Eat the Damn Cake

I’ve decided. I want to be old, sloppy, and look ridiculous in a bikini. I want to have a stain on my shirt that looks suspiciously like ketchup. I want to keep all the weight I’ve gained over the years. I want to prove that that is the look of success.

I heard they dressed some of the Occupy Wallstreet protestors up in suits and cut their hair, and then suddenly people took them a lot more seriously. I want to be the opposite. Except for the hair cutting– that’s fine. I want to go the other direction. And be taken seriously.

When I get old, or even considerably older, I want to look my age. I want to wear big, comfortable clothes. I want to never wear anything I don’t feel like wearing. I want to forget to look in the mirror, even when there’s something in my teeth. I don’t want this to make me quirky or eccentric or gross. I want it to be the way life works.

I want to be better at everything when I’m old. Better at knowing what really matters. Better at appreciating myself. Better at being nonjudgmental. Better at doing the things I love and being around the people I want to be around.

And at the same time, I’m scared of being old, sloppy, and ridiculous looking in a bikini. I’m scared of weight. People talk about baby weight “After my third kid, there’s no WAY I was losing that weight.” Oh shit, I think. Should I have kids?

I keep getting the impression that getting older successfully means looking like you’re not getting much older. Which usually means fighting a desperate, constant, losing battle against biology. From a distance, it looks a lot like having a terminal illness. And in a way, I guess it is. You fight every day, putting yourself through painful procedures and grueling exercise regimens, and then, eventually, the things you’ve been staving off overwhelm your body. And that is that.

I don’t want to waste my time.

A reader sent me this little clip. (I could probably embed the video so it looks better, but for some reason I forget how and I don’t have enough time to figure it out.) In it, the peppy announcer is praising Jennifer Love Hewitt for getting back on track. As in, losing weight, and keeping a young-looking body. “She’s back from the dead!”

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Through the world of body image blogging/tumblring, I met a woman named Erin who just came out with a book called How Much Do You Weigh? The book features pictures of women, posing,  with their weight listed on their images. I thought the project sounded interesting. I asked its creator to talk about it with us here. This is Erin:

I know a lot of people.  I have quite a few close friends, and nearly all of my family lives close by.

I have no idea what any of them weigh.  Even my oldest and dearest friends, because this is just not something we’re supposed to talk about.

I only know what I weigh, because the experience of stepping on the scale is an isolated moment,and  my eyes are the only pair present.  And I never see anyone else’s scale during the moment that they step on it.

So I have no gauge.

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A cool and successful fat acceptance writer approached me, along with some other body-image bloggers, and asked us to submit essays for a book she’s getting published. It sounded like an awesome project. I wanted to participate. But I felt a little weird about it. Like I might be stepping on some toes.

So I wrote to her, and I tried to figure out how to say “I might not be fat enough,” in the politest way possible. It was difficult. But I think I did it.

She must have missed the email, because yesterday, I got another call for submissions from her. “Hey fatties!” it began.

“Um,” I wrote (because I sound awkward even over email), “I’d love to do a piece about accepting weight gain, and feeling good about getting bigger. But I don’t want to offend anyone either. I don’t think I…qualify.”

She wrote back. “It’s about whether or not you identify as fat. If you do, that’s fine. If you don’t, I’ll take you off the list.”

“Wait…” I said, stupidly. “I don’t think I know what you mean by ‘identify as fat’.”

She didn’t respond.

This was all very interesting.

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A lot of my friends are on OKcupid, the dating site where Bear and I first encountered each other (I know! It’s the most romantic love story ever! Online dating!), and occasionally, one of them will pull me over to a laptop and ask for my opinion on, say, fifty or so guys.

“OK, so he’s pretty vague about what he’s doing with his life, but look at all the books he likes!”

And “Look at his eyes! You can tell he’s really nice. But do you think he’s funny? I can’t tell.”

And “Oh my god, this one’s hilarious. Listen, he says, ‘I will search your soul and find the answer and then I will turn that answer into all of your dreams coming true.’ Is he really, really high?”

We pour through pages of guys. I am often surprised by how picky my friends are.

“Nope. He works in an office. Boring.”

“Nah– those are the show-offy glasses. And what is he wearing??”

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What is that? Apparently it’s something. One of the readers of this blog sent me some info on it, wondering if it might be an interesting thing or possibly, possibly a real one.

Orthorexia is when someone is obsessed with eating healthy foods, often to the point of self-harm. It’s not a medically recognized term, but Wikipedia is all over it, of course.

OK, our culture wants to medicalize and pathologize (I’m getting red squiggly lines for both of those words as I type this. Get with the picture, Word!) everything in the world. I don’t know anyone who can’t recite at least one Greek-based term for something that’s wrong with them. I have scoliosis (as you know from the yoga post) and anemia, myself. Wait, neither of those is from the Latin, right? I probably also have several things relating to my tendency to nod enthusiastically when other people speak, my abnormally acute interest in little summer dresses, and my inability to stop cutting my hair.

Naming things often gives them meaning. But some things have meaning even before someone tags a fancy title on them.

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I went on a walking tour of Brooklyn the other day, with my visiting bonus mom and Bear and some other people we didn’t know.  I learned that when the Brooklyn Bridge was constructed, it was the tallest thing on the horizon. Hard to imagine! I learned some other stuff, too, and I already forget most of it.

One of the women on the tour turned out to have gone to grad school at the same place as me, and she had lived in the same neighborhood during.

“Remember Gray’s Papaya?” she said. “Remember Koronet’s pizza? I think I gained twenty pounds.”

“Oh, I remember,” I said. And we laughed.

We had a little moment of bonding. The way women do when they talk about how much weight they’ve gained.

I think most women bond over college this way. I have had the conversation hundreds of times, now.

“Remember freshman year? All I ate was ice cream.”

“Me too. I ate ice cream three meals a day.”

“I gained twenty pounds.”

“Me too! I totally gained twenty pounds!”

We’ve all gained twenty pounds during some ill-advised period of ice cream and pizza eating. That’s what being a woman is about.

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A girl on the street in Dumbo, talking on her cellphone: “…and I think I gained some weight.”

Guy she’s walking past: “It looks good!”

Made my day.

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Unroast: Today I love the way I laughed when I saw myself in on the security camera screen in the drugstore, because I looked awful, and it was funny.