In which I bitch and moan. A lot. About stupid sophomoric shit. All because I made the mistake of examining myself nude in the big motel mirror after my shower this afternoon.

I heard when I was a kid — and I have no idea if this is true or not — that one forms all of one’s fat cells as an infant, and that their density determines how fat one can become as an adult. Really fat Michelin Tire babies are capable, therefore, of growing up to be hugely obese, while skinny babies aren’t. Or something. Anyway, the point is, I guess I wasn’t a very fat baby.

Now I’m 37, and although I’m not dimensionally all that big, I think I’m carrying about as much fat as my body can possibly carry. I’ve suddenly developed this weird spare tire above my hips, and my ass, believe it or not, has developed dimples. Of all things. Six months ago I was pudgy but smooth; suddenly, I’m barely bigger but I’m dimply and bumpy and I’m grossing myself out.

You have to understand that I am a very, very sedentary person… for a variety of perfectly reasonable reasons:

• I work sedentary desk jobs.
• I live in a state where the majority of the time it’s either really fucking hot or really fucking cold out. (Iowa isn’t like Oregon where you can just go out and do stuff.)
• I don’t like to exercise for the sake of exercising. It’s excruciatingly boring, plus I think I don’t make those nifty endorphins that sporty people go on and on about. I don’t feel good after exercise, I just feel hot and pissed off, usually.
• I tend to enjoy things like reading, writing, thinking, making music, watching films: not exactly athletic pursuits.
• I’m left-handed and a bit awkward so I never really developed feelings of confidence doing physical things. (For instance, in grade school, my P.E. teacher claimed he couldn’t teach me to hit a ball with a bat because I was a lefty. Ditto tennis. And even bowling. And when I was able to learn how to do something, I generally wasn’t any good at it anyway.)
• I live in the country, so I drive everywhere because literally nothing’s within walking distance.
• My spouse is also sedentary. (He hasn’t realized it yet. He worked construction for a long time so he got his physical activity at work, but he’s been doing truly physical labor less and less and less over the years and, like me, he’s never learned the habit of doing physical stuff in his free time for the purpose of being healthy.)
• The only physical activities I like are the ones I don’t notice I’m doing (like walking for transportation or dancing or sex), yoga, and swimming. I couldn’t care less about any of the rest of them. Honestly.
• I’ve never made an effort to be physically active because, I think, I don’t actually know how.

When I was a kid, I played outside and ran around a lot like kids do. When I lived in Oregon, I went out and did things like hike Multnomah Falls or Mt. Hood because that’s what you do when you live somewhere like that. When I was in college, I walked everywhere because that’s how college works.

Now I’m old and married and fat and I live a lifestyle that is self indulgent and lazy, and I’m ready to admit now that I don’t know how to change it.

I don’t look like I feel; I look like a fat white married chick who’s pushing forty. I look like a Midwesterner, and not like the clever, funny, friendly, hip, talented, sexy creature I really am. I hate being vain. I do. I never cared about this process (of getting fat and dumpy) until one day I’d passed some limit I didn’t even know I’d set: it suddenly appears that I have become too fat for me to stand my own self.

There are problems elsewhere as well, as long as I’m listing the many obstacles to achieving any kind of beauty. For instance, my skin is still lousy. I thought it would have cleared up by now, but it hasn’t. I still have oily skin and blemishes, and I’ll always have scarring. Oh, and another peeve is the upper lid on my right eye; it will apparently always be a little heavy so my gaze is lopsided. I will always have this huge Morgan nose, of course. And I will always have this soft Hall jawline, if one can even use the word in reference to the slope between my jaw and throat. And my hair, oh JOY, is still falling out and has been for a few years. (My paternal grandmother had extremely thin hair; I think I’ve inherited some female pattern hair loss gene. Christ.) At first I’d thought the hair loss was anxiety-related, but it hasn’t stopped and my hair keeps getting thinner. And, if all that weren’t enough, my two upper front teeth are overlapping more and more as time goes by (because teeth move toward the front of the mouth and crowd each other out, that’s just what they do), and obviously I didn’t deserve nice, even teeth because I was already just so pretty.

I’ve never had hopes of being a great beauty, but damn this is an awful lot of strikes against one girl. I made peace with my nose and chin in my early twenties (mainly because my excellent eyebrows and my awesome ass made up for any other shortcomings), but the rest of it is pissing me off. Especially the hair — that’s just insult to injury. And my ass, well, it’s pushing 40 like the rest of me.

I almost wish I had a fundamentally weaker sense of self-worth, or at least self-image, so that I’d have freaked out earlier rather than letting this fat thing go so inexcusably far. It’s just that I’ve always generally been pretty much at peace with how I looked, rationalizing, as all average-looking girls do, that I had a killer personality and great talent and I totally put out on first dates, so I didn’t have to worry about not being beautiful… even though women are still judged more on their looks than their worth.

The plan:

Doesn’t exist. Umpteen times I’ve started these very small, easy exercise regimens in the past six or seven years. Some were so simple it’s weird I didn’t do them, like: ‘do 25 sit-ups before bed three nights a week,’ or ‘go to low impact step aerobics at the rec center twice a week.’

Perhaps I had to get truly grossed out with myself before I could develop the gumption to do something like eat differently or work out. We’ll see. In my heart of hearts, I believe I need to make drastic changes to the whole shape of my life because the inertia is just too great… for instance, I’ve walked more since we’ve been in Indy than I have in the past year. It’s like they tell addicts: one has to change one’s playground and one’s playmates to effect real change in behavior. I have tried before to eat better and exercise, but it lasts a few weeks and then it’s the dead of winter and I never go anywhere and no one sees me so I forget even to be vain and it’s freezing in that old house so I end up baking sweets and cuddling up with a book and some cake. Or a whole milk latte. And then I have great intentions again but the next thing you know it’s a hundred and ten degrees outside with a humidity index of 98% and all I want to do is lie in front of the box fan with a very cold cocktail, and it’s too hot to eat dinner so we don’t and then the sun goes down and we drive to town for whatever’s available at ten o’clock at night which is usually something fried in Whirl like Torino’s or McDonald’s food.

I know I need to make changes, but I have never tried to form a new habit that I didn’t actually want to form, so I don’t know how. (Obviously I’ve started various new habits over the years, but they were things I genuinely wanted to do.) I might have to develop a whole new form of humility and join Curves or something, and force myself to become genuinely emotionally involved in the process. God knows I can’t buy pre-packaged diet food systems, because they’re none of them vegetarian.

Gack. Just… gack.