Bird Liberator!

[secondlina]

 

Before everyone starts telling me in the comments - Yes, i'm aware that as much as birds are cute, they are nasty. I was afraid of getting near it and afraid that I would have to go to work with Owl scratchies or worse. I was very cautious. I only tried to pull on the plastic wrap because it looked loose, almost as if somebody had sandwich-wrapped the owl's wing. It was trying to get it off by scratching. I never would have tried if it looked stuck.  I wanted to help because the owl was in the park I cross everyday to go to work... and well kids start to play there EARLY. If the plastic looked stuck, I would have just continued to work and called animal control. I'm not silly or cruel to animals. Plus I love owls.

I was still afraid this one was going to kill me. Sweet Oz. I was scared. This counts as my courageous and good Samaritan action of the week as a double-combo.

In other news. I have no life. A combination of lack of hours, travels, general geekdom and  laziness after a day of work have made is so that my art-related-work is in a horrible bottleneck of badness. I'm pretty much turning into a hermit in the next few weeks to catch up. I'll tell you guys more about that in the next post, along with a bit of an explanation about life as a part-time artist.

For now, I am AMAZED, in a bad way, at Japan again. Apparently, the ideal size for a woman over there is a size 2. Anything beyond is considered fat. WHAAAAAAAAAT! I know that asian women are smaller but, WHAAAAT? This is apparently encouraging anorexia and suicide nowadays among our sisters of the island. I'm outraged. Whenever I feel shameful about my weight (a pitiful size 8 to 10) I just read some kind of tabloid. The pure outrage I feel towards these outrageous standards and unrealistic expectations boosts my confidence. 

Ridiculous.

Lemme tell you that a size 10 character is a lot more fun to draw then a size 2. Curves are awesome. 

- Isa

EDIT : As mentioned in the comments, you should not encourage people to be incredibly thin or tell them to let it be and remain overweight. Feminism is not an excuse for laziness on unhealthiness. Perfection should be being healthy.

Really thin people don't exercise more then overweight ones. They usually try to do exercise to become thinner, and then discover that muscles actually take a lot of room. So the stop exercising, atrophying the muscles and stop eating to diminish the fat. So neither thin or fat people are necessarily healthy. What should be encourage is health, no matter what your "healthy weight" is. Because some people are naturally smaller and others bigger. And charts can determine that according to origin, diet, exercice routines and height.

Comments

[ichiban-victory.livejournal.com]

I've never seen any case of birds attacking their rescuer once they were liberated. Yes, they will lash out trying to protect themselves when trapped by whatever, but once that's gone, they're happier getting as far away from people as possible. (Although there are some cool cases where the bird flew a short distance, landed, studied its rescuer, then took off again.)

Heck, I've never encountered an owl in need, but when I was a kid I found a song bird trapped in the chicken mesh surrounding our garden. I didn't even think about getting scratched or pecked, I did what I could to free the poor thing, and once it was free it took off. I didn't get a single mark from that bird. How I wish I could say the same of Bird E. Bird! ^_-

Still, go you! In a way this makes me feel a bit better for the bird we encountered up in Toronto. We can never save them all, but we should always do so when we are able.

(Forever ago I read about the experiences of an American teacher in Japan, and he did get into a discussion with a Japanese man on women. The Japanese man pointed out that American woman were very fat compared to Japanese women, but then the teacher pointed out that American woman also had much bigger chests than Japanese women. It made the Japanese man stop comparing. ^_^;; All men like women with some shape, even if they don't want to admit it!)

[secondlina.livejournal.com]

(was that Gajiin Smash?)

Asian and Caucasian have different body types. You can't compare one with another. That's just wrong.

Toronto bird...oh that poor thing. I saw dead baby birds the other day too. During the heat wave. Poor birdies.

[ichiban-victory.livejournal.com]

(Apparently so, since I just dug out the link, but I read it so long ago that back when I read it it was not called that at all.)

It's not different body types really, it's diet. They have limited land space for farming over in Japan, so they don't have access to many foods like we do. Milk, for instance, is not commonplace at all since there's just not enough space to raise milk cows. Heck, cows in general are a rarity that you'll pay an arm and a leg to be able to eat a steak from. In any case, if you've ever seen second or even third generation Asians raised in North America, they look very different from the people they came from. Sometimes smallness is inherited (I inherited my petite proportions from a great-grandfather, while the rest of my siblings did not and have more normal proportions), but it's amazing how even just growing up eating different foods will affect a person's body.

Case in point, we had a Filipino family in our ward way back when (the parents have since moved back to help the family they left behind). The mother and father both grew up over there. The mother was especially small due to malnourishment as a child. It wasn't intentional, they didn't have access to a lot thus her body didn't grow beyond what it could handle on a limited diet. The husband wasn't any taller than his wife. But when they came to the U.S. to raise their children, all of the children grew up big and healthy, more on par with a 'normal' American citizen.

Heck, my Korean-born but American-raised coworker actually carries a lot more weight around than I do, this despite her Asian heritage. Access to more and better food does that to a person. ^_-;

You can compare different cultures to each other, but it's really important to know the factors behind each. No matter where you go, access to more varieties of food is always going to result in a more healthy build. Heck, if I was raised on a typical Japanese diet of rice and soup, you better believe I'd be a lot thinner than I am having been raised on things like wheat, milk, and meat.

Long ramble aside, I'd not heard about Japanese girls/women being pressured into being small sizes. Last I heard, the Japanese in general were coming to realize their small stature was due to lack of certain food types in their diet and were working to change that. For all I know, that might have been tossed out the window when Japan's economy started flailing. Plus, old habits die hard. I'd not blame men so much as society as a whole for not realizing change is always going to happen.

[secondlina.livejournal.com]

There's so many factors entering the life of a person to affect their weight, like diet, as you say, that their should not be a weight everyone has to conform to, especially not one as insane as that. People should focus on having healthy, stong bodies rather then "perfect ones". I would be happy to be a size 10 if it ment I could run up stairs and look and feel healthy. Excercise and fruit, FTW.