February 2005 Archives

Usually I am capable of resisting, but the other night, in a moment of weakness, I went in. I wandered aimlessly through the departments, knowing that I wanted something—it could be anything, really—I just had to find it.

Clutching the pair of Calvin Klein skivvies that I had picked up in my travels through the lingerie department, I headed downstairs to the make-up counter. Like an addict about to score, I knew what I was doing was a bad idea, but I just wanted it so bad. I tried to rationalize it. “I’m out of moisturizer,” I told myself. “I’ll just get that. And maybe one other thing. Just to treat myself.”

The ‘treating myself’ concept is laughable to anyone that knows me. One who lives frugally could treat oneself to something now and again, but I try to live each day as if the Great Depression or some sort of ration book system were lurking around every corner. I have earned a reputation at work for being the recipient of packages many times a week due to my affection for online shopping.

However, despite my acceptance of my shopping ‘problem’, my judgment is not so obscured as to prevent me from recognizing that the make-up counter is not a safe place for me to be. Since I tend to shop alone, the salespeople act as surrogate friends to me. Ever the optimist, I fall for their trickery and buy whatever it is they attempt to sell me. This is especially true at the make-up counter, where they insist on giving me makeovers. I generally feel so guilty for the time they spend on me, that I must buy whatever it is they are selling, even when it is wrinkle cream or botox alternatives.

This time, I vowed to go in, buy what I needed, and get out. Then, of course, when the woman approached me, palate in hand, and asked to give me a makeover, I couldn’t refuse. “I guess so,” I said hesitantly. “Try not to make me look like a tramp, okay?”

Like any true artist, she ignored my instructions and proceeded to paint me up like a chippie. She examined the black rings around my eyes first. “Have you not been sleeping, sweetheart?” she cooed at me. All natural, I have come to look on them as my signature, much like Cindy Crawford’s mole. I then gave her a run-down of my sleeping habits, which generally leave me comatose more than cognizant, and she winced with displeasure.

Her work began, and though I tried to slow her down, it was all I could do to keep her from releasing all of her creative energy, and greasepaint, onto me. I told her the story of the last makeover I got, where the woman was under the mistaken impression that I was a Latina. She painted me a caramel brown, and then put a heavy purple lipliner on me and sent me out onto the streets of Manhattan. That was the most recent time I vowed to never get a makeover again. “That’s terrible sweetie,” the woman said distractedly as she applied numerous shades of blue and purple eyeshadow well past my eyelids and well into my eyebrows.

She examined me carefully. “Your eyes…they’re like beautiful pools.” She paused a moment. “A man could just drown in your eyes.”

“As long as it’s fatal,” I replied, in all seriousness.

Confused, she looked at me, her penciled-in eyebrows forming question marks. I took the opportunity to try and slow her down. “I’m actually looking for more of a ‘daytime’ look,” I said.

“This is perfect for work or anything!” she bleated, and headed for my pouty gills with hot pink lipstick. I knew, from bitter experience, that there was no point in trying to stop her, or even slow her down at this point. My only chance was to get through it as best I could, and pray that I didn’t see anyone I know--or anyone trolling for prostitutes, for that matter--on my way home.

She finally finished, and I approached the mirror hesitantly. I tried not to gasp openly as I saw my reflection. I didn’t even look like a scarlet woman as I expected, instead, I looked like I had just received the beating of my life after a long night drinking. She looked at me expectantly, and I claimed to adore my new look, not knowing what else to say. Sorry, Ma’am, although I appreciate the effort, but I am firmly against domestic abuse, and I expect my visage to reflect that. It was just easier to get out of there as quickly as possibly.

I couldn’t help but glance in the mirror again as I walked towards the register. Maybe it wasn’t so bad, I thought. Perhaps men are attracted to painted and demoralized women. I jutted my swollen lips out, held my head a little higher, and pulled out my wallet.

