Here's an idea for
Google: don't give me access to finding out information about people who drive me crazy (or, in this circumstance, have driven me crazy). I don't need to know what they're up to, who they're writing for, or, fuck, that they now have a stupidly named blog in which not only do they provide you with all these recently written articles, but also the capacity to make your blood boil once again.
I don't usually get like this, and I hate to sound like a raving lunatic, but let me take you back to the year that Judy and I like to refer to as The Year Whose Name Shall Not Be Spoken. 2001+1, if you will. By all accounts, an incredibly shitty time. I was underemployed and working from home in New York, generally miserable and binge-eating and drinking like it was my job. (Wait, why wasn't I getting paid for
that?)
In the midst of this sharing-my-general-good-will-with-the-planet time, I was also Nerve-dating up a storm. Well, as much of a storm as you can generate after a few weeks of good email and/or phone conversation before the inevitable discovery that the dream girl (yes, someone once used those words to describe me) weighs over 300 pounds--that the photo wasn't just some really bad PMS puffery.
A. was smart and witty and Jewish (the trifecta!)--and he had some depth and a degree of personal pain that I found appealing. He'd survived cancer and spoke about it bravely, had played classical music since he was a child and was working on a book. After several emails and instant messages and phone calls, I felt like I knew him. When we finally met a few months later (travel and work had kept us from meeting sooner), it was awkward. And not just in the hey-I-met-you-online way, but in a disappointing way. I still felt some weird attraction to him.
At some point, all these issues converged: why, if A. was so good on paper (er, monitor) but bad in person, couldn't I let go of the idea of who I wanted him to be? Why did I want guys who treated me like crap to like me? But worst of all was the realization that no matter how smart and well-read and funny
you are, no one wants to sleep with you when you don't weigh less than them.
Looking back on it now, I know I was a different person. Losing weight changes personalities, I think. I was angrier, then, and easily upset. But really, can you blame me? Every day, I got judged by someone--on the street, in a store, on the train--for something I was trying to desperately change. But no one really cared why.
