Whipping Up the Fat Wagon

"Well, THAT'S the pot calling the kettle FAT." - Jim Jefferies, from the Episode 3 of "Talkin' Shit with Jim & Eddie"

Yeah, I'm on the Fat Wagon again. Pissy day today--just feeling ANNOYED.

The internet dating thing... Argh, what a fucking drag. Does anyone know a little old yenta? I am so up for being introduced to a decent guy who has been fully screened by exacting little old lady. I'm beginning think they had the right idea back in the "Old Country" with arranged marriages.

*sigh*

So Bachelor #2 for this week is a scammer. I will say this for Plenty of Fish: they're the only site I HAVEN'T encountered a scammer on. (Bachelor #2 was from cougarlife.com. That profile is being shut down later. Fairly disgusted.) I had a feeling, but... well, when you check back and the profile is under review... yeah. I'll spare you the details.

Why am I on the Fat Wagon again? I mean, I had a great shopping week--bought a bunch of great clothes on sale. (Gods, I love a good clearance sale. Nothing like picking up half a wardrobe for $100, including jewelry. Avenue finally got the hint and started selling fabulous jeans. I am solidly down to a 24 in most styles, and my favorite pair of 24s I can actually pull down without unbuttoning. That is SUCH a high, although I'm going to have to learn how to alter jeans because I LOVE that pair of jeans. LOVE 'EM.) It IS the dating thing. I hate the place I'm in--my attitude is SO much younger than my body.

The other part... well, there's two other parts. One of them... Argh, COMMERCIALS!!!! I listen to WFNX at work. It makes concentrating on the job easier and keeps me from zoning out (most of the time). However, the problem with listening to commercial radio is the commercials. Anyone familiar with the radio business right now can tell you that commercial radio is supported by just that--commercials, ad revenue--and those dollars are getting scarcer and scarcer. Right now, 'FNX, despite its fairly hip, indie, crunchy attitude, is currently being supported by some of the most offensive fucking ads on the planet. Scam ads--the "my wife look TEN YEARS YOUNGER!" (More on that pile of shit later); ProActive; Weight Loss Shakes; Live Debt Free!; and let's not discuss the Home Desperate and McDeathalds. I'm so NOT loving it. Oh, yes, and of course, the @()*&^&*^$^*() St. Patrick's Day commercials. (Folks, an aside--DO NOT, IF YOU VALUE YOUR LIFE, REFER TO IT AS SAINT PADDY'S DAY IN FRONT OF ME UNLESS YOU WANT TO TAKE YOUR TEETH HOME IN A BAG. "Paddy" is an ethnic slur--if you're not in the tribe, I will reply with an ethnic slur directed at your tribe. Ditto, don't use the term "paddywagon"--again, it's an ethnic slur, and just because it's directed against a group of white people doesn't make it acceptable. Unless you're in the tribe. Then you actually know what you're up against.) I will update and repost my old LiveJournal statement about St. Patrick's Day, or, as I like to call it, the Irish-American Day of Mourning.

Anyway, these commercials drive me up the fucking wall because they're AWFUL. They promote the worst shit on the planet for the worst reasons. I mean, I don't hear any women on that commercial about buying it for their husband's saggy jowls. "He looked 10 years younger! I actually thought about fucking him instead of the pool boy!" Can we PLEASE cut the shit on this double standard? I mean, really, guys--do you think that you're really all that a bag of dicks first thing in the morning? Seriously. The shit we put up with... the farting, the BO!, the insecurities, the sports, the fucking everything! You want to be cut some slack? Give it back, boys. Why is it acceptable for a guy to spend ten minutes on his personal hygeine and five minutes (if that) in selecting an outfit for the day, but a woman is expected to spend at least an hour? Fuck you. I don't have that kind of time in the morning. I'm out of the bathroom in 15 minutes, tops, getting ready for work, and out of the house in another 15--I don't have time to futz around. I am not destroying my skin piling on makeup every fucking day--do you KNOW what that crap does to the skin? How it clogs the pores and causes premature aging because of all of the chemicals? Gods, I'm serious here. Even if you use the expensive all-natural stuff, it's NOT good for you. I'm a minimal makeup girl even for special occasions (and still get compliments on the loveliness of my skin, even at 43; good genes, good hygeine, and Lush products).

One of the reasons I DON'T miss acting: I hate the fucking makeup. Pounds of pancake. ARGH.

OK, so there's the commercials griping my ass. And they are. Annoying the piss out of me (yeah, yeah, I know, I know, I signed up on last.fm, but I just can't be arsed; the uni has limited bandwidth and I really don't feel I have a right to use it when I have a perfectly usable radio on my desk).

And then... then there was Celebricrush's comment that he was fat when I complimented him at Foxwoods. Now, this should not have stuck in my head for two weeks. It really shouldn't have. But it did. It brought home to me how fucking twisted our culture is that a succesful, attractive young man who had a roomful of people laughing themselves sick and most of the women in the room hot for him (and he gets plenty of passes made on his FB) sees himself as fat. I don't know how Jim is doing with his drinking--he quit the hard drinking back in the summer after a serious health scare--but after watching Alcoholocaust the other night, I can't believe how much weight he's lost. The double chin is gone (that was very present in I Swear to God), the beer belly is gone, and he looks FABULOUS. (Yeah, could have used a shave, but whatever. See? There's the double standard working again--I can totally give him a pass for the facial fuzz, but had it been a woman up on stage in a skirt who'd forgotten to strop her legs, she would have been skewered by someone.) He looks healthy. But he's calling himself fat. (He's also done it on the podcast.)

