Tag: bursting bubbles

Don’t Cry, I’m Fat.

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

I’m fat. There’s no other way to say it and I’m not really big on sugar coating things, so there you go. I’m fat.

I’ve got rolls that would make a bakery jealous. I’ve got curves in all the right places and a lot of the wrong ones. Baby’s got back and some front. My arm flab is envied by flying squirrels everywhere. I. Am. Fat.

I’m not just fat in body; I’m fat in personality, too.

What I mean by that is even if I lost enough weight for society to deem me worthy (and that’s really never going to happen since I have these things called hips and shoulders and damned if BMI doesn’t account for that sort of thing), I would still have a big personality. I take up space. Give me room and get out of my way. Sometimes I think I need a bigger body just to contain this personality. Try to cram all of this into a skinny girl and it’s either going to overflow or bloat the body.

But back to being fat.

There’s some negative assumptions about my fat self that I’d like to correct. First of all, I don’t eat all the time. In fact, I actually have some troubles eating. Friends tease me about the fact that I can’t eat a lot at one time. One of my buddies pointed out once that his ten year old nephew ate more than I did. And it’s true. It’s like the ultimate joke on the fat girl: I’m fat, but can’t eat a lot. Go figure.

I don’t just eat junk. To be honest, lunches are probably the place that I slack the most on healthy eating, but dinner is a different story. I cook my own meals. I try to make them as fresh as possible. I look for ways to incorporate fruits and vegetables into my meals. I make that effort. I don’t eat a lot of fast food. Being broke helps, but even now that I have money, I’m still treating it as an occasional treat and not a go to staple. I don’t have much of a sweet tooth (I go through phases) and I don’t keep much in the way of salty snacks in my house because that’s the sort of thing I’m prone to binge on. I try to keep up the quality of the food I eat.

I don’t sit around all the time. I exercise. I try for five days a week, at least twenty mintues a day. My routine is currently in the process of being adjusted as I get used to working full time again. So far I’m just doing yoga and pilates, but I plan to work my previous workouts back into the mix: cardio kickboxing, belly dance, Latin dance, Brazillian dance, hip hop, and sculpting. Yeah, I like to dance and kick ass. Nothing wrong with that.

I’m not a slob. I may be fat, but I like the way I look for the most part. I like to dress this body that I have right now. I’ve been broke for too long and haven’t had the opportunity to invest in some new clothes, but believe me, that’s on my current to do list. I like to look good. I have style and I like to express it. It’s a struggle to find good looking clothes for my size because people are under this mistaken impression that fat people need to wear muumuus and while I’m not putting down muumuus, they’re just not for me.

Also, I’m bathe on a regular basis. Maybe I get a little sweatier during my workouts or maybe during hot days, but I can assure you, I don’t smell. I use this stuff called deodorant. Skinny people don’t have a corner on that market.

I know it offends a lot of people, but I’m okay being fat. They think that by saying that I’m giving up or choosing to be unhealthy. I’m not. I’m always looking to improve my health and if I do have a problem, my weight is probably going to be low on the cause list. Not getting regular check-ups, putting off going to the doctor, smoking for 16 years, they’ll be more likely to cause me problems than my weight.

And giving up? Please. I’m not giving up anything. Not my food and not my looks. Just because I don’t fit the norm and nobody’s going to be rushing to put me on the cover of a magazine doesn’t mean I’ve given up. It means I’m rocking what I’ve got and doing it a little harder than you’re comfortable with, that’s all.

I don’t know what I weigh right now. The scale is broken (that joke just writes itself, really). I know at one point I lost forty pounds and I can say with some certainty that due to a variety of setbacks that I gained most, if not all of it back. And I think that maybe lately, I’ve lost a little of it. I’m not sure. I’ll know for sure when my pants start fitting better. That’s how I gauge my weight. How my clothes fit.

Of course, when my clothes start fitting a little big my first thought is always that they’re stretching out, not that I’m getting smaller.

I guess that’s because my body might shrink, but my personality still fills out my britches.

I’m a Guy Magnet* *Conditions May Apply

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

I’m single and have been for years. I’ve never been married. I’ve really only had a couple of relationships that could have been considered serious. But it’s not for lack of attraction.

I attract men. All women are capable of such a thing. It’s just the type of men that I attract that causes me trouble.

Pardon my bluntness, but I’m a fat girl. Maybe not big enough to qualify for Richard Simmons to show up to my house, but I’m still fat. As I like to say, I’ve got curves in all the right places and several of the wrong ones, too.

