He's Dead, Jim | Operation ÖSTERREICH
Last week, Comrade Coquettish posted a video to the FaceSpace, her advertisement for a dance partner to join her for a tango class. (Comrade Coquettish is a lithe & insanely alluring dancer; think Salome & the Dance of the Seven Veils.) I commented, "If life was a dance movie, I would be the raw, untamed talent who only needed formal training to be[come] a legend. Also, I'd be chiseled instead of flabby." (Think Channing Tatum.) In an instant message chat a few days later, she wrote, "You're not chubby, by the way, you are just extra sturdy." I was vaguely shocked, because Comrade Coquettish is a fitness fanatic who practices astonished asceticism & I am slothful glutton whose elephantine bulk can best be described as an elephantine bulk. I know how fat, how morbidly obese I am; it's not news to me. The sad truth is that I choose to look this way, to be this unhealthy. I choose it day by day, every time I have a snack or a dessert or seconds at dinner or choose not to exercise or choose to take the elevator "just this once" instead of the stairs. (Lift really is a better word than elevator.) I remember a brief exchange from a couple years back, in which Vitamin H. lamented her heft & I reassured her that she's not alone, that a great many of us, especially in America, especially in Michigan, especially in Genesee County, are overweight, myself included; she replied, "Yeah, but comfortable with it." She was right. I am quite comfortable being fat. Too comfortable, as it turns out. I should be less comfortable in my own voluminous skin. I should be daily ashamed of my sloth & my gluttony, two of the seven deadly sins. I understand that Comrade Coquettish was trying to be kind, thinking that I was self-hating & trying to disguise it with humor, but her statement was preposterous. "Extra sturdy"? If anything, my tremendous bulk has made me far more fragile than I should be. In this as in a great many things the words of the Bard as an instructive as they are poetic: "…I must be cruel only to be kind" (Hamlet, Act III, Scene IV). I'm not saying that fat persons should be treated as pariahs & driven out of every civilized place by torch & pitchfork, or that insulted already fat kids is a productive way to amend their ways, but I've never been done any favors by those who are kind only to be cruel, explaining that I'm big-boned or extra sturdy or that their is more of me to love. (The Interpreter, my paramour from last year was a chubby chaser, & flat-out told me she wouldn't have been interested if I had a six-pack of abs. So she claimed.) I am far more than flabby, far more than chubby. I am obese & for far too long I have been far too accepting of this sorry state of affairs.
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