And this is bugging me because I used to hear the same shit from the girls when I was teaching theatre: pretty girls, smart kids, lovely, talented young people, freaking when I'd have to take their measurements for costumes, trying not to look and not wanting to hear because, "Oh, my God, I'M SO FAT!!!"

Now, understand that at that point in my life, I was heading for my heaviest. I mean, seriously, I was well north of 350 lbs, pushing 400, morbidly obese, and here are these NORMAL sized girls seeing themselves as hopelessly fat. So, because I couldn't bear the way these girls were torturing themselves (and because we also had a young man in the cast with SERIOUSLY HORRIBLE hygeine problems), I came up with The Speech Decrying the Cult of the Stinky Artist and the Path to Self-Acceptance.

And it goes something like this:
There are some folks who feel that to be an artist, to attain that necessary purity of soul and spirit, one must forego all the shallow trappings of our modern era. Including the convention of daily bathing and the use of stench-decreasing products. I am here to tell you that your artistic purity will not only NOT be diminished by bathing, your status and respect amongst your fellow artists will increase if you apply soap to your body and deodorant to your armpits, ditto toothpaste to your teeth.
Now, I will have to measure all of you for costumes. These are THE RULES: you will NOT, under any circumstances, come up to be measured and say, "Oh, don't tell me, I'M TOO FAT!" because, ladies and gentlemen, I am telling you that you are NOT fat. You are beautiful, lovely, young people with talent and intelligence and great worth. And you are NOT fat. You wanna talk about fat? *I* am FAT.
At which point, I would point to my pronouncedly overweight self and look at them very, very directly. And those kids would be shocked, many of them, because I was owning it, right then, right there. I wasn't proud of it, but it was my reality. I don't know if it made any difference to any of them, but I can hope.

The thing is, though, it's not just girls who go through this awful issue. I used the exchange with Jim Jefferies as an example, but he's not the only man I've heard this from. My ex-fiance had horrible body image issues (and he IS fat, but he made things so much worse for himself). One of my baristas--a young man so hot, he makes not just my heart but my button ache--showed me his belly at one point, pinched barely an inch (and had to grab a handspan worth of flesh to do it) and declared that he was fat. I was trying not to visibly drool and keep my eyes in my head (and my hands to myself!), at the same time as my heart was wrenched because he was serious! I have two dear, cherished friends around my age--both of them life-long weight lifters, both of them attractive men--whose body image issues are painful for me. One of them is quite possibly the single most beautiful man I've ever met in my life, the one man I would drop anyone (almost) to be with if given the opportunity; the other is one of my best friends in the world. I love them both, have crushed on both of them, and it cut me to the soul when they've expressed the body image issues. These are guys that women have lusted over, drooled over... and they hate their bodies.

The second one... I had to really bite my tongue the last time I saw his parents (and I love his parents--they are good, kind, and loving people, and for the most part, AMAZING parents) because the shit they've given him about his body. This is a guy who can drop forty pounds in a month with exercise and diet. Seriously. I would kill for his metabolism. He develops a small pot and he's tearing himself up for being fat. And I'm like, ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS?!?!?!? I SHOULD BE SO FUCKING FAT!

I guess I'm just disgusted by it all. I hate to see people tearing themselves up over their bodies when it's a lot of bullshit. No, I'm not into really fat guys--I know that. I have my shallow side, believe me (and part of it is logistics--unless he's a good 10" in the cock department, we're going to have penetration issues unless it's all-fours). But I can cut someone some slack for purely physical reasons. I mean, I'm not perfect--what right do I have to ask anyone else to be? Seriously. I hate the way our culture (and I'm rolling the US, UK and Canada into this because, from dealing intimately with people from all three, I think all three countries at this point are FUCKING stooooooopid about this issue, and each country has its own problems with food and how popular culture affects body image). The important thing at bottom is this: are you HEALTHY? Are you eating properly? Getting enough sleep? Keeping your bad habits (drinking, smoking, drugs, snacks) under control? Are you getting enough exercise? Are you taking care of yourself? And I don't just mean physically--are you doing things to make yourself happy? Are you keeping your relationships healthy--dealing with people who support the best parts of you, rather than poisonous idiots who undermine your self worth?

Don't underestimate that last one. Speaking as the person enlisted by a few ex-best friends as their Fat Sidekick--and the person with a mother whose self-image is so badly damaged that she still sees and acts like a fat woman despite having lost over 200 lbs and being underweight at this point, and who put all of those negative images on me so that I ignored my weight issues until it was too late out of sheer rebellion--if you've got people in your life making it worse, if you can't get them to back off and drop it, get rid of them. It's not worth the long-term damage it does.

Trust me on this one, kids. I learned it the hard way, and I'm trying to undo the damage before it's too late to have the life I want rather than the one I've accepted.

Take care of yourselves, kids.
Crankily yours,
Empress