina asks Trent what he’s like totally stoked to do with his parents, brah, and Trent’s all, “Introducing my dad to my friends. It’ll be like tooootally bitchin’.” I lied about that last part. Trent’s cadence cracks my shit up, to the extent that I did an impersonation of it on one of the Fatcasts, which Marianne found very funny. Chloe smiles to herself at this, no doubt thinking he means her. Alistair looks forward to “being himself.” Dante wants to hug his mom. No, seriously. That’s so sweet. Girls, pay attention to how a boy treats his mother, or other female family members. It says a lot. Ian doubts Dante’s sincerity and they have a brief shouting match before Dr. Gina puts a lid on that shit.

Returning to Alistair’s comment, Dr. Gina asks Chloe if she feels the same way. “I know you two aren’t the same person, but since you are from the same family…” Where the hell did Dr. Gina get her PhD? The fifth moon of the planet Blunderdonia? Chloe’s look of mute shock says it all. Both Ian and Dante are all WHAAAAAT and Amber looks at Chloe with bewilderment, while Chloe blurts, “Yeah, so?” Dr. Gina abruptly ends the sharing circle.

As the campers disperse, Chloe approaches Alistair and asks to walk to the pool together. Is the guilt getting to her? Alistair’s not interested, and he leaves with Becca. Then, Dr. Gina asks Will to stay behind for a moment. Apparently her parents have emailed their regrets, but they won’t be there this weekend. But they need new assholes! And Will was going to create them! Will seethes and asks, in monotone, if there’s anything else. They’ve sent her a package. Maybe the package will be filled with unconditional love and support her parents have withheld! Yeah, I don’t think so either.

Pool time! Man, I wish we had a Boston chapter of Chunky Dunk but I don’t want to organize it. Dante swims past Chloe and uses it as an excuse to ask her to apologize to her brother for him. She tells Dante to do it himself.

Amber gets in the pool and joins Chloe, saying, “Something’s wrong with me.” What’s that, dear? “I’m just so stupid, I didn’t realize Alistair was your brother.” Here’s something I don’t miss about being a teenager: the egocentric conviction that everything is about you and your insecurities. Amber assumes the failure is hers, and not that Chloe was actively avoiding any association with her brother. She also didn’t know that Piznarski’s name is Dante. Chloe assures her, “Nobody did.” I did! Chloe’s worried that Amber’s mad at her for something, but Amber says, “I’m just weird. I’m just a big stupid weirdo.”

Elsewhere in the pool, Will is ranting about her parents’ impending absence. She had planned the installation of their new assholes so meticulously! How dare they not show up! Will: “I’m just a rage-filled donut right now!” Mmm. Rage-filled donut.

Will says Poppy’s going to be worried about her, and tells Becca they should stick together over the weekend. Maybe they can do the rune thing, finally! Becca gives her an icy “yeah, maybe” and swims away. Will’s face registers a tiny flicker of confusion.

In Dr. Gina’s office, Salty Dad is just hanging up the phone as Dr. Gina comes in. He tells her Wayne stopped by, and that he’s apparently been trying to call her. She knows. She was gonna call him back, but her grandmother dropped acid, freaked out, and hijacked a school bus full of penguins. The subject changes to the approaching parentals, and Dr. Gina says Will’s parents have just blown it off, which she calls “sickeningly selfish.” She also thinks it’s “weird” that Chloe and Alistair have been keeping their sibling status a secret. Salty Dad is unimpressed: “Better get yourself some curtains for that glass house.” Salty Dad accuses Dr. Gina of keeping him a secret — his being her dad, anyway. Oooh, burn.

In the common room that evening, Love Handles is on. Y’all, I wish Love Handles were a real show that took itself 100% seriously. The possibilities for epic camp are astounding. Our Luke surrogate introduces the challenge by saying, “Even though I’m a dot-com millionaire…” HAAAAAA. The fake contestants are to carry a plate of bacon to him without spilling it. Will asks, “Why is pork so funny?” I think bacon in particular is funny because it’s a food that we as a culture have decided is basically without nutritional merit. It’s fat and salt held together with a bit of meat. Chloe wants Will to shut up. One of the fake contestants confessionalizes: “So, you know how bacon’s greasy?” Will: “I used to, before I became a bacon nun!” Even Becca smiles over her book. The fake show goes to a fake commercial featuring a fake actress talking about how awesome it is to go to the gym all the time. The gym is called Core and it will “change you forever.” Will’s face falls and she looks almost morose. The room is silent as Amber looks down and tugs her shirt away from her stomach. Becca tries to keep up the critical commentary: “I live in a patriarchal society that assigns women merit based on their looks. That’s why I live.. Core.” She turns to Will and smiles, but Will just stares silently at the TV, looking more and more despondent.