I was re-reading one of my favorite books this week—Of Human Bondage--and I was struck by the plight of the main character. After being left by the woman he passionately loved, he found that curiously, he did not miss her. “He did not think of her with wrath,” Maugham wrote, “but with an overwhelming sense of boredom.”

I too, feel overwhelmed by boredom when contemplating most of my exes. For fun, sometimes, I try to determine what, if anything, I have gotten out of these particular relationships. The psychic scars are clear; the emotional damage is decided and diagnosable.

I have gained something from these failed relationships besides psychological disorders, however. Each boyfriend that passes through my life leaves a definite impression on one vital part of me—my music collection.

My first boyfriend insisted on wooing me to the strains of The Ramones and The Circle Jerks. When he was feeling particularly amorous, he would slip in a cassette of G.G. Allin, lyricist of such thoughtful songs as 'Scars on My Body, Scabs on My Dick' and 'Needle Up My Cock.'

Boyfriend #1 had been in a punk band of his own, a fact that never failed to impress me. One of his few releases, titled ‘Hell Bent For Rehab’ featured lyrics about older men seducing teenage girls for kicks. “Dude, that’s not, like, autobiographical,” he would claim, as he told me to wait in the car so he could buy us the cigarettes and lottery tickets that I was not legally allowed to purchase.

And much as my mother expected and my father prayed for, Boyfriend #1 left my life, into the arms of a waiting stripper. The stain of his musical taste, however, was not so easily lifted. Listening to Iggy Pop still makes me quiver with delight, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think some of Fang’s lyrics didn’t affect in a way that no one else has since been able to replicate—the song ‘Everybody Makes Me Want to Barf’ really speaks to me.

The next “boyfriend” was the only one with any actual musical taste. An actual DJ, his taste ranged from Kiss to Olivia Newton-John, but new wave and 80’s classics were his true calling. The floor of our apartment buckled under the weight of his records, and he would often stay hours after closing at his record store job, looking for disco classics or ultra-rare Sigue Sigue Sputnik remixes. #2 shaped my musical taste beyond compare—each time he infuriated me, which was many times daily, he brought me reconciliation gifts of records and cds. “You like Tiffany?” he’d ask, and reappear with all of her b-sides and five other teenage girl artists that I was sure to like as much or more. He still sends me packages of cds occasionally, and is my lifeline into the world of pop music.

Boyfriend #3, despite being a self-proclaimed music aficionado, took much more from me musically than he gave, which was representative of much of the relationship. Notwithstanding his refusal to meet or acknowledge the existence of #2, he was content copying all of #2’s music from my collection, and adopting it as his own. He would DJ entire parties with songs that were, essentially, sloppy seconds from my previous love.

I came out of that relationship with less positive additions to my musical collection, but a definitive idea of what I didn’t want. Namely, emo-core bands with limited talent and a decided focus on their hairstyles, much like their dedicated fans. And sometimes, learning what you don't want, emotionally or musically, is all you can expect to get out of a relationship.

And now, working in an office with dozens of handsome young men with the ‘Sharing’ box on their ITunes checked, I’ve found that rather than deal with their personalities or problems, I’m content to scroll through their playlists, and imagine how my life could change if I downloaded them to my collection.

When I was at the tender age of eleven, I had what could be described as a slight crush on a rotund young man in my class, Josh Frank. In addition to being the proud possessor of two first names and a full head of bushy hair, Josh managed to be chubby and yet still stay on the fringes of the 'cool' crowd in our class. Since there were only twenty-five youths in our grade, we were all quite aware of each other?s social rank in the elementary school hierarchy.

The night before Valentine's Day, I carefully signed a valentine for each of my classmates, and chose which conversation heart I would include for them. I certainly would not be giving Gabe one that read 'U R A CUTIE,' for he was not. Josh, however, received one that read, 'LIKE U.'

