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...

So I’ve been doing a little room improvement, which has led to a lot of re-arrangement of bookshelves, which has in turn led to a lot of rediscovery of old journals / favorite postcards / art supplies. And photos. Lots and lots of photos. More specifically, I was surprised to remember that I went through a phase where I actually bothered to create photo albums and scrapbooks for trips in my life. I spent a good hour sitting on the floor, surrounded by bookshelf detritus, flipping through old albums, laughing and remembering the good times: the roadtrip my friends and I took in high school, the dress-up my friend Mark played freshman year of college, the trip my best friend and I took to Australia… but what struck me the most was the difference in how I looked then and now. And then, and then, and then… One album was made up of photos from my dad’s 50th birthday celebration in Italy. We were both pre-GB, and boy did it show. I had completely forgotten how huge I was, and more impo...

I made a new friend the other weekend, and yesterday he made me a surprising offer. I was thanking him for introducing me to a couple of new writers and inspiring me to write more frequently, and he suggested that, as repayment, I could model for him sometime (he’s an amateur photographer). Nude. Now, I don’t know what your reactions to this offer might be, but I almost stopped breathing. First of all, I haven’t known this man long, and he’s significantly older than I, and I’m not sure where our friendship stands on the gray line between ‘just friends’ and ‘awkward sexual attraction.’ But even disregarding my (and needless to say, my boyfriend’s) discomfort with the offer from a relationship standpoint, I was thrown by the revulsion I felt when I imagined standing naked in front of someone with a camera. I’ve been working on the self-image / photos standoff for years. When I was fat, I almost never let anyone take photos of me, which actually cultivated an interest in photography ...