Good as Hell

My car starts making a deafening scraping noise.  The gears lock but I manage to get it off the freeway and into a Denny’s parking lot where a guy orders me to get immediately out of the smoking vehicle. Then he pushes it into a parking place while I wait for a tow truck.  I teach nine classes per week, all three of them different than the class I’d taught for the last couple of years and requiring brand new teaching materials. The repair of my car will cost, almost to the penny, what I’ll earn for a month of teaching.  I pass out usually when I get home from school in the evening, and Himself (now teaching in Irvine and Long Beach) returns home after I’ve gone to sleep and is asleep himself when I depart in the morning.  Between classes I tend to the inevitable complications of my business.  My friends post photos of international travels and spectacular meals on Facebook.  I do not begrudge but sometimes I wish that my life was easier.  Time with students zaps me back to the realization of how privileged I am, in the scheme of things.  Actual teaching lifts me out of my morass and it’s almost like I take on a different identity.

This week, I do confess that I am particularly cranky during the non-teaching/sleeping hours.  Even the satisfaction of being able to teach folks something that will make their lives easier doesn’t completely temper my malaise.  I fall asleep during Real Time, but learn that Bill Maher has gone on yet another tirade about obesity and makes a vigorous endorsement of fat shaming.  Talk show host James Corden makes a wonderful rebuttal.  An aside here, Corden’s performance (weighing about 100 lbs. more than he does now) in Mike Leigh’s All or Nothing is a real tour de force. Corden, like me and millions of others, has struggled with weight for as long as he can remember.

I must have been about four when my mother told me to put on a pinafore dress with a big red flower print for Easter at my gentile cousins.  I balked and told her that the dress made me look fat.  She insisted that I wear it but when I trotted over to show her all of the eggs I’d collected in my basket, she eyed me up and down, observing, “That dress does make you look fat.” I endured bariatric surgery and survived some life-threatening complications nearly twenty years ago.  I lost about 150 lbs.   My weight these days stays within about a thirty-pound range but if it isn’t assiduously managed, I can easily balloon up into plus sizes and general unhealthiness.

It wasn’t until the big weight loss that being fat wasn’t my number one preoccupation.  I don’t think that a day went by where I didn’t endure at least one humiliation.  It took a huge amount of energy to prove to people that I was an “okay” fat person—not stupid, lazy nor lacking in character.  While I am still overweight, my lowest moments these days are never as gut wrenching as what I endured every day of my obese life.

This is the year of the Keto Diet and I, while still overweight, am at about the lowest weight I’ve been at since junior high.  For years I haven’t eaten anything that ever walked on four legs.  Steak and spareribs look good but are simply foods that I don’t eat so I never feel deprived of them.  Now I’ve just added sugar and carbs to the list of foods that I don’t consume.  I eat nuts and cheese and vegetables that grow above the ground.  I am never hungry.  Despite butter and heavy cream, my blood pressure and cholesterol have decreased.  Every few months, usually when I’m out of town, I have a one or two-week rumspringa stuffed with bread and pasta and ice cream.  Right now, this is a good plan for me, but other plans have worked short term before so I might well, in the future, need a new strategy.

James Corden speaks thoughtfully about what it’s like to grow up as a fat kid.  And fat jokes have had a way longer shelf life than humor derived from ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation.  It seems only quite recently that fat jokes have become pretty much off limits.  Except for nasty outliers like Bill Maher. 

In addition to Corden’s fabulous monologue, I hear an NPR interview with rapper/actress/flutist Lizzo and check out her videos.  Hackneyed verbiage perhaps, but Lizzo is truly a personification of “big and beautiful.”  She tours with a team of talented fat dancers.  The trauma of being a fat kid kept me from dancing, or joining a gym, or riding a bicycle on a public street.  Lizzo and her dancers move so joyfully and with such vigor and stamina that no one could accuse them of being “unhealthy.”  While so much of a child’s universe is off the adult’s radar, I hope that between anti-bullying campaigns and beautiful big girls like Lizzo, fat girls will have a much easier shake than I had.  Even a crappy week bears no comparison to a nanosecond of my old fat life.