A certain contigent of men see my rolls and interpret my weight as a sign of desperation. They think I’ll settle for anyone, put up with anything for a little attention and the privilege of saying that I have a man. These are the men that usually have no jobs and more often than not, no teeth either. I don’t know if the two actually go together, but in my experience they have. They hit on me like I should be grateful that a man is paying any mind to me.

These men are quickly shut down and sent grumbling. I actually had one guy offer to take me to McDonald’s for our “date” and then get indignant because I shot him down.

Sorry. I’m worth more than Mickey D’s.

I also have this odd ability to attract older, married men. I don’t know what it is about me that catches their eyes, but it’s a little creepy and I’m not at all in that market.

Then there’s the “only single girl in the room” situation. Maybe some guys don’t mind that I’ve got enough rolls to qualify for a bakery. Maybe they think that I do have a pretty face. Maybe they like my sense of humor and my brains. But, they only have anything to do with me when I’m the only single girl in the room. The minute another girl comes in, someone thinner or prettier or more socially acceptable, someone the guys won’t give him too much shit for kissing, the sweet nothings they whispered in my ear are just that…nothing.

It’s quite possible that these two types of men have conditioned me to not pay any attention to men flirting with me. I’m not very good at reading people. I can’t tell when a guy is hitting on me.

That’s not entirely true. I can’t tell when a potentionally good guy is hitting on me.

It’s enough to drive my friends mad. The good guys are more subtle, I suppose, which is why I have a hard time seeing it. But my friends can see it clearly and it kills them that I don’t. Not only do I not see it, but if my friends are kind enough to point it out to me, I deny it. These aren’t the ususal guys and usual situations. They can’t possibly be hitting on me.

And sometimes the good guys aren’t so subtle. I once had a guy that I had a mad crush on point blank ask me to make out with him. I didn’t because I thought he was joking. I thought it was because I was the only girl in the room. This same guy also picked me over a prettier girl to dance with outside of a restaurant. He looked at me and told me he was going to dance with me outside and he did and I totally missed that he might have actually meant something by that. We did dance outside. It was sweet and I was awkward and it was the closest I ever got to anything with him.

I still kick myself in the ass over missing out on that opportunity. I had my chance and I missed it because I was so deep in denial, so conditioned to think that there was no way a good guy would bother with me. He wasn’t perfect, but he could have been perfect for me. I’ll never know for sure now.

To put this into a common fishing metaphor, I can reel them in even if the bait I’ve got on the hook isn’t the best and not what most fish are looking for. I can still snag a few. Unfortunately, I’m a catch and release girl. I’m not convinced that any of them are keepers and I end up thinking about the ones that got away, the ones I let go.

Someone should have taught me to be a better fisherman.

Bad Words

~ Kiki Writes ~ 2 Comments

Difficult. Paranoid. Frustrating. Spiteful. Ugly. Malicious. Weird. Frightening. Damaged. Aggressive. Hypocritical. Tactless. Uncaring. Insensitive. Selfish. Unaware. Unthinking. Judgmental. Defensive. Unsypmpathetic. Poisonous.

Bad words. That’s what those are. And all of them have been said to me. Not in anger. Not by enemies. They’ve been said with great sincerity by friends and family and co-workers to me.

And every single one is true.

Everybody has their bad words whether they want to admit it or not. I admit mine. It’s not out of pride; it’s out of honesty. I know I’m all of those things. They’re not pleasant things. They’re things that I struggle with and things that I’m working on, things that I’m trying to change.

I admit to my bad words. I’ll be the first to say that they’re true. I can tell you how and why. I can explain them.

And I’d like to explain them. Not excuse them, but explain them. I don’t like excuses. Excuses refuse to take any blame. Explanations are just explanations; blame isn’t part of that game. It is what it is.

I don’t want to explain my bad words to somehow rationalize them or make them acceptible. They’re not. I want to explain them because to explain the absolute worst bits of myself is to tell the ultimate truth. And that’s what this blog is about, right? The original intent of it? To tell the truth.

My friends and family and co-workers, the very people who said those bad words, will somehow still manage to say that I’m a good person. Which is kind of boggling when you look at the list of bad words. It makes me wonder. Do I have more good words than bad words? Or is the quality of my good words better than my bad?

