give it to me straight

My mom called me at work one day and said a family friend's boss's son needed an assistant for three businesses he was juggling. The family friend put in a great word for me (and they respect her so her recommendation is gold) and he agreed to meet with me. Bam. Just like that. The work seemed decent and best of all, no more working with the public. The only drawback was the pay wasn't great and there were no benefits. But I kept leaning toward no more working with the public.

I kept thinking how it all worked out so well. An office job with recommendation from an insider. And I had a day off from working coming up so I could take that day to do the interview and it wouldn't interfere with my current job. Perfect.

I met the man at his father's restaurant. It was empty because they weren't open for lunch yet. The man, M, was short and overweight, a roly poly kind of guy with a round, young face and closely cropped gray hair. His cheeks and chin jutted out when he smiled. His skin was shiny and ruddy around his hazel eyes. He did not walk but waddled. He wore a shirt and jeans and dirty white sneakers.

We sat down and he told me a little about his businesses. He has three and he also deals with his family's personal finances. His family is rich and they have several sources of income and I guessed he needed someone to help him keep everything in order.

It was apparent from the beginning of our conversation that M wasn't articulate but he was extremely southern. He spoke with a grating country cadence and often raised his voice toward the end of his sentences. He paused several times as if he were trying to collect words from his head before he said them. He mentioned the job didn't necessarily have a title since I would be doing a little of everything. I wasn't worried about job titles, only the duties. Fortunately, they were duties I had done during previous jobs or duties I felt confident I could do if given the proper instruction. It wasn't neurobiology we were dealing with here. I was going to be faxing and using Excel and taking out the trash.

He asked me to tell him about myself and I did and then he sat back, his squat, chapped face stretched into a mischievous grin. He stared up at the florescent lights, again trying to find his words.

"So, tell me this...hm...so basically...well, let me tell you where I'm coming from...what my concern is...it seems to me like you're going from A to Z. You went to college to be an artist and you've got this degree. And now you wanna be a secretary. You see what I'm sayin'?"

I basically explained the best I could, downplaying my crazy, that I had a change of heart after I graduated and wasn't sure if I wanted to pursue art and decided to change my direction. He said he encountered a similar situation after he graduated from college so he understood but he was concerned, if I took the job, I would pack up and leave after two months or so. I assured him I wouldn't do that. I pointed out I've been at my current job for three years now. And if I didn't get that job, I'd probably have to stick with it for another three years because these opportunities rarely come along.

In some ways, I could understand his concern or just curiosity over why I made such a radical change. But in other ways, it made me feel bad, as if he were implying that I was downgrading myself or that the job was beneath me. First of all, nothing is beneath me. The job might be beneath my education but not beneath me. I'm just not uppity like that. And I told him I enjoy being organized and doing office work. It's easy and I don't have to deal with the public and it wouldn't be so stressful that I couldn't work on my writing or even pick up art again on the side.

The problem with my job now is that it's so stressful and dealing with the public gives me such bad anxiety that I'm emotionally and mentally exhausted at the end of the day and have no creative output within me.  I wasn't necessarily aiming to move up as far as a job goes, but just to find something to lower my stress levels.  And that seemed like the kind of job to do it.

And then he said if I were hired, he'd have to get into the mindset of a man doing the job because he envisioned a woman filling the position. I was slightly irritated by that but it wasn't a deal breaker.

The deal breaker came a week later.

art

"'Cause we all know art is hard
young artists have gotta starve
Try, and fail, and try again..."
-Cursive, Art is Hard

"Art is not the world, art is in our hearts..."
-Showbread, Stabbing Art to Death

"Let me ask you something, what is not art?"
-Unknown

I used to draw.  A lot.  My childhood was spent with a Slim-Fast in one hand and a pencil in the other.  I often sneaked into my sister's room and pulled out her charcoal sketches of dragons and Axl Rose she kept underneath her bed.  And I copied them.  I learned about lines and shading sitting on the floor of her room, surrounded by the waxy smell of drugstore makeup and wall-to-wall posters of hair metal bands.

An artist was born.

