Eat the Damn Cake

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I just painted my nails blue. Turquoise, really. They shimmer. The area around my nails shimmers too, because my aim is really bad. How does anyone paint nails neatly? I knew girls who had mastered it by the time they were twelve. But not too many. Because I didn’t really know that many girls.

For most of my life, people have asked me how I learned to socialize. Even while I’m socializing with them. They imagine that you can only learn from a lot of other people almost exactly the same age as you. I learned how to socialize the same way everyone else did. From my parents, first, from my friends, and from the people I ran into, admired from a distance, and read about.

I’ve had to pretend for a long time that I’m normal, because “normal” is proof that I am a success, as an unschooler. Which is funny. Because normal is a pretty boring goal for such a radical lifestyle. It always felt like a conflict. I was obviously really different, because I didn’t spend any time in a classroom, and I spent a lot of time in the woods. And at the piano. And, I don’t know, doing a million things in the middle of the day, when I was the only kid in sight. But then, whenever I met anyone new, I was supposed to show them just how normal I was. Continue Reading »

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I tried to let it go. I tried to just stop thinking about it. But it wouldn’t go away.

Last week, on a random day like Wednesday, or maybe Thursday, my fiancé came home to find me staring at the article on my computer.

“Um…hi,” he said. “Are you OK?”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Just reading some stupid article.”

He sat down and read over my shoulder, “….Start laying the foundations for negotiated infidelity.” And then laughed and said, “What is this?”

It was an interview with a woman who wrote a book called “Sugarbabe.” The book urges every couple to find a young, sexy woman who will provide the man with sex (of course) and, charmingly, “the three C’s” (Cooking, counseling, and conversation.) Cooking! Of course! Because the wife keeps making the same old leathery potroast. And let me correct myself– this doesn’t apply to every couple. Only the rich ones. Or at least only couples who can afford to lavish a lot of resources on the sugarbabe.

So basically the sugarbabe is an escort, except so much better, because she gets to stay! And hang out! And make you tea! Continue Reading »

I’m over at Dances With Fat, guest posting. Check it out here!

Also, I sent some thank you notes. I’m so on top of this whole getting married thing.

(Ha! Kidding!)

I woke up feeling restless. Something had shifted inside me. In the same way that it does every year, when the summer begins to break. Every year, I forget that I’ll feel like that, and every year it surprises me. I wanted to write a fantasy story. I wanted to go somewhere else. Somewhere with mountains, and open space. The urge was so strong that I rushed to my computer and moved the Lord of the Rings trilogy to the top of my netflix queue. Not because I need to watch more orcs getting beheaded. Oy vey. That got excessive after the third one or so. I wanted to see the dramatic New Zealand/Middle-earth landscapes. That’s pretty desperate.

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It was Saturday. I told my fiancé that we had to have a wild adventure. We got on the Hudson Line and went up to Tarrytown. It took about an hour. We walked up a hill into the center of town. It pretty much looked like a town. There were some antique shops, an ice cream place, and a 7-Eleven.

“Is this enough of an adventure?” my fiancé asked. Continue Reading »

Ladies and (possibly a handful of) gentlemen, I give you…..Ragen! Many of you probably already know her. She blogs at Dances With Fat, and she is fabulous. She inspires me. So without further ado:

“My feet hurt today.  My knee has a sharp pain when I bend it, my hip aches, and my left hamstring still hurts.”  Normally I wouldn’t admit any of these things, but I was I explaining this to my massage therapist.  She was running late, so I had offered to talk in the lobby while her previous client was getting dressed so that I could speed us along.

I’m fat – 5’4, 280lbs. According to World Health Organization BMI scale I’m “Class III – Super Obese”. I’m as fat as you can get on the BMI Scale – maxed out as it were.  According to what I read about people my weight I should probably be dead of fat, so the fact that any attempt to be ambulatory at my size only ended up with a little foot, knee, hip and hamstring pain should probably have me thanking my lucky stars.

According to the BMI chart it would seem that all of my problems would be solved by getting taller. Seriously, since BMI is just a ratio of height and weight, if I could find a way to get taller that would also apparently solve all of my pain.  What they recommend though, is losing weight. Since this medical document also says that, were I “normal weight”, I would be “considered more attractive than [my] overweight and obese peers”,  it’s possible that it would solve my dating problems too…although my quirky personality would remain, so I suppose there are no guarantees there.

At any rate, I don’t like to admit to hurting because I’m always afraid that people will think it’s because I’m fat. In reality it’s because I’m a … Continue Reading »

I was brushing my teeth, and looking in the mirror, and the fat on my arm jiggled. It jiggled!

It hit me then. Not the arm fat itself, but the realization that my arms were fat. That they were unacceptably, abnormally, suddenly fat. And what was the worst part: they were fat in a way that didn’t match the rest of my body. In photos that cut off just below the shoulders they made a convincing argument that I probably weighed about 200 pounds, even though the body below was pretty small in real life. They were out to get me. They were going to destroy my wedding, which prominently features a strapless gown. There was a possibility that they would destroy my life. And I had no idea how this had happened.

I got a couple free personal training sessions when I joined a local gym. I asked the trainer, “What can I do about my arms?”

She said, “Well, there are a lot of exercises that will tone them.”

“Will they look really different?”

She laughed. “No. To do that you have to modify your caloric intake.”

Oh. Eat a lot less. Continue Reading »