belly up

The last entry I did garnered the most comments yet, which tells me that the greatest single common thread throughout the American experience isn't love of liberty, love of civil rights, or love of fellow man, but body fat. Admittedly, six people isn't what one would call empirical evidence. This bothers me not at all. Shocking as it may seem to some people, I am fully capable of making arbitrary statements based on entirely spurious coincidence, having at my fingertips not only a medium for expressing said statements, but also an extremely rich and fertile fantasy life that reconstructs the real world in minute detail exactly the way I want it.

So, Reality redesigned. And Americans are fascinated by fat.

(That it happens to be my fat, both good and bad, is just a bonus.)

Me, I'm all for having a serious national debate on the rival merits of the Atkins diet, as opposed to Weight Watchers, South Beach, and surgerical alternatives. True, I might be late jumping on that bandwagon -- seeing as how international news organizations noticed America's enthusiastic adoption of the obesity fad about a decade ago with such stimulating articles such as, "Why is America Fat?" and "The Great Satan Has a Beer Belly," and "They'll Die First -- It's All Good." It amuses me that a country can actually eat itself To Death, much like my friend's father's pet piranha in middle school. The fish was ghoulishly named Wilbur, after the pig in Charlotte's Web, and would single-mindedly consume anything that drifted into its eyesight. It was a source of occasional entertainment to our jaded middle-school palates, at least until my friend grew overenthusiastic about demonstrating its gluttonous gifts and fed it an entire hamburger patty. The results were edifying to say the least, though more for us -- we were callous little horrors in those days -- than for Wilbur, who didn't survive the experiment and eventually sank to the bottom of its tank with an expression of affronted astonishment on its little fishy face. If that's not an object lesson, I don't know what is.

These days I feel like I'm on the actual brink of losing weight, as though the newer, thinner me is a velcro wall waiting at the bottom of a big hill, at the top of which stands the fatter me in a velcro suit, precariously balanced on a skateboard pointed down. There's a lot of excitement in the potential of being thin, and an idiotic feeling of power as well. Some days it seems just within grasp, as though I just have to reach out with my little toe and push off to be sent zooming down, shrieking past the gapes of envious, struggling dieters until I collide with the new me. In my imagination, the fat explodes off me when I hit that wall, squishing away in great gobs of quivering white, leaving me svelte and fresh and thin, by all the holy pickled bananas; it splatters on the pavement in fascinating, Picasso geometry, eventually to be harvested by angry Goth teens looking for environmentally-friendly pancake makeup alternatives to attain that stylish vampiric pallor.

Curiously, the thought of losing my body fat fills me with a sort of dread, for lack of a better word. True, when I was younger I hated my body with the sort of loathing normally reserved for the white maggots writhing out of the dead eyes of your grandmother or, say, George Dubya Bush. Then again, I had all sorts of issues when I was a kid, and my weight was just an excuse for deep soul-searching, general self-flagellation, and all-around self-pity. If it hadn't been my weight, it would have been my race. (It was.) If it hadn't been my race, it would have been my piano playing. (It was.) If it hadn't been my piano playing, it would have been my personality. (It was.) If it hadn't been my personality, it would have been my family--

--did I ever tell you about the time my mother...? never mind.

That was a long time ago, back when eating disorders were something that cool kids did. So long ago that Alyssa Milano was cool. So long ago that even the memory is something viewed through a hazy fog of disinterest, like it involved the hypermorbid, self-absorbed, peculiarly unattractive daughter of the complete stranger who moved in across the street. I look back at Little Me and feel a sort of superior pity, the condescending sort you dispense to roommates you really really want to irritate.

Somewhere between high school and grad school, I sat down and had a therapeutic encounter with my body. We spoke to each other like long-estranged relatives: me the perfectionist mother, my body the wayward daughter who pierced her nose and smoked kitchen sponges.

"So?" said I.

"You hate me," said my body.