I devoured sketch pads and ground colored pencils into stumps.  As much as I loved toys, I loved drawing utensils equally.  I couldn't wait to try a new type of marker or a new color of crayon.  I drew my favorite superheroes and created my own action figures out of paper.  But I was never incredibly creative.  My artistic endeavors were derivative of the enormous amount of Saturday morning cartoon I consumed and my eventual discovery of anime, which I was into way before it became so huge here in America.  I was ahead of the game back then.

I learned to shade and highlight.  I learned about depth and perspective.  All from doing it on my own, from observing, from drawing, from constantly creating.

I was good at copying.  Any attempts to be original were mediocre at best.  But when I was younger, I wasn't preoccupied with being original or unique.  I just genuinely enjoyed drawing and having fun with it.  I was good.  It gave me pleasure.

But sadness and insecurity crept in and my mind became poisoned and I became a perfectionist.  People noticed my talent and were impressed.  And somehow, people began to inflate my abilities.

"Brannon drew a picture of my daughter and it looks just like her!"

"Brannon doesn't even use an eraser!"

"I heard Brannon doesn't need to draw from pictures, or from life.  He can draw from memory!"

"One time, I saw Brannon sneeze on a piece of paper and then when I looked over his shoulder, his snot was in the shape of Mona Lisa!"

None of this is true, of course.  But for some reason, in some people's minds, I'm better than I actually am.  And that was a part of the insecurity.  I felt I could never measure up to people's outlandish expectations.  I was my biggest critic.  Eventually, nothing I drew matched the image I had in my head and it frustrated me.  I knew I was better, more capable, but for some reason, I couldn't translate the image from head to paper.

There were times when I got away with reaching people's expectations, or at least that's what they told me.  I did a few commissioned drawings.  But eventually the stress became too much and I stopped charging because my art was not worth anyone's money.  And eventually I stopped doing drawings for people all together because I couldn't afford to jeopardize the reputation bestowed upon me by others.  I never lived up to the hype, never went along with the adulation and as much as I tried to downplay what I could do, no one believed me and I suddenly I was a small town art prodigy.  And wanting to please everyone, I didn't want to produce low-quality work and prove everyone wrong.   

I had been painted into a corner, so to speak.

Art became a source of frustration instead of pleasure and so I stopped drawing as much.  And then I went to college to study art.  No one had any preconceived notions of who I was or what I was capable of and suddenly I was a clean slate, an out of practice clean slate.  And I felt like I was starting from zero while all my classmates were already prodigies themselves.  I was in over my head and terrified I had made a huge mistake.

But I finished college, got a degree, and graduated with honors.  I guess that means something to someone but it doesn't mean anything to an animation company.  They want to see your demo reel and it doesn't matter how great your grades were in college, if you don't deliver mind-blowing art, you're done.  There's hundreds of other wide-eyed kids in line behind you who have dedicated themselves to their art.  They didn't hide behind rumors of grandeur.

I abandoned art after college.  I didn't feel good about my abilities and wanted to go in a different direction.  I just wasn't sure about the direction I wanted to go in.

Let me let you in on a little secret I've been keeping about my relationship with art:  I DON'T FREAKING GET IT.

cacao kapow!

Valentine's Day hit me like Chris Brown in a Bronco.  I'm not talking about just being alone (although that did have a lot to do with it).  I'm talking about the enormous amount of crap I ate.

I won an entire plastic container full of Hershey Kisses from work and then the store gave everyone a box of chocolates and my mom bought two boxes of chocolate for me.  After consuming that much sugar and chocolate and lard and fat and lard and sugar and chocolate and fat and lard and more lard and the occasional coconut cluster that slipped past my security measures (yuck), I felt like total garbage.

It's kind of amazing how you don't realize how bad you stopped feeling until you start feeling bad again.

I always thought I was impervious to sugar, caffeine, Aspartame, vitamins and minerals, love, legally obtained prescription drugs, etc.,  because I can have that stuff and it doesn't make me more energetic or foggy or good or bad.  I've always walked around generally feeling like crap.  So, when I started exercising and eating less greasy, fast food-type items, I didn't feel more energetic or "alive" or better physically or even mentally.

All it took was a near month-long binge of boxed chocolates to make me realize I didn't feel as bad as I believed.  And you might say a month-long binge of chocolates will make anyone feel that way, no matter what condition they started in.  Even the most lethargic sloth would come away from three boxes of cocoa-coated caramels feeling worse.  But that chocolate wasted feeling was how I used to feel all the time before I started dieting and exercising.

