tamidon | pathological

pathological

When I started cooking there were very few women in kitchens, less than even today's low numbers,and I was very concious of it. I never asked for help with heavy things unless it would cause me serious injury, or if it was something any guy in the place would ask for help with. Skip up to taday, and I'm still like that. I never ask for help, and I almost always refuse offers of help. I went today to our butcher to pick up a case of veal bones. The guy brings it up and yells,"hey Joey, can you take it out to her car?" I tell him "Don't worry I got it."
Joey shows up 'let me take that out to your car"

"No really, I've got it"

"You sure you can carry that?"

grr...

"Son, I've been in this business too long to let boys help me carry my shit, really"

Throw 45# box up on my shoulder and walk out the door...

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Yep.

I only ask for help carrying if I'm going to hurt myself trying to do it on my own. My boss hates it.

When I carried heavy things in China, men would ask me all the time if I needed help. (This happened in Africa too.) So I learned to say in Chinese, "Listen, I could carry YOU if I had to. Look how much bigger I am than you!"

Then I got to carry my own 70-lb backpacks and shove people out of my way onto trains.

*sigh* I miss the good old days. :)

yup.

i'm not as butch as i want to be, but i can carry more than it apparently looks like i can. and when someone tries to take an object away from me, when it's a piece of my own furniture in my own house, and when i have said "no really, i've got it," it really makes me want to break something.

it really makes me want to break something.

usually the heavy thing you're carrying, over the person's head, yes?

AND it makes me feel weaker when I DO ask for help, because people spend a lot of time insisting that I can't carry that. Whatever it is.

You go girl!

So, where you, and all those strong women hide when I need them?

Lots of heavy boxes lifting around here, as you know...

*adores your macho*

Buh? Didn't you take a job where you're EXPECTED to carry heavy things? How can he hate it?

the same thing happens to me in the garden industry. only once did someone get really *insistent* that they help, and that bugged me, but it was almost a customer service thing. The latino boys who i collaborate with sometimes are always offering to carry shit for me, but they do it in more of a chivalrous way, like running ahead of me to grab something before i can do it--then they blush shyly because they think they're helping me. which is kind of nice, because the white guys wait, leaning against the shovels, to see you bend over so they can look at your ass.

Becky, one of the fiddlers in The Homespun Ceilidh Band (http://www.homespunceilidh.com) doesn't strike me as being at all butch[*]. But I'm pretty sure she's the strongest or second-strongest person in the band (Allon, our soundman might be a little stronger, I'm not sure; Mike may be as strong, but Becky at least makes lifting stuff look easier). She's the one who has the least apparent difficulty slinging the main speakers around or helping Allon get loaded equipment cases out to his van. She doesn't look obviously muscular (though she is tall ... and once you watch her in action you start looking closer at how her muscles work and can start to see how they're disguised ... thing is, first impression doesn't shout "muscle"), but one gets used to seeing her grabbing the heavy things, and usually letting her be the one to control how quickly the speaker comes doen when two or three of us go to lower the speaker stands and pull the speakers off them. When one of the guys grabs something heavy instead of her, it's only because we just happened to get there first; all but the strongest of us are more likely to step aside and let her grab the heavier of two objects simply because she's less likely to hurt herself.

Becky's power:mass ratio is a little scary and more than a little cool to observe.

[*] Not that she's frilly über-femme, either; to me she comes across as just "modern woman", unambiguously feminine without that coming across as being a noteworthy point on the butch/femme scale, if the the way I'm phrasing this makes any sense at all.

CAn you come carry MY boxes? :-)

(I *HATE* the fact that I can't lift anything heavier than a matchbox without risking putting my back out and laying me up for days, in large part because of the sheer paheticness of having to ask strong looking people [yes, generally men] for help.)

"heavy" for me in his world is ~25 pounds.

"heavy" for me is ~50.

which is a high enough percentage of my weight that I can see him being confused.

I dunno, you tell me...what are you offering? :)

Why, lifting heavy boxes for me! For the pleasure of it, of course.

Pilar, that's my dad...he's in OH

maybe that's why I'm strong now,moving boxes. Why are you needing to move lots of boxes, does this have to do with selling the company?

When I was a cook, one of the other cooks was a 5-foot, 100-pound woman with a pink mohawk. She only asked for help for stuff that was genuinely too big or too high for her. She was also the most chipper punk I've ever met, I enjoyed working with her, and I picked up some of her musical tastes. But not the Smiths, and especially not at 8 in the morning.

See what happens when I try to do even vaguely naughty things? I'm forced to be Catholic or I'll make an ass of myself. :( I'll kill the comment -- it was said completely in jest.

I'm really sorry, sir. I had no idea you were

tamidon's father. Please forgive me for my disrespect. It really was entirely in jest.

I always needed to move a lot of boxes. I am in the business of selling printed paper, and paper is bloody heavy, when you fill a carton with it. I used to recruit strapping young lads for the chore, but since we moved out here, they are difficult to come by. Just like strapping young lassies are hard to come by...

Once I sell the company, I intend the buyer to come and move all the stuff out by themselves, and then the heaviest thing I'll be carrying around is the guitar.

No sweat. I did not take offence.

At least these guys seemed polite, not disrespectful. No comments about being a girl or lady or hurting yourself or whatever.

yes, perhaps i meant "buff" not "butch" (though "butch" has taken on a meaning in my head as "strong and macho but necessarily male" in my head, as well as the genderwise meaning of it. e.g. i might say "wow, i'm just not that butch" in response to someone's story of biking 100 miles in the freezing rain with a flat tire, regardless of how femme-gendered the person in the story otherwise was :)

trowa_barton tends to be chivalrous in that way...opens doors, waits for me to go ahead, stuff like that. I'm still not always used to it (and that's probably okay, as I don't want to take it for granted), but he's very sweet about it and I find it charming coming from him. :-}

I don't know if you read Strata's LJ, but this entry made me think of you:

http://src.livejournal.com/304549.html

Cheers,

Ambar

BWHAHAHAHAAHAH!!

that is one of your very endearing qualities m'dear. No bullshit.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

pathological

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What's a word for physically-powerful-but-not-butch?

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ACK! I take everything back!

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Re: ACK! I take everything back!

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Re: What's a word for physically-powerful-but-not-butch?

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only partly relevantly...

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