It’s curious. I imagine people would say the quality and quantity of my good words are greater than my bad words, but that’s a natural reaction if you like someone. You want to see all of their good bits. You emphasize them. Partly because you want to think that you associate with good people, but also because you want the people you care about to be the best they can be. You might know about their bad words, might even speak them, but in the end, you minimize them.

I don’t want to minimize my words. I don’t want to magnify them, either. I want to look at them honestly and explain them honestly.

It’s pretty heavy stuff and I don’t want to bring down the tone of the blog. I have trouble keeping a straight face for very long and unfortunately, there’s just too many bad words to give sufficient covereage to them in one post. So for the next several months (seven if I counted my groups right), just once a month, I’m going to talk about and explain my bad words. You’re going to see just what kind of monster I really am.

Welcome to my dark side.

Five Gifts I Would Give (If I Could)

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

Last week I listed five gifts I wanted from Santa. As much as I like getting, I like giving, too.

Here are five gifts that I would give if I could afford to give them and if it were practical to do so. Don’t look for anything of substance here. You won’t find it. It’s not one of the things on the list.

1. I’d give the Pittsburgh Pirates a winning season. I’m not talking championship; I’m saying finishing things out above .500. I’m no Pirates fan, but it’s got to be miserable as a fan and a player to running on two decades of losing seasons. No one deserves to go through that (though there are some people I think should; doesn’t mean they deserve it, though).

2. I’d give everyone a white Christmas. The snow would only last a day and wouldn’t be on the roads so there’d be no travel problems. I think people in the warmer climates are missing out.

3. I’d give people a break from being self-righteous. I imagine it’s exhausting and they could use a vacation.

4. I’d give my old high school some windows so it wouldn’t look so much like a prison. Or I’d give it some razor wire so the prison look would be complete. Whichever would be better for the current students.

5. I’d give everyone an extra tomorrow so they could catch up on their sleep today. Sometimes you just have to pause and take a nap so you have the energy to keep up with life.

That’s my giving list. What’s on yours?

Rob Whoville!

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

Ah, December. The time of year when people talk about goodwill toward men and showing the love and giving and sharing and lots of other mushy, squishy feelings we’re only fine with showing one month out of twelve. There are a lot of holidays that occur during December and most of them run with the same kind of warm fuzzies. Christmas (Jesus’s birthday version, Santa Claus version, and the combo platter), Hanukkah, Kwanza, Ramadan, Yule, Solstice, Festivus, and probably several more that I’m either forgetting or not aware of. 

Though I celebrate Christmas (more of the Santa Claus version as I was raised by atheists and am now myself an agnostic of sorts), I no longer wish people a Merry Christmas. I don’t say Happy Holidays. I tell people to Rob Whoville.

Why?

Because people, while talking about the “true spirit of the season”, act out the actual spirit of the season which is, of course, MINE! These people who decry the commercialism, selfishness, and absolute material greed of the holiday season actually personify it all beautifully in a religious sense with their insistance that December only has room for one holiday and it’s theirs and theirs alone.

Love your fellow man, so long as he bids you the proper holiday greeting and celebrates the same holiday as you. Cry and plead to the masses about the lack of tolerance you’re getting, but not about the lack of tolerance you yourself are showing.

Well, I’ve got news for you, kids. Just because you don’t celebrate it, doesn’t mean it’s wrong and it doesn’t exist. That goes for EVERYBODY. If you’re going to preach the meaning of the season outside of Black Friday and door buster sales, then you need to be willing to practice it, too.

As I said before, there are a lot of holidays that are celebrated in December. There’s nothing wrong with wishing people Happy Holidays, just like there’s nothing wrong with saying Merry Christmas or Happy Hanukkah, or any of the rest of them. ALL OF THOSE ARE CORRECT. Even if you don’t celebrate the particular holiday, somebody does and it’s okay to politely acknowledge that. Your face will not melt, you will not spontaneously combust, and Santa will not skip your house.

It’s unfortunate that for all the talk about kindness and giving during the season, it ends up being only talk because to be truly selfless and kind would mean giving up being “right”. And laws knows we can’t be having with that.

So if simply expressing a season’s greeting is offensive, then I’m going for broke with my December motto. Why pick sides in this holiday “war” when I can create my own side and offend everyone? Sure, my motto might take some explaining, but I don’t mind that. Some things are worth explaining.

Remember, it wasn’t until the Grinch robbed Whoville that he learned the TRUE spirit of the holiday. Maybe people need to experience a little kind of larceny to really get it. Maybe they need someone to steal their pride.

Rob Whoville.