We had our nametags out on our desk, and we all walked around, distributing our valentines to our classmates. This was a process that could take upwards of half an hour, and our teacher sat at her desk, visibly bored, as we each gave her our largest and most colorful cards.

As I was passing my valentines out, I stopped at my desk occasionally to peruse the cards that had been left for me. I saw one with Josh's telltale scrawl on it, and plucked it from the bunch. I opened in quickly, glancing around the room to make sure that he wasn't watching me, and pulled the card out of the envelope.

It was a Michael Jordan card, with a picture of the athlete dribbling a basketball down the court. 'You're Nothing But Net to Me!' the card read. I turned it over and Josh had written,

WILL YOU GO OUT WITH ME????

Circle One

YES NO

My heart racing, I put the card back on my desk and went back to passing out valentines. I realized that finally, I would be a woman, I too would have a boyfriend like so many of my classmates. The rest of the class party passed as if in a dream, and I planned how I would slip the valentine back to Josh with 'YES' emphatically circled. I saw Josh standing next to my desk, and I coyly ignored him.

When I finally returned to my desk, I sat down to read Josh's valentine again. I opened the card, and saw Michael Jordon staring back at me. Only this time, when I turned it over, there was nothing there save some eraser marks and a faint penciled reminder of what could have been.

* * *

Valentine's past.

It must come as no surprise to the reader that upon entering high school and being forced to take a language course, I chose German. My teacher, Herr Silber, favored an informal approach to teaching, which consisted of us watching American movies in English and then, after the screening, he would parrot our favorite lines back to us in German. During the two years I studied under his tutelage, we watched Jurassic Park six or seven times. Although this brought us no closer to mastering the German language, we did have the pleasure of hearing our esteemed instructor repeat “that is one big pile of shit,” in both English and German, more than a dozen times, after we all voted it to be our favorite quote.

In addition to American movies, Herr Silber found that the only way that he could get through the early classes of a California public school was by adding large quantities of alcohol to his morning coffee. His nose was lined with the telltale red veins that one sees in the faces of chronic drinkers, and on occasion, his eyes would well up with tears as he reminisced about his native Osterreich.

Depending on where Herr Silber found himself in the continuum of drinking to hangover, would determine the class format that day. Sometimes we cracked our books and repeated dialogues about riding bikes and traveling via bus. More often though, we would intensely debate the textbook’s main character, Jens Kroeger, and the unnatural rosyness of his cheeks. Was this a mistake on the part of the color calibration department at the textbook factory, or were the German-speaking peoples indeed more flushed than we? As the only actual native German speaker that we knew, Herr Silber was our only basis of comparison, so we studied his complexion in great detail as he glowered at us from behind his podium.

It was known in the public school system that you only took a language class if you had some possibility of going to college. Two years of a foreign language was required for admission to any accredited school, so those of us who considered going to one of said schools enrolled in either Spanish, French, or German. In our class, however, there were four young men that appeared to have enrolled on a lark, rather than due to any sort of collegiate ambition. Herr Silber referred to the group as “The Quartet,” and took their insults much more seriously than he took those of the rest of the class. There was no obvious reason for this, other than perhaps Herr Silber didn’t consider them to be serious scholars like the rest of us.

By the beginning of our second year in German, we had learned how to claim “my pocket calculator is lost!” and the Quartet had been reduced to a Duet. These two, however, were far more dedicated to class disruption than the ones who had bent so easily under Herr Silber’s will and dropped the class. Travis was one of the two that remained in our class, biding his time until he was old enough to drop out of school legally. He was fond of taking my hands while staring boldly into my eyes and claiming, “Your hands, they are so soft, they are like baby hands.” Although amusing the first time, it was apt to be repeated two or three times during any given 50-minute session. His daily routine also tended to include obscene outbursts whenever any question that was directed at him wasn’t answerable with one of the two words that he knew after taking a year and a half of German.