"Yup," said I.

"That's not fair," said my body, tearfully. "I never asked to be born. It's all your fault, anyway. I didn't want to be fat. Nobody asked me."

"You're not a good daughter," I said. "If you were a good daughter, you'd work hard, and make an effort, grow up and show some discipline. You'd go through puberty. My God, girl. Aren't you interested in boys at all? Are you a lesbian? Is that it? You're a closet lesbian?"

My body sniffled. "You're always judging me."

...and, you know, I was.

It took a long time, but eventually I grew up. I actually forgave my body for being what it is. It was surprisingly hard, but I managed it, and now the thought of exchanging it for a better body feels, in a curious way, rather like death. My pudgy self and I have gotten used to each other, like two comfortable souls squashed into an arranged marriage negotiated by well-meaning parents. I've grown accustomed to my naked reflection in the mirror, the perfectly round head, the smiling curve of my waistline, the smug, self-satisfied purse of my belly over my pelvis; when I curl up on my side in bed, my tummy collapses next to me with an exhausted sigh -- What a day -- like a secret lover snuggled against my thigh. If the Guy snuggles behind me and slings his arms across my hip, my arm is there first, hugging my stomach to hide it from him. My secret. My belly.

Eventually I'll have to give it up, this comfort blanket of my fat. Someday. Moving on, even in the interests of health, feels like betraying my old body, when it took so long for me to reassure myself that it was okay to be round, it was okay to be plump, it was okay to jiggle in places that were supposed to be firm, yes, even on a woman. I find myself sabotaging this incipient thinness in tiny ways, every day. "I'm so tired, I'll skip the gym just this once." "I don't have time to eat, really, so I'll just go out and get some fast food. It'll just be this once. " "I had a bad day, I deserve some french fries. Just this once."

Maybe tomorrow I'll try being thin. Just this once.

News from the sister front...

so i´m in spain right now.

did you know that if you were in a restaurant and tried to literally translate the word hot dog into spanish, you would be ordering a ´bitch in heat´?

i´ve been staying with a friend of mine who came out to barcelona to take her TOEFL courses...two years ago! a boyfriend, apartment, and one baby later, she has decided to continue staying here. thankfully, spain has not changed lara much. she still has the same witty remarks and sharp tongue, but now they´re in spanish instead of english. i told her that i would come to visit her after the little bandito was born to see what all this mother-baby stuff was all about. imagine waking up every two hours to feed a crying ball of fat (aka matteo). wow. that takes some definite mother-type patience.
we all take our parents for granted (and i´m positive that i will again in the future), but after seeing her take care of the baby day in-day out, i certainly appreciate my mother a whole lot more. i don´t really understand the pay-off quite yet. she feeds him, she bathes him, she even puts him to sleep...and for what in return?! a little gurgle of spit on the shoulder.
did someone not let me in on a sick joke? i´ll try a dog first.

the weather here has been a bit haywire. snowing, raining, sunning...? my goal is to make it out to montserrat (translation: serrated mountain) and go backpacking sometime this next weekend. ideally, we´d like to go climb, but apparently you aren´t supposed to do that right after it rains.
we went climbing in montjuic yesterday. a local cragging place in town that has incorporated a city car tunnel into a bouldering cave.

for a cosmopolitan city, barcelona has been a fulfilling stay so far. the tapas, the bread, the paella...mmm... besides the food, the architecture is especially great since you can appreciate it all over town even if you´re completely stuffed.
for those of you who have not heard of antoni gaudi, he was a spanish architect from the late 1800´s. his most famous structure is the segrada familia, located in barcelona along with many of his other eclectic buildings. commissioned to design the cathedral in 1886, the construction has yet to be finished and still has many more decades of building ahead. with much respect, the cathedral looks like an ice sculpture made by a child on a bad LSD trip.

okay. that´s all for now. i have to go clean baby vomit off of my shirt.

sako