Some time after, Will stands at the mail window to pick up the package her parents have sent. In it, there is a postcard with a picture of the Eiffel Tower, on which is written, “Can’t wait to see you in this! Love, Mom & Dad” The “this” is a pink fleece hoodie with the “Core” logo embroidered on it. In the source material for Huge, Will’s parents owned a chain of high-end health clubs, so this was not a surprise for me, but Will’s obvious wavering between sadness and anger is heartbreaking.

The commercials feature an ad for the “Lysol No Touch Hand Soap System”, a gadget that uses a motion sensor to squirt soap in your hand. The promo text reads: “Never touch a germy soap pump again!” I find this hysterical for some reason. If you’re afraid of your soap pump, wouldn’t you also be afraid of touching the faucet? THE FILTH THE FILTH IT IS EVERYWHERE.

And the day has come: the parentals are arriving. I think I spy one same-sex couple so far. Some parentals are fat, some are not. This whole thing is making me EXTREMELY NERVOUS. Ian, too, apparently, as he fidgets beside Will, looking for his own folks. He doesn’t want to inflict his parents on anyone, apparently, because just being around them is a constant source of tension. Poor Ian: “They’ll argue about anything! Anything! This shirt!” referencing the plain beige t-shirt he has on.* Will: “That shirt is pretty polarizing.” Finally, they arrive, and Ian crosses the field to collect a two-parent hug, leaving Will on her own.

Amber is also on her own, looking around anxiously for her mom. Chloe comes over to talk, when she spots Trent standing with his dad — who is tall and athletic and very familiar, though I can’t place him — and pregnant stepmom across the field. Trent sees her as well, and smiles broadly, which his dad picks up on. He wants to guess which girl Trent likes, and guesses Amber, to which Trent says, “Well, actually–” but his dad cuts him off with such conviction that Trent doesn’t correct him. When stepmom tries to intervene, Trent’s Dad asserts, “I happen to know this guy really well. Am I right?” Awkward (DRINK!). Trent, not wanting to let his father down, nods unenthusiastically, which gets him put in a playful headlock.

Chloe, well out of earshot but able to see the trio, catches Trent’s attention and gestures to ask if she should come over to be introduced. Trent first pretends not to understand, and then turns his back to her. Burn. Amber, clueless as ever, is fixated on her no-show mom, and says she’s going back to the cabin. Chloe stands alone, watching Trent and his parents, verging on tears.

Elsewhere on the parental-meeting ground, Becca is in the midst of talking shit about Will to Alistair — she thought they were friends! — when Will comes over and asks if Becca wants to shoot some hoops. Becca quietly says no, refusing to look at Will. Will is confused, aware that something’s wrong but totally oblivious to what it might be. After a few awkward (DRINK!) moments of silence, she leaves. Becca is all, SEE? SEE? Apparently she’s mad that Will wants to hang out now that her parents aren’t coming. On the one hand, I think Becca’s entitled to feel a little taken for granted by Will, but on the other, Will wasn’t exactly looking forward to having a splendid time with her folks, leaving Becca behind, but was rather hell bent on reaming them out and forcing them to leave.

Alistair and Chloe’s parents have arrived, and Chloe gets to them first. Alistair, still chatting with Becca, is in no hurry, and so they get a chance to survey him from afar. His mom says, “He has definitely slimmed down,” while his dad argues, “He looks the same to me.” They call him and Becca over — do remember that Becca and Chloe were BFFs last year, so she’s met Chloe’s parentals before.

Dante and his mom are sitting together, and she tells him how good he looks. “How bad did I look before?” Dante inquires. His mom assures him she didn’t mean it like that. See, this is the problem with our habit of telling someone they “look good” when what we really mean is that it is good to see them. Mom catches Dante watching Chloe and asks if she’s a girl he likes. He says no, and tells her not to ask questions like that. She agrees sheepishly.

