My Earlobes Still Feel Fat

Today is my 28th birthday.  That seems both really old and really familiar, due to my habit of saying I'm older than I am for a couple of months before my birthday makes it so.  Anyway, whether I'm old, young, or a 'spring chicken', as my BF calls me when I lament our age difference every year on his birthday (he just turned 25), I'm definitely exhausted.  The past couple of months have been manic: I started a new position at work, at essentially the exact same time that book publicity began in earnest, which meant interviews and photo shoots* and writing and tweeting and generally being much more involved in the world than usual, and on top of that came personal dramas and Thanksgiving and Christmas shopping and the general year-end pressures we all face every year around this time.   Suffice it to say, my body and my heart and especially my brain are all knackered. So all I want for my birthday is a break, and for once in my life I'm doing my bes...

I've been thinking a lot about the gym lately, and not just because my body is falling apart and I know that lethargy is helping it along – the gym has been on my mind in part because of this article , in which Lindy West claims that to be a fat person at the gym takes courage.  Not only do fat gym-goers have to fight their own (possible) sluggishness, they also have to be prepared to defy the judgment of other gym-goers, who (West claims) look at their fat colleagues as motivational at best and disgusting at worst. I have to admit, I feel this way at certain gyms – usually disgusting rather than motivation, though – and it's one of the reasons I don't belong to a gym here in London (the other reason being that I straight-up can't afford it).  It's hard to find gyms where normal people make up the majority; almost every gym near me (Virgin, LA Fitness, etc) is very expensive and caters to a clientele that's image-obsessed, as a rule.  I'm hard-pressed to f...

I just watched an hour and a half long TV show on BBC called ' I Want to Change My Body ', which follows 30 young people who have different things about their bodies that they want to change, from their weight (obviously, since that's usually the #1 complaint), to their boobs or noses or skin or receding hairlines.  It basically validated what I've become more and more sure of in the past ten years: that nearly everyone has issues about something to do with his/her appearance, and a lot of us are tormented enough to take extreme measures (define extreme any way you like: surgery, juice fasts, obsessive makeup use) to try to 'fix' ourselves. The show was fascinating, of course (I'm convinced that learning about people's deepest insecurities is far more voyeuristically stimulating than watching them have sex), but it was also really sad to watch.  I feel like our society is getting more image-obsessive and more neurotic by the year – I'm certainly n...