So thin is NOT in?

Interesting Yankee game yesterday… the Yankees WON, but only by one run… and Sabathia LOST, but he struck out eight and held the Yankees to four hits. That one run was the result of a home run from Melky Cabrera, who also happens to be on my team. I decided to bench C.C. instead of playing him against the Yankees… but the funny thing is, he ended up with more points for this loss than he had for his first four games of the season COMBINED. So even though he technically lost the game, I’m still greatly encouraged by his improved pitching. Hopefully I won’t need to be buying any more Sabathia Suckscream this season…

So the other night I stayed up until about two in the morning, because I’d started watching this interesting show on Discovery. It was about a tribe of people in Uganda who arrange marriages for their young people – which, in itself, isn’t so unusual. But once the marriage is arranged, the bride-to-be is forced to eat and drink all sorts of fattening foods so she’ll gain weight. Because in this particular tribe, “fat” is also considered “beautiful.”

It was rather fascinating to see how what is considered “attractive” in one part of the world might be considered unattractive somewhere else. Our standards of beauty are obviously influenced by the society to which we are accustomed. Here, it seems that Hollywood often dictates what is “beautiful,” and the only way to achieve a tiny size-zero frame is to eat ridiculously small amounts of food or exercise excessively (or perhaps some torturous combination of the two). Whereas for this tribe in Uganda, “fat” is the ideal. And to achieve it, the girls embark upon an equally unhealthy regime – instead of taking in far too few calories and working out until the point of exhaustion, they drink copious amounts of whole milk, eat butter, and limit their activity to sleeping.

I was a bit disturbed to hear the documentary team interviewing the bride-to-be. This girl was only seventeen years old, and had been happily attending school before her aunt and uncle (raising her since her parents died) literally traded her for ten cows. They got ten cows from a teenaged boy’s family, and the teenaged boy was promised a wife. The girl, however, had dreams of finishing school and moving on to college and perhaps exploring parts of the world other than her own. But once those cows exchanged hands, that was it – she was stuck. She was forced to spend the next four months before her marriage in a “fattening hut,” where her grandmother watched her drink gallons of milk every day and threatened to beat her with a stick if she didn’t finish it all. That teenaged boy couldn’t wait to see his fattened-up bride at the wedding, but the poor girl just wanted to go to college and live her OWN life.

And I just felt so sad when I was watching the show – because not only was this girl forced to gain weight because of an ideal of “beauty” just as unrealistic as our own “size zeros”, but she also longed for a life other than the one she happened to be stuck in. Will she be happy one day? Or will she spend her life wondering how things might have turned out if she’d been able to avoid the arranged marriage, and gone to school, and ate like a normal person so she could just be HERSELF and not someone ELSE’S idea of perfection? Will she, for the rest of her life, assume the grass is greener on the other side of the “fattening hut”?? I guess it doesn’t matter WHAT part of the world you live in – you could be in a modern, metropolitan city or in the middle of the Ugandan wilderness, and STILL struggle with self-image and an obligation to please others before yourself. The culture may be different, but the basic human wants and fears are the same.

And at the moment, my fear is that I won't be able to drink milk for weeks...