After being sent to the principal’s office several times for various offenses, Travis settled down, and ignored the class completely, even when directly addressed. He was silent for a few weeks, studying his textbook intently, and jotting down notes on a scrap of paper. Finally one day, a look of serene calm gracing his face, he walked to the front of the class and approached the instructor’s podium.

“Well Travis, what do you have for me?” Herr Silber questioned him.

And then, in flawless German, Travis replied, “Suck my third leg.” His victory complete, he picked up his books and left for the principal’s office, without needing to be asked.

Only a few weeks later, we were given our quarterly progress reports. Our current grades were recorded, and the instructors were allowed to mark any of a few canned responses. Travis’ current grade was the lowest possible—an F—and his comment read “Working up to apparent potential.”

I, however, had the highest grade—an A—as did my friend Kim. This was not due to any inherent ability on our parts, rather, Herr Silber had promised Kim a perfect score on both her midterm and final exam if she would take the German exchange student, Ena, into her house. I had jumped onto the offer and suggested that I should be given perfect scores too, since I was living at Kim’s house at least half-time. When I was refused, I told Herr Silber that I would report his alcohol consumption to those in authority at the school, and miraculously my grade shot up as well.

Ena had already been kicked out of her original host family’s house. She was a large, broad-shouldered girl, with a propensity towards cowl-necked sweaters and a fondness for Budweiser beer. Her cheeks were as rosy as the children in our textbook, and she smoked more cigarettes than any teenager I had met previously. She didn’t seem to believe in the regulatory laws of the United States either--she would light up a cigarette anywhere, whether on campus or in class, and always seemed surprised when she was forced to extinguish them. Kim had been chosen as her new host because of the extremely lax parenting in her household, and due to the fact that she lived only a block away from campus. This would allow Ena the ability to sneak back home to drink during lunch, which Herr Silber recognized was a formidable need.

Each day, Ena would sit on the diving board of the pool, a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other, with the phone from the house on the end of its tautly stretched cord tucked under her chin, chatting away in German. Judging from the number of phone calls that Ena made that semester, she missed her life on a horse farm in Germany very much, and found our attempts at alcoholism pathetic. We didn’t actually learn any German from Ena, although she did teach us that in Germany, a sixteen-year-old can easily both look and dress like a woman twenty years her senior.

Those two years of German did help in the bid to get me admitted into college, however, beyond that, it has helped me very little. I am fluent, if you consider being able to say, “Lick my ass,” and “You are a pigdog,” fluency. I can also riff on pocket calculators—the possibility that they are lost, to your left or right or even right in front of you.

I’ve considered the possibility of studying another language, now that I am older. Were I to pick one, I’d probably choose French. During my last trip to Paris, I entered the country knowing only the words, “yes” and “I love you.” By the end of my trip I knew how to say “ham.” Clearly I have a natural ability when it comes to the French language. I’ve also mulled over learning how to fake an English, or even possibly an Australian, accent. I think perhaps, due to my talent with languages, this may be more appropriate for my skill level. I mean, if Bridget Jones can be played by an American, I can certainly learn how to start throwing around words like “bloody” and “tosser.” I’ve been paging through travel guides, and practicing how I will say “cheers” rather than “thank you” when the stewardess hands out peanuts on my flight. Thusly, my language studies will begin.

When I introduced Billy to my roommate Nivan, it was for both the first as last time, as he was helping me move out of the Brooklyn apartment that Nivan and I shared. Billy was a young man of dubious sexuality and cutting-edge couture, and I was unabashedly in love with him. However, I was still slightly embarrassed when he politely shook Nivan's hand and said with the utmost sincerity, "It's nice to meet you, Mittens."