Chloe is getting her folks some lemonade, and so is Trent. As she pours, she says, “Trent?” inquiringly, uncertainly, almost pleadingly. Then she says, “Hi,” half to him, half to his family, to which Trent responds — awkwardly (DRINK!) — “Oh, hi,” and then promptly turns away from her again, saying to his stepmom, “Here’s your drink,” ostentatiously neglecting to introduce them. Chloe, wounded, walks away. Damn. Girlfriend is going to need some aloe to soothe all the mad burns she’s getting in this episode thus far.

Ian’s parents are telling him a charming story about almost running out of gas on their way there, and they are not fighting at all. Ian seems to be waiting for a bomb to go off, but his parentals are cheerful and gracious with each other.

For the record: this is the point at which I began to suspect what would ultimately come of this subplot. Just putting that out there.

Alistair’s dad wants to know what sports he’s playing. Becca volunteers that he’s been playing softball, and that he’s good at it. Alistair says he’s enjoying yoga. Mom thinks this is wonderful, but dad has to comment, “Yoga’s not a sport.” Mom asks Becca if her parents are there, and Becca says no. Mom then asks after her grandmother, who apparently came to visit during Parents’ Weekend last year. No, she couldn’t come. Well, then Becca should join them for dinner. Mom then makes a comment about Becca and Alistair “finding each other” and oh, she thinks they’re a couple. Alistair is totally willing to go with this, and Becca begins her new role as Alistair’s beard.

In the girls’ cabin, Amber sits worrying about whether her mom is going to turn up. Carter comes in with her rail-thin big sister. Finally Amber’s mom comes in, like a massive whirlwind of annoyingness. OMG! OMG! I’m here! Wow! Amber’s so thin! She shouldn’t get too thin! No, that’s a joke! Wait, Carter’s sister is really thin! Why is she here? Oh she’s visiting! Oh okay! Carter’s sister looks deeply self-conscious when called out like this.

Amber shows her mom her bunk, and introduces Carter and — halfheartedly — Will, who is lying in her bunk with her headphones on. Amber’s mom looks at Will and whispers, “Is she the one we hate?” Amber flails for a moment and corrects her, “We don’t — really hate her.” Mom: “Oh, so she IS the one.” Ugh. Amber’s mom wants to go to the yoga demonstration, and in her rambling mentions that on the drive up, she thought “Indigo’s car” was going to blow up. Will asks, “You know someone named Indigo?” Amber’s mom explains, rather haughtily for my taste, “My sister’s name is Indigo, my name is Teal, and I named my baby Amber. I am colorful.”

At one point does a person pass over the threshold from charmingly wacky to dementedly irritating? I think we’re there already. In the bathroom, Amber’s mom loudly announces, “What the hell, I’ve got my period! I’m supposed to be in menopause.” Poppy volunteers to get a tampon but Amber quietly tells her it has to be a pad. Her mom pokes her head out of the bathroom: “My uterus is tipped, for real,” gesturing, “like a teeter-totter.”

Will has stormed outside to escape the crazy; I don’t blame her, man. She’s sitting on the cabin steps, still listening to her headphones, as Salty Dad walks by with a basket of tomatoes. He enlists her help with dinner, and Will goes along.

Inside the boys’ cabin, Trent and his dad are standing and not talking. Of course, it is awkward (DRINK!). I’m assuming pregnant stepmom is in the bathroom. At this point I realize that the whole parents’-weekend event is a fucking misery. This is terrible. Everything is terrible! You’re terrible, Muriel. Dad asks if Trent’s been “working out,” which, duh, but Trent says he’s been doing “other things” too. THESE THINGS DO NOT INCLUDE HAVING SEMINUDE PILLOWFIGHTS WITH THE OTHER BOYS, I MUST NOTE. Pregnant stepmom comes out of the bathroom and Trent’s dad is all are you okay? Is everything okay? Are you sure? Do you need to sit down? Go back to the hotel? Ugh, he’s one of those expectant fathers. Ian comes in, pointedly telling his parents, “I’ll be right out!” but they come inside anyway. When Trent’s dad hears Ian’s name, he says, “This is the famous Ian? We’ve heard a lot about you.” Ian: “You have?” Ian’s mom: “You have?” Ha. Trent proceeds to hijack Ian’s parents to show them the camp garden.

