I have lost some weight. Not a lot of weight, certainly not bucket loads of weight like my friend Anne, who writes the incredible Body of Work diary that’s part of the new Elastic Waist thingy (which, by the way, is where I’m updating three times a day Monday through Friday like clockwork, although sometimes the posts aren’t signed Weetabix, sometimes they are all “we think bacon is yummy” and “we aren’t kidding” and “we are very pretty too, aren’t we” and “yes, yes we certainly are”) but just a little bit of weight. A teaspoon, perhaps. Not enough that my post-Operation Hottie jeans are comfy or even possible, but enough that my trousers are suddenly too long, enough that I have to wear heels every damn day or I toddle around work tripping on the hems of my pants. Apparently the first place I lose weight is the bottoms of my feet, which is just like my body, forsaking all boobs and foot bottoms for tackling the ass arena.
I haven’t been exercising and I still don’t drink enough water, so I think what’s happening is this weird insulin resistance/PCOS diet nutrition plan that I started last year might be doing its thing. I guess it follows, because my whole principle behind Operation Hottie was to do the things that I wasn’t doing before, and this time, I’m not doing the things I was doing that made me fat, meaning that I am no longer ordering a truck of bread to be delivered to the house and then unhinging my jaw and swallowing the entire truck, then spitting out the driver and the steering wheel like watermelon seeds. Mmmm…. watermelon.
This hasn’t really changed my life very much, other than I have to think more about protein and roughage and no longer can make entire meals out of Special K and milk, as it doesn’t have enough protein and feel vaguely guilty on Sunday mornings when I have four of Esteban’s incredibly wonderful melt in your mouth pancakes that he makes with lemon juice, cinnamon and fairy dust, because I know that combined with the Wisconsin maple syrup, there’s no WAY that four pieces of bacon is going to be enough protein and even though I’m full to my gullet, I have this guilt that I need to go suck out a wheel of brie in order to offset all of those carbs. And while I don’t specifically need to be eating what is essentially a diabetic’s restrictions, when I play the balance game correctly or I just don’t eat refined sugar, I don’t crave it. Which means that the Monday after pancake day a LOT of fun.
And if that’s not a reason to eat healthy, a diabetic lady in my office was apparently in denial about her condition and blissfully fed her sugar addiction and is now in a wheelchair because they had to lop off her foot (does anyone else wonder what they do with those body parts? I do). And I am not even kidding when I tell you that I just now returned from the lunchroom where I saw her loading up on distinctly non-diabetic fare. When she saw me grab my lunch of fresh fruit and a cottage cheese kicker, she exclaimed “Don’t they look so gooood?!”, which was punctuated by the spackle splat of the spray whipped cream spurting all over her high octane fruit pie. If I were a spiteful sort, I would make a comment about how ten years ago, this same woman told me “No offense, but I just don’t like fat people” and when pressed, she said “Because they’re jealous of me for being skinny.” In the words of my text-crazy cousin Malnourished, WTFEver.
And lest you think that I’m angelic, I will tell you that I ate no fewer than ten Oreos yesterday afternoon. Must maintain fat girl cred.
This week is the last of my OH MY GOD weeks, wherein I run around freaking out and slightly urpy from a stress tummy. I have now completed all twenty thousand pages of science fiction and literary theory and my eyeballs, they threaten to disintegrate and fall out of my head. I didn’t need my reading glasses for work before, but I sure as hell need them now. Thank you, literature credit requirement! Now, I have only to write a paper to be presented on Wednesday and then handed in sometime after that.
Which would be great, except this twenty page paper? Yeah, I’ve never written a twenty page paper. I’ve written some papers, some very interesting papers, but no PhD level conferencey type papers. In fact, with those papers, there’s the sneaking suspicion that maybe the professor was just trying to be nice.
Every writer feels like they are just two steps away from being found out as the talentless hacks they feel themselves to be. And perhaps related to that, I have always felt a bit like I was a poser in graduate school, as though I only got through via some very impressive lighting effects and smoke machines, and it’s times like this that those feelings well up and threaten to consume my brain. I mean, creative writing programs are easy. You just write pretty words. They don’t even have to make sense. But this? Creating arguments and dissertations and turning the literary world on its ear? Look, a shiny rock. Pretty.
The past weekend, I spent logging into and out of electronic databases, compiling research, fretting over my paper proposal with the margins in which my professor could barely contain his disdain. I have no arguments. I keep wanting to turn everything into a gender issue, even when really, it isn’t. I don’t know science fiction. I have no opinions about genre theory. I just want to cite a bunch of beautifully written work, compile a really impressive Works Cited page and then lean back in my chair and put my hands behind my head and sigh after a job well done.
I shouldn’t be freaking out about this so much. I try to remind myself of that, but at the same time, the voice in my head, the little Type A personality voice that strives for perfection and feeds my inner control freak, that voice pulls up my very beautiful GPA and reminds me that one false step, even a freaking A minus, is going to drag that bastard down into the mud. Giving myself permission to fail, to learn by stumbling around, it is very difficult. Even writing about it, I am so frozen that I just revert to robot-speak when talking about it. Hard. Head hurt. Ow. So the next few days will be spent throwing myself upon the spear of this gigantically huge paper, and then presenting it in class whereby hopefully they do smell weakness and descend upon me like rabid dogs. And then? Then it will be time to relax. And take a breath. And spend several weeks waiting for the graded shoe to drop. At least I no longer have to powergorge on a bunch of science fiction any more and can read something fruity. I predict a trip to the newsstand to buy every tabloid available. I really wonder what Bat Boy is up to these days.