I felt bad that I indulged so heavily.  I write these entries about doing well.  I write about moderation and it's okay to cheat every once in a while and you just get up and do better the next time around.  And then I binge.  And it happens to everyone but I still feel like I should be a better example.  I've battled food and my weight and my addiction to food for years and you'd think I'd develop some sort of resistance to the constant cravings.  But, no.  In a lot of ways, I'm no better now than when I was seventeen and bingeing on Doritos and Diet Coke.

I also feel like I'm not as in touch with my body as I should be.  I don't know what's going on inside.  I can't detect the changes in my mood or my middle.  There's a giant disconnection there and I don't know how to harmonize my senses and awareness. 

If anything, I guess this overindulgence was a good lesson.  There might be something to this diet and exercise after all, folks!  Maybe it does make a difference, even if the differences are subtle and fluid and not easily recognized by those who aren't in touch with themselves.    

do not allow back

This is embarrassing to write about but we're all family, right?  I've talked about all my other mishaps, be they spiritual, physical, and social.  Might as well talk about my professional snafus, too.

When I was seventeen, I quit my job as a florist assistant after dealing with dead people, nearly wrecking the company van (on several occasions), and inhaling second hand smoke from my soot-stained boss.  I quickly moved on to be a cashier at a pharmacy.  Things went swimmingly for six months until I sold cigarettes to an underage girl.  The girl worked with the Alabama Alcoholic Beverage Control Board and several agents quickly swooped in and told my supervisor.  I was fired on the spot.

Now, let me explain.

I was fat, pimply, and insecure.  I didn't have a voice.  I didn't like to "confront" people.  The girl did look too young but I was too scared to say anything.  I felt a rush of nervousness hit me, a bad feeling, but I ignored it because I didn't want to come off as rude or suspicious of her.  Yeah, it was my job to be suspicious and check her age but I didn't think of it in those terms.  I just thought of it as one person dealing with another.

And it was a huge mistake.  All these years later, it still embarrasses me.  No one likes to talk about how they were fired but I was fired for doing something illegal.  I look back on it now and I feel dumb.  All I had to do was ask for an ID but I couldn't even muster the courage to do that.  And because I couldn't ask a simple question, I was fired and it made my life spin in a different direction.

Cut to a few weeks ago.  A former coworker from my current job called me up and told me he had gotten a position as an assistant supervisor at that same pharmacy.  He said there was another assistant manager position open in another city and he said I should try for it.  I immediately thought of my termination and wondered if I could be hired there again.  I didn't want to express that to him, though, because it was embarrassing.  So, I shrugged off his offer and made lame excuses and said I wasn't sure if it was right for me.

The job did sound pretty good, though.  More money.  More hours.  I just had to face that shame again.  I finally expressed my concern to him and he said he'd speak to his store manager to see if I could be hired again.

Two days later, he sent me a text message saying I was on the "do not allow back" list.  I wasn't necessarily shocked but just knowing it was official was disappointing.  There was the smallest part of me that held out hope.  But that hope was squashed, just like it always is.  Just knowing I'm on a naughty list somewhere makes me feel dirty.  Filled with more shame.

It's bad enough that the dumb, huge mistake I made ten years ago still embarrasses me, it's also still holding me back from better opportunities.  I didn't even ask for the opportunity.  In fact, I avoided it  'cause I didn't think it would work out.  Naturally, it didn't.  But it was like the universe had to bring my bad decisions back around to me, another reminder of mistakes and failures, of setbacks and shame.

A week or so later, I walked into that pharmacy to pick up a couple of things.  I had just come from work and I had on a dress shirt and tie.  A man with an unkempt beard and a limp came up to me and asked, "Do you work here?"

"No, I don't," I replied.  "I'm sorry."

"Oh, no, it's okay," he said as he hobbled away.  "Sorry for asking."

I wasn't talking to you, mister.

apprehensive

"They’re fooling themselves. They think all this bullshit about hard work and achieving means something but it doesn’t. Universe is completely random. Particles colliding at random. Blind chance. So you didn’t make it. No big deal. It’s not your fault. Shit’s random."
-Party Down

I'm not an atheist, just apprehensive.