Nivan had become my roommate as part of a failed bid to prove that I wasn't a racist. I had been living in the dorms at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, despite that fact that I had dropped out of the one class I was taking there when I realized that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't sleep standing up, and there was no way I could survive a five hour class without a single nap. So I perused the Village Voice until I found a hovel in Brooklyn that was cheap enough for my very limited budget. "Four room apartment" it proclaimed, "eat-in kitchen." I had never heard of an "eat-in kitchen" before, in my part of the world we had dining rooms. But, I thought, it would be like camping, perhaps, roughing it. And at two and a half bedrooms, even with another person, I'd have room to spare.

So I advertised for a roommate, after having been politely declined by every friend I knew, including the ones who were currently living in homeless shelters. I wanted to find someone immediately, because the first of the month and my move-in date was rapidly approaching. One of the first applicants I got was Nivan. His email was punctuated properly, which impressed me, and was scattered with attempted witticisms. The final sell was when he assured me that he was a tidy fellow. We exchanged a few emails over the course of an evening, and I had decided that I would meet him the next day and show him the apartment.

I waited patiently outside for him to show up, and was surprised when I was greeted by a tall brown man. He was probably ten years older than me and wearing a dress shirt and slacks. More than his adultness, I was shocked by his foreignness. Nivan was Indian, a group I had never previously encountered outside of convenience stores. As I showed him the room the size of a small kitchen table that was to be his, internally I congratulated myself for being so open-minded and accepting of his differences.

Move-in day came, and I watched apprehensively as Nivan unloaded a box of spices and curries into the kitchen. I needn't have worried however, for as much as Nivan resembled a respectable Indian man, he was nothing more than an American stoner who had grown up in Boston. The scent of chicken korma wafting down the stairs was never to greet me as I came home from work, instead, marijuana smoke filled our apartment as the smell of dirty laundry and bass-heavy hip-hop throbbed from his tiny room.

As it turns out, the landlord had apparently thrown up a number of walls into the third floor of his own home, and created the so-called four room apartment, which, like Russian dolls were each increasingly smaller, until the final one was barely visible to the human eye, and ended up holding nothing more than a stack of Nivan's papers. The landlord was the father of two sullen teenagers, whose mother seemed to have disappeared, probably because of their increasingly criminal behavior.

Every morning Nivan would put on a suit and head for a job doing something business-related in Manhattan, and come home to his pile of dirty laundry and have a dozen beers. After a few months, I realized that Nivan would not ever be doing laundry, as it involved hauling it up the street almost an entire block. I was granted a temporary respite when he went home for Thanksgiving, filling his car with dirty t-shirts and socks. He returned home and fired up a bowl, declaring that he never intended on doing laundry unless his mother did it for him. "And Christmas is just around the corner!" he said with exhilaration.

Every few months, Nivan would manage to coerce a skinny washed-out girl to accompany him home, and she would emerge from his room the next morning pale and skittish. These girls never stayed, and I never saw them long enough to determine if they were all the same girl, or just any number of young women from the East Coast private liberal arts college scene. They must be very open-minded, I speculated, or have spectacularly low self-esteem to agree to be bedded in a room the size of a coffin filled with more than two-hundred pounds of dirty laundry. The smell that emanated from his room was one that I hadn't smelled since I was a young teenager and had my first true male friends. At the time, I blamed it on the unwashed laundry, but it has since dawned on me that what I was smelling was the stench of chronic masturbation.

The apartment was falling apart between Nivan's absolute unconcern and my well-meaning but ultimately destructive efforts at home repair. The landlord who lived on the first floor of the house visited us occasionally, whereupon we would frantically hide ashtrays and open windows. The landlord had relegated his children to the second floor of the building, in a likely attempt to hide his pornography addiction from them, which I discovered when each month, as I deposited my rent check under his door, I would hear the fever-pitched moaning of filthy movies in the background.

