Yes! No!
I have a thing for high-end cooking magazines, like I have absolutely any idea what I’m doing in the kitchen, and for some reason, I like to read them in bed, which is quite possibly the least appetizing spot in the house. Although that’s not really true, because tonight, we had dinner in bed, does that gross you out? Grilled cheese and tomato soup from a can (Campbell’s!), because Adam is sick, we don’t have a dining room table (the second we knew we weren’t going to stay in this house, we nixed the very idea of buying one, because why? So we can pay to move it?) and our usual spot where we eat in front of the television was unappealing.
Does anyone else do this, or are we the only piggish couple who shovels our food in our mouths in odd locations? I mean, certainly if we had a child, I might feel differently, as really, a high chair has no place in the bedroom or living room, but … well, for now, it’s fine.
The point I started to make is that my bedtime reading leaves me subject to illusions of culinary grandeur, particularly Bon Appetit, and in the last five minutes tonight, I had to be talked off the ledge of making my own handmade spice rubs in pretty jars to give out as Christmas gifts this season. I mean, really, I made Campbell’s soup from a can for dinner … do I really think I’m going to roast a supersize batch of cardamom pods and toasted cumin seeds, grind them with a mortar and pestle, throw in a little gourmet sea salt and then (oh my God) put it all in a hand-decorated tin with a personalized label? Seriously?
I have a mammogram at 8 a.m. tomorrow morning, and while yay, breast health and all, I’m dreading it, because again, I have these dense fibrocystic breasts that take hours to sift through with the assistance of four radiologists and a special decoder ring. I don’t mind these things generally, but all, and oh I mean ALL, dignity is lost when you have four doctors and a nurse repositioning your breast on a set of slides while one says things like, “No, put the nipple THAT way. No, no — THE OTHER WAY. Facing me. Yes, I want the nipple facing ME. Really jam it in there so I can see the top part of it. That’s good. Like that.”
Yes, the last doctor I had said “jam it in there,” like he was packing the trunk of a car for a road trip and my boob was that last pesky duffel bag that refused to cooperate.
And finally, since we’re on the path to dangerously disjointed anyway, vanity sizing is really on my nerves. I initially thought, stupidly, that even though I lost a rather sizable amount of weight, that I could still get away with wearing some of my fat pants, because so what? They’d be a little big! How exciting! Not so much. Perils of bearing your thong at the post office aside, my God, too-big pants are astonishingly unflattering. Most days I alternated between looking like I had a giant load of corn poop in my pants to simply appearing … deflated, like someone had let the air out of my legs. In both instances, I actually looked fatter than I had before, which was certainly not the goal, and I did not give up copious amounts of pizza so that I could look like a half-empty Michelin man.
Enter the new pants I finally bought, which were in a size eight, which, I might add, is a perfectly reasonable size for someone of my … size, hey, can we say SIZE again? Also, I already had two pairs of these pants (Gap jeans, boot cut, if you were wondering) and loved them in my size eight. Except that it appears that what was once a size eight is no longer a size eight, and the current size eight is more like a ten or a twelve. And although I bought them anyway, because they fit in the dressing room, after about an hour on my body, my crotch was starting to seep to my knees and I’m pretty sure I could pull them off without unbuttoning them, and this is WRONG, people, it’s SO WRONG.
I am not a size six. I’m not saying that because I want you to say, “yes you are!” I’m saying that because frankly, I don’t want to be a size six. I’m certainly a lot thicker than that — by choice — and if sizes keep shrinking at this rate, in a few years, I’m going to be the first five-foot-seven woman in history to weigh 140 pounds and wear a size 0.
I know this isn’t new, but God, it’s annoying, and so completely deceptive and it’s cruel, it’s actually cruel. Not to mention the fact that it encourages us to be porkier all the time, because why not? You can eat nachos every day and still be a size two! I’ll roll down the aisles of the supermarket like a blueberried Violet Beauregard, but by gum, I’ll be wearing my size zero pants!
But for now, it’s a minor irritation, because I have to buy new pants again, despite already having gone through the miserable self-ass-checking in the mirror. Thank you, Gap. It is small consolation that you are not Ann Taylor, who designs pants for … well, I don’t know who. Can anyone wear Ann Taylor pants? I might as well throw on the slipcovers for our couches and pair them with a nice cardigan, because geez, are they boxy on me.
Happy Wednesday!
*Shocking Pinks
27 comments November 13th, 2007