I've mentioned before that I've stopped praying or relying on God in any kind of way.  I used to feel guilty about it but now I don't feel bad at all.  Nothing in my life has changed.  I'm no better or worse for it, which makes me wonder if God was ever in my life at all, or if God is anything at all.

I don't know.  I'm not sure I care.  I do hate that I've slid so far down but what can I do?  I've tried it all with the prayer and meditation and Bible reading and patience.  Nothing helped.  Nothing ever does.

Faith is a lot like a slot machine.  You pray and pull the lever and you hope for good results but you never know if you'll hit it big or end up empty.  It's really all random chance. You can never be sure if the constant prayer ever pays off or if things in your life just finally line up.  You want something long enough and if you work for it, you might just get it.  It doesn't mean God had anything to do with it.  Just to be fair, it also doesn't mean he didn't.  You just can't know so why get caught up in it?

It pisses me off when people think I have given up on my faith in God just because I am not where I want to be in life.  Do people think that's how I think it works?  I'm not new to this game.  I'm not asking for a perfect life.  It's not about circumstances but sensations.  I have never felt that comforting presence.  I have never had a good feeling when it comes to God.  I've only ever felt separation, emptiness, nothingness.  I am not reassured when I pray.  When I scream for God to give me a sign, I get nothing.  I am not comforted and therefore I don't think there's anything out there to comfort me.  How hard is it just to say hello?  If God cares/exists, why has he not shown me?

And where's the stable relationship with anyone in my life, cosmic or concrete, with flesh or faith?  My parents are distant, my coworkers are crass and former friends are too busy.  I can congregate and communicate but I'm no one's number one.  

I wish I could believe again.  I wish I could be the good little Christian boy in my Christian bubble like so many people around here.  They are small-minded and naive and annoying.  And sometimes I think it would be easier if I could just be that way, too.  What if God gave a shit?  What if he finally had mercy on my menial life?

It's not like he's bullying me or anything.  It just feels like it.  But that's conceited on my part because, really, who am I?  He has a whole big world to ignore so why would he single me out to slice and dice?  No, he's saving that dirty work for the devil.

english is my second language

While at work a couple of months ago, my high school AP English teacher came in to shop.  I walked up to her, excited to tell her about my newly acquired passion for writing.  I haven't seen her since I graduated high school in 2004 and thought she'd be happy to hear about my venturing into her field of expertise.

After we caught up for a bit, I told her I liked to write now and she smiled a small smile and I told her I was even published in my college's literary journal.  Not a huge deal but it was something.  A good start.  I might have made a misstep, however, because I said her class helped me enjoy writing and I thought my writing grew while under her guidance.  I even bragged a bit and said I thought I wrote some pretty good essays during the times I had her in 11th and 12th grade.

She smiled again and mentioned my science teacher's daughter, who was one grade above me.

"Yes, I still remember her essays.  She was one of the best students I ever had."

I didn't understand why she chose to compliment some random girl who had nothing to do with me but I pressed on and casually asked her if she would like to read some of my writing.  She was retired by this time and so I thought not only would she have the time to read it but I hoped she'd be interested to see how I've grown as a writer.

Instead, she let out a sigh.

santa claws me in the face

Thursday afternoon, I put on my frayed trainers and headed out the door.  The weather was perfect for a good walk to I had to go out and enjoy it.  I knew I only had a few days of good weather left before the air turned too cool to go outside.

Things were great.  I wasn't too hot.  I wasn't too sweaty.  Ear buds were firmly in place, pumping music into my extremities.

And then the school bus passed me.

It's always awkward when vehicles pass me.  I can see people crane their necks to look through the rear view mirror at the bearded stranger walking down the dirt road.

It's worse when it's a bus filled with curious and obnoxious children.  That particular bus has passed me a few times and I always caught glimpses of smashed noses and oily forehead prints on the smudged glass.

Being the beautiful day it was, the bus windows were down to allow the sweet little bastards angels to enjoy the cool breeze.  As the bus rolled past, I saw a white ball whirl by me and hit the blades of grass at my feet.

