Diet

I am now on the path that leads to redemption: I have admitted that I am swiftly becoming a lardass. Time to take action.

Step One:

Smoke.

Everyone knows that cigarettes cut your appetite, keep your mouth and fingers busy, and supermodels do it and god knows they're thin. Of course, there's always more of a health risk for overweight smokers, but if you increase your intake from one to two packs a day, you'll reach your goal weight in no time!

Step Two:

Add more fruits and vegetables to your diet and avoid wheat.

That means instead of beer you should go for a little cranberry in your vodka, or a bloody mary. The antioxidents also cancel out any potential adverse effects of the alcohol. In fact, you can actually see it working. Have a couple of martinis with extra olives and look at yourself in the mirror naked. Damn! You hotty, you!

Step Three:

Get more physical exercise.

Give your signed letter to your secretary instead of calling her to make her come get it. This will also have the added advantage of no longer being the only lawyer at the firm whose secretary is skinnier than she is. To that end, give her lots and lots of dictation tapes full of your babbling that she has to spend all day typing and tell her aerobics are really bad for the elderly. It's likely this last comment may drive her to eat something fattening.

Step Four:

Find inspiration.

This one really tripped me up. I mean, there's so much to choose from when searching for inspiration to get skinny again. Alas, pasting photos of supermodels and JCrew catalogs everywhere are not doing it for me. Nor do I feel like investing in one of those devices that oinks when you open the fridge. And frankly, the fact that my pants always leave marks in my new flesh folds no longer do the trick because these marks seem to have become permanent and my pants just sort of snap into place like legos.

Thank the gods for this video. It not only provided me with the inspiration to get moving again, it gave me an idea for other lucrative careers once this whole legal thing goes in the can.

Lull

I've been in a bit of a lull lately. I've been feeling domestic, while avoiding doing anything particularly domestic, so this basically equates to me staying at home watching old movies while fruit flies breed in my sink.

Sigh.

I'm not sure what my deal is. What makes it worse is pretty much everyone around me is attributing my unhappiness to the practice of law. I can't really agree with that. There's definitely a lot of tedium involved, and I'm not one of those people that gets off on confrontation (although god knows I'll rise to the occasion if need be - or if need not be - like if you're just ticking me off). I also like winning. So far my record's pretty good. As in, I haven't lost yet. Go me.

I need a change, I think. Or maybe a vacation. If neither comes soon, I'm bound to make some irresponsible purchase, like a designer couch, or a massage chair, or perhaps a neti pot.

Hm.

Weight

It was recently pointed out to me that by far my most passionate and effective legal writing happened to coincide with the period from last November through last February, when I was blogging heavily in order to impress a potential mate with a panopoly of wit and truth.

Mission accomplished, so I stopped blogging and the writing part of me got lazy and now it takes me five minutes to write a sentence in a brief because I can't seem to find the correct adjective. And even thesaurus.com, my old friend of yore, yields nothing these days because I can't even think of what I want the synonym for. So, such gorgeous phrases as "Defendants' so-called 'very real' defense boils down to nothing but a mumbo-jumbo of misplaced monikers and stonewalling strategems"* have dwindled into obscurity, only to be resurrected (hopefully) with a positive end-of-the-year review.

After landing sought-after mate, my need to be witty in a form that could hang out in the public sphere in blog form and be read by perhaps not all of the people I want reading it, but who I might have mistakenly (drunkenly) given the address to, seems to have faded. Let's face it, I was getting the attention I craved. I was also getting laid, and I've noticed that this can tend to direct the mind to other more (re)productive things.

Also, I got fat. That made it hard for me to type more than my job requires. If blogging were a job, I would've applied for disability.

I'm really not kidding about the fat part, and I'm definitely not kidding about all the offensive things I am going to say about fat. See, there is a very cardinal rule in my family about fatness, which is pretty much that you should be left on the side of a mountain to starve until you read an acceptable weight and may return to the tribal grounds. It's about Darwinism and a strong need to propagate washboard abs which appears on our family crest right next to an abstract rendering of dysfunctionality. In short, my family is somewhat sizest, although we would term it "aesthetic."

When I returned from Asia last fall after getting dengue hemorrhegic fever, I was a very skeletal 122 pound 5'8 waif of a thing, about 13 pounds under my normally small frame. I had to admit that I really liked the attention. I totally got what the point of anorexia is -- it's that barely disguised envy when your girlfriends tell you that perhaps you're a "little too thin." But I'm a nice person, and I didn't want anyone to feel bad and my work clothes fit me like garbage bags, so I did the sensible thing and consumed as much food as possible in order to get back to 135.

This involved a lot of ice cream.

But at 135, I was still a "little too thin," so I indulged everyone once again (and myself with more ice cream) and made it to 140. And somehow forgot to stop eating. And eating. And walking distances longer than 50 yards.

I now weigh 166. No fucking joke. I have gained more than a quarter of my original body weight. I am carrying 125% of myself around like some pussy ant. I am officially overweight according to the BMI. My sister called looking for a temporary home for her Size 8s and I had to decline because even Banana Republic 10s are threatening to give everyone a crack peep show at work when I sit down. I swear I even hear the seams creak when I breathe.

I have been boring my friends to death with all this talk of fat -- so much so that one of them finally convinced me to do something about it already and join a gym. Also, I could stop eating about 6,000 calories a day. Just a suggestion.

I'm glad she intervened. I was starting to have nightmares that I would be on one of those featurettes with "America's Growing Obesity Rate" and then a street shot with a bunch of fatties waddling down a street with their faces blurred out. And there I'd be, and everyone would know it was me because I haven't yet learned to walk like I'm fat so I'd be the only one galloping as my BR Size 10s swish swish swish their way into a hole between my thighs resulting in eventual second-degree chafing.

Truly, it's bad. I think I just disgusted myself into going to the gym again tomorrow. Besides, our gym has those nifty treadmills where you have your own TV, so today I could watch videos from all over the world where drunk people fall on train tracks and miraculously survive. As if that was not enough to make me appreciate a heart that wanted to explode and a body that would ooze stinky sweat and fat bouncing everywhere at the same rate as my suddenly huge boobs (I'm talking about being grateful to be alive, which I, like, so totally am), they then did a MONTAGE of the same shots in rapid replay. It was like being at a rave featuring near death experiences.

Maybe next time a different channel.

*Extra credit for the alliteration. Take that, Matlock!