LOL FAT

Before I get into today’s post about weight gain, I need to talk about Meg and Dad. It’s heated up. They are now sending messages to each other via me, under the guise of congratulating me on my last post.

From: Dad

To: Tulane Chris

Good post today! Do you have Meg’s number?

I forwarded this to Meg, who replied within the hour:

From: Meg

To: Tulane Chris

301-xxx-xxxx. 38DD.

So… yeah. I have a new mommy. She’s several months younger than me, she’s my employer, and I totally made out with her at a party in 2006. And here I was afraid it would be awkward.

So, I’ve had the seed of this post germinating for a while now. In a “State of the Chris” post I began a few weeks ago and abandoned, I had this to say:

“So… I haven’t gotten fat, quite, but if fat was New Orleans, I would be driving through Baton Rouge at eighty miles an hour, windows down, chain smoking, with fast food wrappers blowing around my feet like autumn foliage.”

Granted, considering the native cuisine fat essentially is New Orleans, but let’s move on. Here are the reasons I’ve nailed down for why I’ve gained weight:

1) Eating and drinking are wonderful.

2) I don’t really believe they make you fat.

Someone once wrote of New Orleans that it was notable because everyone there discusses, over lunch, what they had for breakfast and what they planned to have for dinner. I talk a lot about drinking and fucking in this blog because they’re traditionally the funny vices – I like gambling, smoking, swearing, and lying in bed all day too, but they don’t really lend themselves to as many one-liners. Eating, though… oh my God. Best vice ever. There may be something I like better in the world – I’ve never actually held my firstborn child or looked down on earth from space and let the wonder of it all wash over me – but a quarter-century’s gone by and I haven’t found it.

So, of course, I don’t really believe that meat, beer, and pastry –my friends – make people fat. I objectively know it’s true the way you know the answers to trivia questions or crossword puzzle clues, but I don’t feel it. It’s just a fact: Natalie Schaeffer played the Millionaire’s Wife on Gilligan’s Island, Winnipeg is the capital of Manitoba, and food makes you fat. I don’t believe it the way I believe in psychics or the Chupacabra. I react to food actually, demonstrably making me fat the way a staunch atheist would react to suffering biblical plagues. I know it’s how other people live their lives, but it’s not supposed to happen to me.

I’ve also never had to worry about my weight before. I was a small child, and when I was in high school, I was so thin people used to come up to me and ask me if I was anorexic. Strangers. Why do strangers think they’re entitled to have an opinion about my life? Now I would have a snappy comeback (well, okay, I’d tell them to go fuck themselves, but it’s better than nothing) but as a timid fifteen-year-old I was too uncomfortable to do much of anything except mumble – which is, of course, what they expected.

Well, shit, though. I had to go up a pant size last time I went to Target (if I ever get a celebrity endorsement, it will be Mossimo jeans) so I need to either

Lose a little weight, or

Become a shut-in, balloon up to 650 pounds, and eventually be buried in a piano case

Initially, I like the shut-in idea (so much privacy!) but then I realized shut-ins probably have to deal with a lot of social worker visits.

“How are we feeling today?”

“Well, we’re still a 650-pound shut-in forced to deal with eager do-gooders.”

So, I decided I had to just bite the bullet and lose five pounds (four times.) But how? I could eat less… or I could shoot myself. I could drink less… or I could shoot myself. I could shoot myself… but we’re planning a party for Larry Hagman’s birthday, so I couldn’t do it until late September at the earliest. So I’m left with exercising and eating healthier, which is probably wise. Apparently, it’s not considered a vegetable sandwich if you use skirt steak in lieu of bread. So with this in mind, I went to the grocery store this afternoon with the best of intentions. I was going to buy delicate, ladylike foods that take more calories to force down than they provide. Watercress, bran flakes, and so forth.

Armed with these good intentions, I walked through the door and immediately saw Crunch muffins. Muffins with shattered pieces of Nestle crunch bars in them. Candy in pastry. The development we’ve (I’ve) been waiting for since BIRTH. I managed to drag myself past them, using my right hand to keep my left hand from picking them up a la Evil Dead 2, and just as I got away…

“Meat Markdown Madness.” That’s the event they have at the grocery store the day I start the first diet of my life. All flesh, all inexpensive, for a limited time only. Meat. Markdown. Madness. There’s not a word in there I don’t like. IF anything were to drive me insane with joy, it would be cheap meat.

So, the hell with it. I cracked. Who wouldn’t have? To hell with celery-flavored diet yogurt, I bought meat. So much meat. Wonderful, beautiful, delicious, alive with flavor meat. Huge chunks of animals now sit in my freezer, and I sit here as I was meant to be, fat and sassy. My arteries and my bowels may race each other to see who can clog, burst, and kill me first, but I’ll be happy while I wait.

Spellcheck lols: I mistyped “lunchtime as “luchtime,” which the computer assumed was meant to be “lutetium.” <---- That, right there, is probably the only time anyone has ever typed “lutetium” in a word document.