I looked up and saw glowing brake lights as the bus skidded to a stop.  Through the blasting music, I heard the bus driver's booming voice spill over the open windows.  I surmised he was yelling at the littering little snot.  I was only feet from the bus so I slowed my pace.  I didn't want to pass by and risk being pelted with more paper or insults.

"What the hell is this guy doing?" I asked myself about the driver.  The bus just stood in the road, the brake lights illuminating my embarrassment.

Finally, I just turned around and walked in the opposite direction.  I heard the squeak of the tires as the bus started up again.  I didn't look back until I was down the hill.

Oh, why do I always find myself in these awkward situations?  I kept thinking what the kids must have been thinking.  "Hey, John, let's throw this piece of paper at the fat loser walking in the dirt road!"  I don't like being "that" guy, the one people think they can push around or make fun of.  Especially when it's a bunch of middle school shits playing the bully. 

I looped back around to the spot where I was almost hit with the wad of paper and found it on the ground.  I picked it up, smoothed it out and saw it was poorly colored paper Santa.

By the way, you did a crap job putting that Santa together, Pablo Prickasso.

I just wanted to burn some calories and clear my head, not catch a paper cut from Kris Kringle.  Thanks for the holiday cheer, Timmy. I hope you get coal and canker sores for Christmas. And people ask me why I don't like kids! 

getting to know gluttony

I don't want to say my mom is the reason why I'm fat but...it is her fault.

I kid.  Sort of.  But my mom equates food with love and living in the South, food is fried.  We fry everything.  We fry chicken and potatoes and vegetables.  We fry desserts.  We'll fry anything.  We'll fry milk if you give us the chance.  So my mom equates fried food with love, which means I was doomed from the start.

My mom learned that kind of love from her mom, who probably learned from her mom.  I don't think that's an unusual parenting style, especially in the South, but it's a slippery slope.  I don't see much wrong with showing someone you care by feeding them as long as that's not the only way you show love.  You also have to teach your kids to have a healthy relationship with food, just like you'd teach them how to have a healthy relationship with people.

My mom skipped that part.

My parents were not very affectionate, especially my father.  Once again, not unusual, but Mom's love shined through the most when she cooked.  She conveyed her love through cornbread instead of kisses and while she just did what she knew, it had an unintentionally negative impact on me.

When I was younger, Mom asked me what I wanted from the grocery store.  I told her I didn't want anything.

"But the kitchen is practically empty." 

It wasn't. 

"I just hate the idea of you and your sister walking into the kitchen and not having anything to eat."

That sentence struck me.  My parents have been very fortunate to have always been able to provide us with more than we needed as kids.  I don't think her concern came from a place of fearing she might not being able to have access to proper nutrition, but came from a place of fearing she might be a bad mom.  I say that because she never said she worried about us opening the closet and not having clothing or opening our backpacks and not having enough school supplies.  It was all about the food.

And so my mom passed down the notion of food and love to me, whether she meant to or not.

Even as far back as recent months, as much as I've tried to diet, I still look to her as a compass of sorts, following her lead when it comes to eating.  I tried to be good and follow a strict diet but if I see her eat a small plate of food in the middle of the night, I feel like it gives me license to do the same.  Or if she asks if she wants to go get a pizza for us, she knows I'm going to say yes.  Sometimes I'm only as strong as she is.  And when she gives in, I have no trouble caving as well.

I'm not exactly sure how my weight gain started.  I don't think it was anything tragic that led me to the linguine.  At least not at first.  I was an active child.  I often played with my cousin, who was around my age.  But as I grew older, I simply grew out of playing outside.  I was not a rough and tumble child.  I was sensitive from the beginning.  I was artistic.  I liked to draw inside instead of kick up dirt outside.  I simply think the combination of an ever stocked kitchen coupled with inactivity caused my initial weight gain.

I didn't notice my extra bulk until a classmate of mine pointed it out in fourth grade.  We had all come back from summer vacation and the first thing he said to me was, "You got fat over the summer."  I'll never forget it.  It was the moment I became aware of my appearance.  And over the years, I've only become more and more aware of myself to the point of obsession.

That was around the time I went from eating out of pleasure and convenience to eating so I could comfort myself.  I took those notions of love and feel good feelings I inherited from my mom and ran with them.  Any time I felt bad, I used food to recreate those feelings, to cover up any pain I felt.  And this continued into adolescence.