In the kitchen, Salty Dad is educating Will on tomatoes. Dr. Gina, walking by in the background, stops to eavesdrop as Salty Dad instructs Will on knife technique, and when she says she’s never cooked anything, as he supportively tells her she’s “a natural”. Aww. Of course Dr. Gina’s phone beeps at the precise wrong moment, but she avoids discovery by ducking and beating it out of there. Turns out it’s a text from Jonathan.

In the yoga demonstration, George leads the class as the parents and kids follow along together. Amber’s mom is only watching, but is involved enough to stage-whisper “Good for you!” to Chloe and Alistair’s wheelchair-using mom as she participates. Oh. My. God. Chloe’s mom just ignores her. Amber’s mom goes on to explain that she’d try it too, except she has cramps, and then begins to tell of her tipped uterus again, while Amber loudly shushes her. George invites Amber’s mom to join in, and she does so, whispering to Amber how cute George is. Amber’s reached her limit and wants to leave. Now. She covers by telling her mom she wants to spend time alone together.

They get back to the girls’ cabin, which Amber’s mom calls “dirty”, then says she’s just kidding, but no, it really is dirty and they should clean it, for what the camp costs. Amber says she wants to hear how her mom is doing. “You’re so funny,” says mom. “You’re gone, and I’m stuck with my bitch of a sister. How do you think I’m doing?” Damn, y’all, if I had to live with this I’d probably save up for fat camp too. Hell, maybe boarding school. Mom has no filter at all. She then tells Amber to ignore her, she just misses her daughter. Then she presents Amber with a shoebox. Amber’s excited until she discovers that it contains cookies. Uh oh.

Dante’s mom comes into the boys’ cabin to use the bathroom, and finds Alistair knitting alone. They bond over their shared passion for knitting, until Dante comes in and mom goes to attend to nature’s call. Alistair puts his knitting on his bunk and leaves without speaking a word to Dante. Once he’s gone, Dante gets his journal and pulls out a page on which something is already written. He hides it under Alistair’s knitting.

In the girls’ cabin, Amber pulls her mom outside, explaining that she has to ditch the cookies, because she’ll get in trouble if she’s caught with them. Her mom doesn’t get it, and tells Amber just not to tell anyone. Finally Amber lies and says she can keep them in the camp kitchen. Instead, she takes the cookie-shoebox to the laundry room and stashes it behind a washer.

Alistair and Chloe are headed out to dinner with their parents. Chloe asks Alistair if they can just pretend everything’s fine while their folks are there, and then after that he can go back to hating her. Alistair refuses to pretend, just as Becca approaches. “Really?” asks Chloe, referring to his fake girlfriend.

In the mess hall, Amber’s mom is telling the assembled table that this place is awfully “dirty” to cost so much, but Amber wanted to spend her own money on it. Amber, in the meantime, is sitting, back rigid, intently chewing and staring at the ceiling, seemingly wishing she were anywhere else in the world but here with her mom. “Why are you chewing like that?” asks Amber’s mom. “That’s how she always chews,” says Dante, helpfully.

Ian’s parents have a perfectly reasonable and friendly conversation about where to sit, and once they’ve walked off, Ian stands, open-mouthed, while a bemused Will says wryly, “Wow, I’m sorry I had to see that.” Ian says his parents have been behaving like this all day. Will suggests maybe they’ve gotten into couples counseling, which Ian says is impossible. Call me cynical, but my money is on a divorce announcement later in this episode.

Chloe and Alistair and their parents are waiting for a table at a restaurant when Trent and his parents come in. Trent introduces them as “Alistair, we’re in the same cabin, this is Becca, and this is Chloe… his… sister.” I am surprised that particular burn did not set off the building’s smoke alarms. Chloe, at least, is reaching the point where crying or beating the shit out of Trent are equally-possible options.

Of course, the families must now eat together, to maximize the awkwardness (DRINK!). Alistair is concerned by the portion sizes. Trent’s dad and stepmom agree to split a plate, which gives Alistair the idea to suggest the same to Becca. Trent asks Chloe if she wants to split, and Chloe’s like, “Fuck yoooou! (Ooo, ooo, ooo!)” Not really, but the sentiment is there. Instead she decides on ordering, “Fettucine alfredo with extra sauce, extra cheese, and a side of fried clams.” Her parents exchange looks, her mom concerned, her dad… almost angry. Now ain’t that some shit? (Ain’t that some shit!)

