Dopp Juice Archive

On April 1st, I sent my whole extended family this letter:

Hey Everybody, Family I love,

I wanted to wait until it was totally official. I don't know why... It just seemed like if I told you in advance everyone would want to get on a plane, and things are rough in the economy right now so we don't need to be doing that... so maybe we can just celebrate this summer at the reunion, okay?

I got married.

OMIGOD I'M MARRIED!!!!!

AHHHHHH!!!!!!

Okay, I'm still running on the high. So sorry if this email isn't making much sense. It happened so fast. I met her in the garden store about a month ago (I know, so domestic, right?) and she's perfect, and she fixes all the part of me that are weird, and we're amazing together, and you're totally going to love her. We moved in together almost immediately... and I'm sorry I didn't tell you about it... i don't know, it's dumb, but part of me was afraid you'd judge me.

Anyway, we had to go to Canada to get married because it's not legal in California. Thank god Canadians understand that who we choose to love is as unique as our personalities. They treated us really well, and we got questioned a little at the border, but we only had to fill out one form, so that was cool.

Oh! Pictures! Here's one of us together:

http://sarahdopp.com/images/weddingphoto.jpg

Everyone says we're really cute together.

About her... she's young, ambitious (has been growing a lot lately), bright, cheerful, a little fresh sometimes. Gorgeous. Uhh.... I guess you'll have to meet her. This summer!

Anyway, love you all, and thank you so much for being the most supportive family in the world.

xoxo,
Sarah

My mother wrote back first with…

what a great wedding photo! I love it. Congratulations. and ..and and...don't DO THIS TO ME SARAH!!!!!

Love you,
Mom

My cousin followed generously with…

Would pruning sheers be considered a practical or an S&M-style wedding gift?

My uncle expressed his concerns:

Sarah,

Although I want you to know that I am very, very happy for you I have seen so many partnerships like this end with one partner complaining in tears that the other partner just sits there looking out the window and never talks, never wants to go anyplace, doesn’t share tastes in music, movies or even food. I know that your generation doesn’t want to hear my generation’s skepticism about “unconventional” relationships, but it’s just that we have seen so much heartbreak through the years.

I’m sure I speak for all your aunts and uncles when I say that we will support you now and always . . . no matter what happens.

But my aunt smoothed it over…

Sarah, Sarah, SARAH!! You look so happy together! As an energy practitioner, I just hope that she is well grounded and well rooted. I'm sending you one of those "food of the month" gifts to you and your beloved so be looking for Jobe's plant spikes coming in the mail soon. And yes, don't do that to your mother (and vicariously your AUNTS) again!

Excited about the fun responses, I passed the email around to several friends, including the man I’d been seeing lately. His response:

Sarah,

I always knew that you'd move on one day.

And I had heard about being cast aside via email.

This was so abrupt.

sadly...

He’ll move on. He’ll be okay. …right?

I’ve always traveled in gamer circles and never been a gamer. I don’t what it is about them, but I love the gamer types — they’re passionate, geeky, focused, funny, creative…. something. Or maybe it’s just that everyone in the world is a gamer except me, and that’s why I always feel surrounded. Regardless, for the last 15 years or so, I’ve always taken the emergence of a video game console or colorful set of 20-sided dice as my cue to leave a party and call it a night.

So I was rather surprised at myself when I bought a Nintendo Wii in January. Maybe it was my rebellion against feeling socially excluded for so long — this Wii is mine, all mine. Or maybe I just thought it would fit me.

I ditched Wii Sports immediately (I hate sports), bought a Wii Fit (which is a nice way to get myself to move when I don’t want to leave my house), picked up House of the Dead and some gun accessories for zombie-killing date nights (way more romantic than you might imagine), and splurged on Super Paper Mario Bros (which I love).

Here’s what my Wii has taught me so far…

#1) I get really excited when I can figure out a strategy on my own. I don’t want to be told how to do things — I want to be given information to work with and make my own decisions. Even if I’m going to come to the same conclusions everyone else did and, really, we could have just saved me an hour just by spelling it out up front… I won’t love it unless I came up with it myself.

#2) I pay attention to feedback when it can help me refine my strategies. Otherwise, I ignore it. Points, music, flashing colors, info bars, whatever… if I recognize that it can help me do something better, it’s on my radar. If I don’t, it may as well not exist.

#3) I want to be able to test and refine my strategies immediately, as soon as I come up with them. A game is addictive to me when there is minimal barrier between “Oh, I think I know what I should have done differently,” and trying that out.

#4) I like kid stuff. I don’t care how much I grow up, I think I’m always going to like something that’s simple, colorful, and pleasantly engaging… as long as I can connect with it without messing with my social reputation too much.  And Wii is cool, so I’m okay.

#5) With my lifestyle, I’m probably going to get RSI. My Wii arm gently informed my mousing arm of this fact. And the RSI is probably going to be because of my mousing arm, not my Wii arm.  And I should probably do something about that likelihood sooner rather than later.  Argh.

Okay, so that last one was a downer. But the rest were really intriguing to me, and I want to apply them to web development and community management somehow.

What patterns have you noticed about your brain in gaming?

I have a friend who’s bigger than me. He’s in his fifties and has big arms, big legs, and a convex belly that’s soft to curl up against.  It’s Sunday today, so he’ll probably be running 12 miles this afternoon — he’s training for the Alcatraz Triathlon. This would probably concern me (they built that prison on that island so people would DIE if they tried to escape and swim away!!), except that he’s already done it twice.

I have another friend who’s petite, thin, and beautiful. Her arms, legs, and belly are small and firm, and they look like they came straight off an airbrushed magazine cover.   She’s in her thirties, and she will probably be thin and gorgeous her entire life.  She never ever exercises, and she eats whatever she wants.

The idea that body size and body fitness are separate things is a fairly new concept for me.  I grew up thinking that big meant bad (lazy, unhealthy, ugly) and small meant good (active, healthy, beautiful). Unfortunately, at 5’10” with a large bone structure, it didn’t really matter how much I exercised, I was always going to be big.

My mother and I spent a long time being at odds with each other on this subject (we’re now on neutral, mutually-respectful territory, and I should mention she’ll probably read this post — hi Mom!).  She, too, was conditioned by experiences and culture to equate big with bad and small with good,  and she passed some of that on to me.  More than that, though, she believed that exercising makes you happier (it does), and hoped to heal some of my adolescent depression by encouraging me to go to the gym.  Her intentions were in the right place, but when paired with the “big = bad” philosophy, this encouragement just poked more holes in my self-esteem. She was saying, “I want you to love yourself more,” and I heard, “You’re not good enough the way you are.”

I probably don’t have to explain how any attempt to express, “You should go to a gym,” can easily come out wrong.  But it’s worth mentioning that even her attempts at positive reinforcement were thwarted by the screwed up body image culture.  I heard any compliment about my body (“You’ve gotten skinnier!”) as “What you weigh is very important to me.” This further reinforced the big = bad, small = good problem, and reminded me that I’ll always be big. You can’t win at a game with broken rules.

Moving to San Francisco and meeting phenomenal people like Debbie Notkin and Laurie Toby Edison (who put out a beautiful book of artsy nude photos of fat women called Women En Large, and who also write the body image activist blog, Body Impolitic) changed a lot for me. They explained to me that our cultural aversion to large bodies is severely disproportionate to our interest in being healthy, and that a lot of the time the two are completely unrelated.  Debbie and Laurie’s work also helped me unlock another part of my brain that had been shamed into hibernation: I find confident, curvy women hot! Even further?  Big men are hot, too.

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