When I hit puberty, everything only got worse.  Not only was my stomach expanding but my face exploded with acne.  I was an awkward mess of excess oil and body parts padded with fat.  And so I ate to forget the freak show in the mirror.  I felt ugly and inadequate and eating only made things worse in the long run but I either didn't realize or didn't care at the time.  As self-aware as I thought I was, all that weight certainly creeped up on me.

But eventually, I got sick of being so big and so I lost around 20 pounds during the summer after 11th grade.  I came back to school and felt and looked decent.  After I graduated, I continued the weight loss journey and ended up losing a little over 60 pounds and went to college with a better attitude and a better body.  But I hadn't defeated the cause of my weight gain.  I was still insecure.  I was still sad inside.  I still felt inadequate.  Somehow I had found the resolve to lose weight despite my overwhelmingly negative attitude about myself.

And then my first year of college destroyed me and once again, I turned to food to cope.   But only for a while.  Eventually, I got a hold of myself and dieted and exercised away all the weight I gained that first year.  But the issues remained, nagged at my mind and wouldn't let me forget the gross, fat guy I still thought I was.  I buried the feelings with school work instead of food.  I hadn't overcome my issues, only ignored them again.

It was only when I graduated from college and moved back home that I let food back in again.  It was like meeting an old, familiar lover.  And we made sweet, sweet love.  60 plus pounds worth of love.  I was more depressed than I had ever been and I did not care about anything except filling my stomach up with everything I could get my hands on.  I was in self-preservation mode.  If I didn't reach for pie, I probably would have reached for pills.

All the weight I lost, all the hard work I put into changing my body and my mind slowly unraveled with each passing day.  I packed the weight back on over the course of two years.  And I ignored it.  I didn't want to face myself and so I simply didn't.

And one day I looked at myself and saw that I was back to where I started.  Overweight and still miserable.  I realized I hadn't changed, hadn't learned, hadn't accomplished anything.  I felt like I had wasted my youth.

For me, food was the only constant in my world.  It wasn't just my comfort.  It was my companion.  It was my best friend.  And although some best friends can be destructive, I didn't care about the long-term damage.  I was looking for the short-term solution.  I couldn't just give up on food.  I felt like I was abandoning someone who had been there with me through thick and thin (both literally and figuratively).  Me giving up food would be like me telling you to suddenly cut your best friend out of your life.  I just couldn't do it.  It was a ridiculous notion.

But one day, just like that one  magical day in high school, I said I was tired of being like this.  I didn't want to see another birthday as big as I was.  I didn't want to ring in another year overweight.  Since January, I've made the decision to lose the weight I had gained not once, but twice.  And I've managed to lose 39 pounds so far.  I still have a long way to go and I've hit several obstacles along the way but I've done it before and I'm confident I can do it again.

But it's still hard.  Even now, despite how far I've come in trying to recognize bad food behavior, when I'm at my lowest, all I want is food.  It's still the only thing that soothes me.  No person, no god, no orgasm, no compliment or accomplishment is as satisfying as food.

And I even tell myself to stop.  I'll grab some chips or reach for the frozen pizza and I'll pause and tell myself it's not going to help.  It's only going to make things worse.  But I eat the chips or the pizza anyway.  I don't care if it's going to make things worse because I'm hurting in that moment and need to make the pain go away.  I say I'll deal with the consequences later.  I never do.  I deal with it by eating more pizza.  By eating  more cake and pie and chips and candy.  I deal by not dealing.

I've realized that it's easy to lose weight.  That's a bold statement with the seemingly insurmountable weight struggle so many people are going through but it's simple science.  More calories burned than consumed.  In fact, you can even pinpoint how much weight you want to lose on a weekly basis.  1 pound equals 3,500 calories.  Eat 500 less calories than you normally would every day and in 7 days you will have saved yourself 3,500 calories, which totals 1 pound.  The trick is finding out how many calories you usually eat and how many calories you need to consume to maintain or lose more.  But that's the basics.