As a means of changing the subject, Chloe’s mom asks Becca why her grandmother didn’t come this year. Becca pauses for a split second before responding, as bluntly as possible, “She died.” Chloe’s mom looks stricken. Even Chloe is visibly moved, from which we can assume that Becca was probably being raised by her grandmother, or was at least very close to her. Naturally, this revelation brings the already-morose tenor of the dinner party to an absolute low.

Back at camp, Dr. Gina is making an announcement in the crowded mess hall — which turns out to be that she is grateful to have her own father with her this year. She turns and asks Salty Dad if he has anything to say, and Salty Dad gives us a thoughtful, “No seconds,” and giving Dr. Gina the most affectionate look we’ve seen yet. The campers smile. Aww.

After dinner, Ian and his parents are walking when his dad suggests they sit down for a bit. No sooner have their asses hit the benches of the picnic table does Ian’s mom begin, “We love you, so much.” Oh shit, they really are getting divorced. Damn this show. Ian asks if one of them is dying. Nope. Are they in couples therapy? Yes! And it’s helped. Then the hammer falls. “It’s helped us realize that we need to be apart.” To make it extra extra clear, Ian’s dad states definitively, “We’re getting divorced.” Ian tries to process it, tries to be calm and understanding for his parents, he even smiles.

It’s only alone in the laundry room later that he throws his basket of dirty clothes down and cries. I had trouble watching this scene. Divorce, they say, is emotionally harder on a kid than the death of a parent, and I fucking believe it. They also say that divorce is hardest on girls when they’re younger and boys when they’re older. I was a good eight years younger than Ian, but this scene still gave me a familiar sinking feeling, and I have another of my constant urges to crawl inside this story and give a character a hug, to promise it really will be okay.

A little predictably, Ian finds Amber’s hidden cookies. I’m not really loving this cookie subplot, I’ve got to say. He opens the bag and inhales deeply –

– and delivers them directly to Dr. Gina.

Chloe, Alistair, and Becca are returning from dinner and piling out of the parentals’ minivan. As their parents drive away, Chloe says in Alistair’s general direction: “I feel sick. I should have split with Trent.” Trent? Who’s Trent? Oh, you mean the guy who refuses to acknowledge his relationship with you to his parents? Alistair and Becca ignore Chloe and walk off together. Chloe: “Alistair? When you see Trent, can you tell him I said that?” Alistair: “Tell him yourself.”

Alistair walks Becca back to her cabin, remarking on how “date-y” it is. Becca tells him he’ll make a good boyfriend for somebody. Becca “can’t imagine ever going on a date in reality” and Alistair tells her to think of it as LARPing. Becca: “I cast level 9 flirtation!” But then she revises: “What am I saying? I’m level 9 awkwardness.” (Does it count if “awkward” is used in a quote? I say yes. DRINK!) Outside her cabin, Alistair asks if Becca knew he was Chloe’s twin when they met, and Becca says she guessed it based on his uncommon name. She never brought it up because she didn’t want to talk about it — her hurt from being cast aside as Chloe’s BFF is too fresh. Alistair rightly tells Becca she shouldn’t waste energy worrying about what Chloe thinks. Becca should be like, “Fuck yoooou! (Ooo, ooo, ooo!)” Alistair kisses Becca’s hand and says good night, while Becca lingers, ostensibly trying to work out whether she has a crush on Alistair or not.

Inside the girls’ cabin, Amber’s mom — Teal — continues to be the most annoying force in the known universe. When Poppy tells her the evening bell has sounded and she has to go, Amber’s mom asks, “Can’t I stay the night? Please? Pippy?” Poor Poppy tries to explain it’s not allowed, when Teal points at Carter’s sister and says, “She’s staying.” Carter’s sister hides behind her magazine as much as she can, as Teal is told that Carter’s sister got permission in advance. Well, Teal would have too, if someone had told her! Poppy doesn’t budge until Teal is all feigned resignation and adept manipulation and, “oh, ignore me, I’ll just sleep in the car.” Well, we know where Amber is learning this shit. Poppy relents and before she even finishes the sentence, Teal is all YAAAAY! because that is what she expected all along.

Amber bolts for the laundry room under pretense of having left something in the washer. She finds the cookies have vanished. What now?