The landlord's daughter was sixteen, but due to what I speculated were the high levels of hormones in the Brooklyn milk supply, she was built like a thirty-something woman. The knowing look in her eye and adult men that I saw hanging around our stoop didn't help matters much. Apparently her father felt the same way, because one day as Christmas neared, I was walking up the stairs to my apartment, and when I passed her door I heard shrieking. I stopped for a moment and took in the rattling metal industrial chair that was hanging over her doorknob preventing her from opening the door which had already scraped a hole in the carpet. "You stupid motherfucker," she wailed. "When I get out of here I am going to stick this chair so far up your ass that your head is going to pop off your motherfucking neck!" On the slim chance that she was addressing me, I slowly crept past and continued on to my apartment, trying not to let the stairs creak on the way.

As I watched Nivan open a beer, I suggested that perhaps that what was happening downstairs was child abuse. Nivan wiped off his chin and contemplated the idea, as pounding on our floor erupted from the room below. "Yeah probably," he finally said, handing me a cigarette. In general, Nivan and I ignored each other completely, save for the passive-aggressive notes we left for each other, my missive suggesting that he might start cleaning the body hair which jettisoned from his anatomy at the slightest opportunity, out of the bathtub, provoked an angry response accusing me of leaving a used band-aid on the floor,but now, with the specter of an overgrown sixteen-year-old woman/child being abused in our very house, we spoke for the first time in months. After I finished the cigarette, though, we returned to our separate universes.

Ten days later Nivan disappeared. I assumed he had left for Christmas, because a fair amount of his laundry appeared to be gone. While he was gone a package arrived that I needed to sign for. It was addressed to 'DJ Nizzy Nice.' As I was sending the UPS man away with the package, it dawned on me that perhaps this DJ Nizzy Nice was Nivan's alter ego, and I accepted the box of what appeared to be records. I then realized that perhaps my roommate had a secret life of some kind that I was not aware of. Or perhaps just a fond affection for slightly pathetic nicknames. When he hadn't returned after three weeks, I started to worry that he might never be coming back, and, holding my nose, I braved his room. I searched for his parent's phone number, but when finding nothing but an unopened box of condoms, I left, empty-handed.

It was another two weeks before Nivan returned. When he walked in the door it was as if I was seeing a ghost, for over the past month I had convinced myself that he would never be coming back, and partook liberally of his jar of unused laundry quarters. He deposited his bag in his room, went to the refrigerator and retrieved a beer, it was like he had never left. "So, how was your vacation?" I asked. He went back to his suitcase for a moment and returned with a packet of photos.

"I got engaged," he said, tossing the photos on my lap. I leafed through them, there was Nivan and his parents, dressed in colorful garb with a beautiful young woman who was clearly out of his league.

"Wow," I said after a moment. "I didn't know you were dating anyone." It was as if he had walked in and told me that he was really a unicorn, it seemed incomprehensible that Nivan could have had this totally hot girlfriend on the side, and that she had consented to marry him. I wondered if there was something about him that I had missed, something eligible, perhaps, something rich.

Nivan laughed. "Dude, my parents hooked it all up, it's like, arranged. I went to India with them over Christmas and got engaged. I have to go back and marry her in a while. I think there's a contract or something." He took a long swig from his beer and smirked. "It's cool," he said.

Nivan's leap into the world of matrimony didn't improve his tidiness, nor did it stop him from bringing the pale, awkward girls back to his room. I didn't hold out much hope for his wife's future happiness, but at least his mother would finally be relieved of laundry duty.

Her hair trembled as Straight Up Now Tell Me Paula gave her a apologetic 'no,' followed by the same from Randy. Simon finally raised the ante a bit and told her that the reason that she was being rejected was not because of her voice, but because of looks. Her hair stood on end defiantly and she declared, "We aren't all Barbies, you know."

This was an enlightening comment, of course. Living in California, where people are more likely to waddle than walk, I had never noticed that everyone was not formed like a Barbie, previous to the fat woman on American Idol telling me so. LL Cool J (that would be Ladies Love Cool James to those of you not in the know), the guest judge for the night, proclaimed that he "liked that Barbie comment," and then when he was ignored by everyone in the room, who must have recognized the mundanity of such a comment, he stood up to say it again. He then hugged the salad dodger, and declared again how much he liked "the Barbie comment."

