I'm Worried About My Ass. Where "Ass" is Code for "Being Fat"

I'm not sure how it happened, but it looks like that after a year of sitting my ass, eating everything in sight and not exercising, I've gained some weight. I'm just as shocked as you are. I thought that things would be different with the Obama Administration, but apparently not. So much for change.

Papa called me three weeks ago and said, "We have to talk. I have important news. Let's meet for dinner." By the time that we finally met for dinner last week, I was on the verge of a nervous collapse, because I didn't know if he was going to tell me that (a) he is dying; (b) I am dying; (c) he is transitioning and will be soon Mama 2.0; (d) I am adopted and my birth parents would like to meet me and I will now have to spend all major holidays with them as well; (e) he ate the Lindbergh baby and would like me to facilitate the confession; or (f) he is a big Twilight fan.

Obviously each of these revelations is on a sliding scale of shock and horror, although of course in celebration of Pride, I would have to say that my papa transitioning would be the most welcome news of the bunch.

So we meet for dinner and papa says, "Our family has bad genes. My mother died of cardiac arrest, I have high blood pressure and you will too one day. If you keep gaining weight, it will make everything worse." So I, relief that he's not an EdwardCullenFanFirst pouring off me, said "I should lose weight, right?" and he says, "If you can hire someone to lose it for you, I have no problem with that." And then we had cocktails and dinner.

So that night, I decided that before I went to bed, I'd lift some weights as part of my new health regimen. For conditioning and shit. So I lifted my three pound hand weights ten times and then I was going to do some more, but suddenly became alarmed-- WHAT IF I BECOME TOO MUSCULAR? I mean, I don't want to get thrown out of BlogHer next month because I am supermuscular dude. Seriously. I haven't formally exercised in a year (give or take a decade) and I'm suddenly freaking out that after ten minutes with weights (four of them spent admiring myself in the mirror, holding them in pensive poses) I will resemble a steroid fiend. Weird.

But maybe there is something to it because this weekend I am going to a wedding and I decided to try on the sundress that I'd bought for the occasion. Well, the occasion was that it was on sale last January, but what is this, some kind of a clothes audit or something? Anyway, the first problem was that I couldn't get it zipped up. Part of it is my own fault because I was home with the kids and I couldn't bring myself to ask them to zip me. Because doesn't that just give you a really unpleasant image--young lanky kids trying to defy the laws of gravity and pulling the zipper on their mother's dress. So I did it. I zipped myself up, an exercise which in my case was most certainly aerobic and as I looked in the mirror preparing to beam, I was horrified to see that although the dress was fully zipped, it squished and pressed me in the most unflattering ways so that I now had flesh pouring out of the arm holes, and for some reason looked like I had four breasts. Although I'm sure that it would have made me a front runner for BewbFest '09-'13, it also made me mildly nauseated. Add to the whole thing that one of the ribs that I'd fractured self-stuffing into the fucking dress was now puncturing my lung and cutting off my oxygen supply and I quickly realized that I'd have to go get another dress.

This was not good news.

And maybe it was all caused by my weight lifting.

To be continued. Eventually.