Inside Dr. Gina’s office, she’s staring at the bag of cookies. She gets up and sticks them in a filing cabinet. My god y’all, they’re just cookies. They’re not heroin! They’re not plutonium! They’re not the fucking ebola virus! They’re cookies. I am a little enraged by the cookiephobia here. Dr. Gina steps back and stares at the cookie-infested filing cabinet when she gets a text. Jonathan is still trying to booty-call her. Fuck yoooooou. (Ooo, ooo, ooo!) Actually she just texts him back, “No.” Then there’s a knock at the door. It’s Wayne! With a basket of tomatoes from his garden. Damn, he gardens too? Wayne is a catch. Apparently Salty Dad called and asked him to bring some tomatoes for parents’ weekend. Oh, that meddling Salty Dad!

Dr. Gina can’t keep her eyes off the filing cabinet, stuffed as it is with cookie-based explosives. She asks Wayne to get the cookies and take them home. THEY’RE! JUST! COOKIEEEEES! I get that Dr. Gina has an eating disorder, and if she were the only one reacting with abject terror to the cookie-presence, I’d probably be more understanding here, but I’m irked that nobody is being critical of this whole OH GOD WON’T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE COOKIES madness. Wayne agrees, and decides this is also a good time to make out. All right! I bet Wayne is a good kisser.

Back in the girls’ cabin, Amber is laying out a sleeping bag on the floor when her mom marches over and asks if she should just leave. She then drags Amber outside and accuses her of not wanting her there. Mom is a total co-dependent freak show. Amber apologizes — for what, we don’t know — and then so does her mom: “I keep saying stupid things, and I’m just a big stupid weirdo.” Man, I still don’t like Amber, but she certainly has my condolences. Mom goes back on the defensive saying Amber “doesn’t know what it’s been like” and demanding that Amber tell her she wants her to stay.

Once inside, Amber seeks out Will, who’s sitting in the shower — the water’s not on — listening to her headphones and drawing on the postcard from her parents. “You still have that food, right?” Amber means Will’s stash from the first week. Will cautiously says yes, it’s buried in the woods. Amber “really needs some.” And thus when everyone is asleep, Will and Amber sneak out, flashlights in hand, to find and dig up Will’s contraband, bringing us full circle.

Almost. Because we get a “…to be continued.”

Next week: This preview trailer actually made me say OH NOES! aloud. It seems Ian and Amber share an intimate moment and I predict OUTRAGE — and possibly the gathering of pitchforks and torches and an angry mob — amongst Will/Ian shippers, which seems to be happening already on the Huge Facebook page.

—

* Incidentally, remember Ian’s giant fork t-shirt from the Talent Night episode? I do, because I found it hilarious. You can get your own — up to a men’s 3XL — at this Etsy shop.

NB: Right, so, I wrote this for Friday and then completely forgot to post it.

Okay, one more week with Playlist.com! I still haven’t had time to play with Grooveshark, darn it. For my international readers: evidently the licensing issue is going to be a problem no matter what service I use, and as I said before I am reluctant to host tracks myself and risk the wrath of the RIAA. I’m bummed about it, but unless anyone else has a new suggestion, I’m at a loss here.

1. “Doing the Unstuck” // The Cure. “It’s a perfect day for letting go — for setting fire to bridges, boats, and other dreary worlds you know — let’s get happy.” Anytime anyone disparages The Cure as uniformly depressing, I play them this song. It also transports me, without fail, to my sophomore year of high school.
2. “Float On” // Modest Mouse. I am not one of these old-school Modest Mouse fans. Indeed, my lack of radio exposure means I had never even heard them prior to “Float On” appearing on Rock Band, a game which has introduced me to many a pop song that otherwise would have slipped between the cracks of my awareness. I’m still not a Modest Mouse fan — I bought the album from which this track is taken years ago, but ridiculously, have only listened to it maybe once all the way through — but I still really love this song. (Aside to my dad, who really digs these playlists: lyrics!)
3. “Dream a Little Dream of Me” // The Mamas and the Papas. This is, in my humble opinion, one of the most epically underrated pop songs of all time. OF ALL TIME. Magical.
4. “One two three four” // Feist. Speaking of magical. This was the song that finally got me on the Leslie Feist bandwagon, my suspicion is that the horn section is what did it. I am oddly picky about my folksy artists — the ones I love (Suzanne Vega, Robyn Hitchcock) I love tons, but it takes something special to get me on side. This song, and her collaboration with Kings of Convenience, were sufficient.
5. “Extraordinary Machine” // Fiona Apple. “If there was a better way to go then it would find me / I can’t help it, the road just rolls out behind me / Be kind to me, or treat me mean / I’ll make the most of it, I’m an extraordinary machine.” Enough said.