But my point is, physically, losing weight is easy.  It's the mental part that is the hardest.  Diet and exercise can change your body but what is going to change your mind?  It's all a head game, a constant fight with the demons inside you pointing you in the wrong direction.  And until you tackle those demons and exorcise them from your brain, you'll always be in the middle of sensibility vs. gluttony.  I should know.  I've been caught in the crossfire more times than I can count.

My mom's not really to blame.  I was just kidding.  If anything, the combination of fried food love and my stunted social skills and possible mental defects that no one had any control over is what contributed to me being this way.  It's all just circumstances, random events and chances that led me here.  But I'm at a place now where I can take responsibility for my own body and actions.  Looking into the past and finding the cause of my weight issues is good because I can learn and grow from it but I don't play the victim here.  Not in this case.  I don't look back to blame, only to resolve.

I've managed to lose the 39 pounds despite not having dealt with my issues.  And until I do, it's very likely that I'll gain the weight back.  That's why it's imperative I try to fix the inside while simultaneously correcting the outside.  The problem is I just don't know how to do that.  So until I do, I have to stay on top of my eating and working out.  I gained all the weight back because I didn't stay on top of it.  I let myself go.  I allowed my inner insatiable beast to roam free in a playground made of pasta.  I've temporarily caged him but with makeshift bars.  He's still clamoring to get out.

I can only hold him back for so long.

smear campaign

At work the other day, I went to grab a pen and felt a wet stickiness on my hand.  I looked down and the pen had somehow started to leak and left a streak of ink on my palm.  It was a pretty thick streak, too.

Instead of grabbing a tissue, I pulled out the hand sanitizer and thought the wetness plus alcohol would lift the ink right off my palm.  I squirted a healthy dose into my hand and started to rub it in but immediately knew I had screwed up.

Instead of lifting the ink off my hand, it just spread it all over both my hands.  I looked at what I had done to myself and immediately went back for more hand sanitizer.  No such luck.  I just kept making it worse.  By this time, my hands were a gross shade of gray like I had lost circulation in my hands.

Let me also point out that it was dead in my department.  Not a customer in sight.  Until I made a mess of myself.  Then everyone congregated to my department and a lady even asked me if I could show her how to tie a tie.

Of course.

She said she needed to shop some more but said she'd be back so I took that opportunity to dump out the rest of the hand sanitizer in hopes some of it would rub off but I just kept smearing the inky black all over my hands and into the crevices of my fingernails.

I went over to another department and rifled through their hand sanitizer as well.  There as no one on staff to relieve me so I could go to the bathroom and wash my hands so the sanitizer was my only hope.  I dumped out another pile and washed my hands in it in vain.

By this time, the smells of both sanitizers was getting to me, green apple and granny perfume.  I probably smelled like the fourth hour of The Today Show and all I managed to do was make it look like I had been digging for truffles the night before.

The lady came back, with her daughter, and asked me to show her how to tie the tie.  I sighed inside myself because the girl was pretty.  She'd take one look at my  hands and reel back.  By this time, I had gotten the majority of the dark ink off my hands but I smelled strongly of alcohol and had a ring of gunk in my fingernails so I wasn't feeling too confident.

Then I felt the beads of sweat forming.  My chest felt like a radiator and I wondered if I should point out my soiled hands and get it out of the way or just let it be.  Maybe they hadn't noticed.  Through my own observations, I've noticed people aren't very observant, at least around here.  Mentioning it would just bring more attention to it so I didn't say anything.  

I limbered up my hands and the lady said, "Now, watch really closely, Carol."

I hoped Carol had stunning eagle vision 'cause I didn't slow down for her to comprehend a thing I did.  I tied that tie faster than I've ever tied one before, my hands a blur, like I was pulling some sleight of hand magician trickery.

I gave them the tie and finally a supervisor came by and I put my hands in her face and said I needed to go wash up.  By now, the hand sanitizer had begun to clump up all over my hands and my hands felt raw and gritty.  I washed away the hand sanitizer and the majority of the ink but the wonderful fingernail stains were still there.  I just pressed on through the rest of the day with my hands in my pockets.

First my zipper broke and then I had a brush with a leaky BIC.  What's next?  Trip and fall on my face in front of a crowd of tweens?  Throw up burp in front of a customer?  Accidentally fart over the loudspeaker?  The humiliating possibilities were endless.

It's just not looking good for me.