Saying something like, "We can't all be Barbie" is akin to saying, "Work hard, play hard." It's something that you read on a t-shirt at the mall, and are using as justification for your lifestyle. I'm sure there are a number of witticisms that I could impress LL Cool J with, given the chance. Wait till I tell him "I go from 0 to bitch in 6 seconds," I'm sure that will make him realize that "mean people suck," and perhaps earn me an earnest hug as well.

My defining experience with people of size occurred the summer before last, when I decided that the only way to move past my last so-called relationship was to develop another more interesting obsession. Having already exhausted gore photography, off-the-shoulder tops and not being willing to start on porn at such a young age, I decided that food was the only fixation worthy of my time and I headed to Weight Watchers.

Weight Watchers was a lesson in self-esteem--from the minute I walked in the door I was constantly complimented on how incredibly thin and good looking I was. When I managed to ignore the fact that these morsels of admiration were coming from men and women who had pus-riddled sores from their thighs constantly rubbing together, it actually kind of made me feel good.

I set my goal weight to be the same as the weight listed on my license--I figured it would bode well if the next time I got pulled over I didn't start out the encounter with a fib, which inevitably leads to compounded lying and eventual arrest. These six pounds wouldn't be easy, I realized; as anyone who has seen me hula-hooping can attest to, I have very little control over my own body.

I cut my caloric intake by seventy-five percent, and learned to survive on leaves of lettuce and the dew that I licked off my windshield in the mornings, making sure to do complex mathematical equations to translate each morsel into "points." I took to haunting the gym at my school, where I, adorned in copious amounts of lilac eyeshadow, pranced past the numerous lesbians lifting weights and grunting in front of the mirror to get to the StairMaster, where I would leaf through Cosmo articles on how to achieve better orgasms while being glared at by the disdainful women-lovers. I also starting to lurk around the Weight Watchers online message boards, to get tips on how to make my carrot sticks taste like cream cheese and so forth.

The Weight Watchers message boards, are, as you may imagine, a lesson in low-class idiosyncrasies. Many recipes for solid food include Diet Coke as an ingredient, and 'It's as good as a Twinkie!" is a common kudos. One of the regulars made a web site dedicated to translating all carnival food into "points" thus allowing her brethren to save up for a corn dog and funnel cake without fear of going over their weekly point-load.

One of the common attention getting devices on the boards was for any of the legion of newly-committed three hundred pound plus women to complain that although it was bedtime, she was absolutely unable to finish the amount of points allotted to her for that day. These posts would rack up a dozen responses in a matter of minutes, each one asserting that under no circumstances should the woman allow herself to fall asleep unless she managed to stuff a few more calories into her gaping maw. "You have to follow the system for it to work," they would assert, "it works if you work it!"

The regulars also liked to detail their recent sexual activity, and speculate how many "points" they had worked off. Frankly, judging from the height and weight statistics they so proudly posted (which more closely resembled the demon spawn of a circus midget and an opera singer than any human being I had previously encountered), I wasn't sure if allowing their husbands to treat their belly like a trampoline while gnawing on a pastrami sandwich George Costanza style, would count as exercising anyway. But, who am I to judge?

It took me more than six weeks to lose five pounds, probably because of my undying affection for soy sauce and other sodium-enriched delicacies, as my diet commander told me consolingly. I took to wearing less and less clothing to each meeting, in the hopes that eventually, if I showed up in nothing but pasties, the scale would display my goal weight and I could leave this depressing nightmare of a hobby behind.

Eventually, with a fair amount of well-earned shame, I was brought to the front of the meeting and awarded a bookmark and keychain for reaching my goal. I tugged at my micro-miniskirt and looked out at the sea of envious, moon-pied faces and realized that perhaps, with enough stimulants and diuretics, we all could be Barbie.