I am having another slow blogging week, and thus I am returning to the well and revisiting/reblogging another old post.

The “gnomes” story reproduced below was just written this past February, but is much beloved, both by me and evidently by many of you, if the emails I get about it — three in the past week alone! — are any indication. It began with a question on my now-practically-abandoned Formspring page (I do want to get back to it, it just became overwhelming!), and here I must use the word “question” as a vague shadow of its fuller meaning, since the inquirer is clearly less interested in my thoughtful response than in trying to provoke an emotional reaction simply by the asking. Lately, we’ve had the misfortune to witness this sort of fat-baiting writ large, and I never cease to be fascinated by the way in which so many of these attacks — if you can call them attacks — rely not on acerbic wit or creative insults, but instead nearly all of their intended cruelty depends upon an assumed negative reaction to the word “fat”. It is enough, in most respectable quarters, for this word to be spat upon someone like a disease; fat is such a powerful word, in fact, that many believe it needs no further context in order to efficiently destroy and silence a person. How else can we explain “insults” such as commenter drst describes, following a skirmish with Anti-Fat Extremists:

I got two messages in my inbox overnight calling me fat. I mean that’s all the messages said. One went something like “You are a fattie fat fat fat fat…” but there was nothing else in the messages.

I hadn’t encountered a situation like this since before I found FA, because most people you encounter face to face don’t throw the f-word around casually. I’m rather relieved my only response to these messages was derisive laughter. I mean, really? That’s it? That’s all you’ve got? I posted a FA message to some haters and the only response they can throw at me is to call me fat? How sad.

This, my loves, is why the process of reclamation — as much as I loathe the term — is so important, and so healing. Preventing people from saying a word is impossible; the more taboo it is, the more folks want to say it, and thus the more power it develops to do real damage when it is finally, inevitably spoken aloud. But as we have recently seen in the news regarding Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s “n-word”-strewn racism joyride, the solution is not simply to say our forbidden words because we can, damning the consequences. The solution is to recontextualize those words, and for that process to be led by the individuals against whom the word has been used. Fat is not a bad word, nor does it need to be a hateful word. Unlike most racial epithets, it is not a word that has a long and violent history of oppression, human misery, and pain — its use as a negative is a relatively recent development, and as such it is a much easier word to reframe as a value-free descriptor, or even as a positive assessment.

And so, to bring this overlong intro to a close: back in February I was asked this question. And the blandness of it — the obviousness of it — was so utterly absurd that I was delighted. Of all the things to ask. I responded thusly:

Q. Why are you so fat ? , its disgusting really .

A. I’ve only written about 100,000 words on this subject just in the past year alone, but since you’ve asked so thoughtfully, I’ll sum up: It was gnomes. Magical invisible fat-making gnomes.

My fatness was first hewn out of flesh from one of the gnomes’ sacred pigs (a majestic animal that was, alas, ritually sacrificed for this purpose), and then, after an arduous process of transubstantiation, I was given life and sent forth into the world for some mysterious as-yet-undisclosed reason, though my suspicions are that bacon is somehow involved. This is where all fat people come from, and having revealed these facts to you and the world at large by answering this question, I will very shortly be spirited away to the gnomes’ reeducation camp, if I am not hanged for treason. That is the truth.

So farewell, my fat-disgusted friend, I hope you appreciate my heavy sacrifice, as I appreciate the heavy burden you must bear in being forced to witness the fatness of all who waddle forth from the gnomes’ secret pig-sacrificing fat-person-building bacon-worshipping kingdom.

Even now I hear them at my door. My time is short. Farewell, farewe—!

You mustn’t ask me what happened when I was interrupted, nor how I managed my escape, to return to this blog and my mission to expose the fatmakers’ plans for pudgy world domination. Suffice to say that Fat Satan owed me a favor. And I’m still here, right? And we’re all happy about that.