dir/new_school/rant: W e i g h i n g   i n

I saw my own face today, saw the face that you see daily, the one I try to ignore. I don’t know how often I actually notice my genuine face or my real body. I know there are times when I ride an elevator and my mind adjusts for the strange dimensions the polished metal gives the body. Or when I look in a mirror, off to the side and decide that it’s "not a good mirror" that it’s warped a bit and not showing me who I am. This whole piece is derivative of my morning, when I woke up. I looked in the mirror, I could actually tell I’d lost weight. The first time I’ve been able to look at my body and see some significant change, for the less, in a long time. My basic goal was to go out and run errands. I was going to go to the video store and to the big chain store. The chores were nothing serious, return videos and a cheap lock that didn’t seem worthy of the front door defense system. And I don’t mean for this to be some fashion show horror tale, it was more then that. I don’t know, sometimes you go out and you decide you’re going to look cool, other times you say fuck it and what you have is fine, but I’d just finished working out and taking a shower. I shared an impromptu lunch for my late-shift working girlfriend and after she left, I went looking for clothes, figuring I’d go out and get some air, walk around and people watch a bit. I notice that perception of weight is graded on a curve, this curve is represented by your own weight and your own opinion of your weight, which if course, is constantly being skewered by a greater general sense. When I lose small amounts of weight, I think nothing of it. I do not want the pride, or the sense of success. I will not weigh myself daily, if I’m on some angle to change my lifestyle I don’t want to measure my progress through a adjusting set of numbers. I’d like to think that I do this cause I know I can’t do it based on numbers, what I need is not better numbers, what I need is a lifestyle change and it has to be a change I embrace. I know this. I am not ten pounds overweight, I will not drop two clothes sizes in two weeks and be all the better looking, after a quick fad diet. Ten pounds seems like piss in the bucket, but today I saw some of the piss at the bottom of the bucket and it was inspiring. Today, I woke up and today I looked thinner and looking thinner was ten times more satisfying then when someone says "Hey you look thinner" cause when they say it, it’s like I’d prefer they not notice. I wish somehow I could lose the weight, very discretely, cause I might slip or fail and you don’t want anyone to know of your struggles, your ups and downs. Later, during the evening, I dressed with this new thinner perception. Rather then talk about the clothes, the thing which is significant is that when I move around people I imagine a face that I think people see, the denial face. I don’t see the real face or the rest of me. This is why pictures that others have taken of me always bother me. I don’t mind my own self portraits, or the photos from people who know the face I want to portray. You know it’s that best angle, which you want to be the angle that people always see you in, as opposed to say all the other angles that you do not have creative control over not letting people see. The clothing was right and looked great, but having seen who I was this morning, the clothing, fit with the slightly thinner body, not the fake body and face that I like to think that I carry and that you see. It was great clothing on a fat guy and I didn’t want to see him, had no interest in seeing my, "lost a few pounds but I’m still fat" self, it is not where I want to be and that makes it frustrating. So I work on being patient with the small results and hope to build further on them, I am different now. I am beginning to see things as they may actually be, somewhere outside the sphere of how I’ve wanted to see things. I am not bullshitting myself anymore. I’m not sure I’m as good as I used to be at throwing snowballs my way. I think when you change your lifestyle, when you try to change who you are. I think you can only succeed when you are honest with yourself and lay down the lies and I have tried to sleep with the notion of waking an honest man. So when I rose today, I was and still am fat, but the truth is that I could see a small change and it is promising, it is not the weight, it is the perception, the change in how I’m thinking. And when I noticed the change in the body, the glaring perception in the personal reality, it allowed me to dig deeper and see that my major problem is that I somehow believe that if I am who I really am –and I am. That I can’t be who I want to be and this is not true. So I dressed the way I wanted to be, outside the usual stealth way that I have gone about disguising myself past notice. And I went out in public and said fuck it-to myself and it felt right. For the first time in a long while, just being me was cool and I wasn’t nearly as self conscious as I am when I try to project whatever image it is I think I’m projecting to people. That image is beginning to fray, it’s probably time to lay down the illusions, time to just be me… So i’m working on it and I think it might just be a little bit of KungFu in the whole experience. outtakes… -…problem with change is that it is a slow process. You can rush things and try to get quick results and the truth is that we are tuned like this. Everything is a rush for instant gratification and it seems, often times, that this is the reason why we fail ourselves, so desperate to do things quickly that we rush and take shortcuts. - I always frown when I have to hear of some "fat" celebrity and how they are down about being fat. Fuck’m folks, I’m always one to think that if you’re rich, you should be able to work out your fat issues, with little trouble. If we all could only be fat, but afford personal chefs and trainers and the occasional surgical support. If I was rich I’d be a thin motherfucker dude and if I for some reason stayed fat and couldn’t manage to be thin, I’m sure that I wouldn’t care, but I wouldn’t cry on my cheeseburger or sigh in my milkshake. That’s just me, I try not to be a self-conscious fat guy, I do want to keep it real, keep the self loathing as private as possible. -I’m willing to let myself take some joy in the little things that build to the larger goal, cause the goal is not to lose weight, the goal is to eliminate the bad habits and to stem the self destructive habits that I live by and maintain to insure my lack of happiness. I often times feel like my own worse enemy.