A few months ago, I was hanging out in one of my favorite downtown pubs when I spotted a distant acquaintance across the bar, one of those friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend kind of deals.
"Hey, man," I said, "how's it going?
He stared at me for a moment, clearly puzzled, before a smile spread across his face.
"Oh, hey!" he yelled across the bar. "I didn't recognize you. Been packing on the pounds, huh?"
This was awkward on several different levels.
First of all, there's the inherent weirdness of having a near-stranger tell you to your face that you are fat.
I mean, in the dude realm, this ordinarily isn't a big deal. Getting called fat or hairy or ugly when you're hanging out with your guy friends is kind of par for the course. You don't get upset about it. In fact, you're usually just grateful it wasn't accompanied by a smack in the hoo-has.
But this guy crossed the dude line. Because "fat" is one thing. But "so fat that your face has devoured itself" is a different animal altogether.
And then there was the "huh." Without the "huh," he would just have been making a statement. A totally unwarranted statement, but a statement nonetheless. But the "huh" turned it into a question – a question that, according to the faces of everyone sitting around me, I was expected to answer.
"Hey, big piggy fat-face, you've gotten so fat that people can barely make out the normal human face inside your new fat fatty pig-face – don't you agree?"
I really didn't know how I was supposed to respond. I've always made it a point to carry around a few "backup pounds," just in case I was ever marooned on an island or something like that. You never know when your airplane might crack in half and dump you and a bunch of strangers on an uncharted mass of land inhabited by polar bears, body-snatchers, deadly clouds and mysterious government hatches.
But still, I've never been overweight enough for someone to actually call me fat. To my face. In front of lots of strangers. How is someone supposed to react in a situation like that? Britney, where were you when I needed you?
The way I figured it, I had two options available to me: 1) Take the childish route and punch him in the face, or 2) Take the childish route and punch him in the neck. Never underestimate chubby-kid angst.
But I didn't do either. I decided that my greatest weapon wasn't my fists, but my rapier wit. I'd give him a good, old-fashioned tongue-lashing, a devastating verbal assault, a kick right in the proverbial hoo-has.
So here's what I came up with:
"Yeah. Heh. I guess I have."
Zing!
I spent most of the following week thinking up other lines I could have used to stun him, including such classics as, "Shut up!" and "You're the one who's fat!"
When I wasn't busy doing that, I was obsessively staring at my own ass in the mirror and trying to decide if I really had gotten so fat that my face had imploded.
I consulted with a panel of experts, by which I mean my mommy, and was thoroughly assured that I hadn't gained a pound since high school. I just had a little extra cuddliness to me. Baby fat, is what she called it.
When I asked my wife what she thought about the issue, she tossed one of our cats at my face and ran out the door, which I chose to interpret as, "I am hot for your body, and I have to leave now before I am overcome with fiery passion."
But still, numbers don't lie. Especially the numbers on the tag of my pants, which reveal to anyone who cares to look that, from the waist down at least, I am officially rounder than I am tall. This is a shocking thing to realize. Like, if you tried to wrap one of my pant legs around my waist, I'd smack you. But then if you tried again, you'd discover that the pant leg doesn't go the whole way around. Something has gone terribly wrong.
I figure that a person can choose to react to being a fatty in one of two ways: by accepting responsibility and taking action, or by refusing responsibility and blaming someone else.
So far, I've got about 10 or 15 names on my list, all of whom in some way are responsible for my weight gain.
Mitt Romney, Tom Cruise, Gene Simmons – I know they all factor in somehow, although I can't prove it. Either way, they creep me out.
In the end, though, my list wasn't helping any, so I decided to take up jogging. Well, not so much "jogging" as "flailing around the elementary school track like a wounded walrus." After a month of jogging every morning, I somehow managed to actually gain about two pounds, which is kind of remarkable. But I stuck with it, and now I'm proud to report that I've lost a grand total of five pounds, which, if you're really bad at math, is practically 10 percent of my body weight. So take that, dude in the bar that I barely know. Now who's fat!
Oh, it's still me? Crap.
"Hey, man," I said, "how's it going?
He stared at me for a moment, clearly puzzled, before a smile spread across his face.
"Oh, hey!" he yelled across the bar. "I didn't recognize you. Been packing on the pounds, huh?"
This was awkward on several different levels.
First of all, there's the inherent weirdness of having a near-stranger tell you to your face that you are fat.
I mean, in the dude realm, this ordinarily isn't a big deal. Getting called fat or hairy or ugly when you're hanging out with your guy friends is kind of par for the course. You don't get upset about it. In fact, you're usually just grateful it wasn't accompanied by a smack in the hoo-has.
But this guy crossed the dude line. Because "fat" is one thing. But "so fat that your face has devoured itself" is a different animal altogether.
And then there was the "huh." Without the "huh," he would just have been making a statement. A totally unwarranted statement, but a statement nonetheless. But the "huh" turned it into a question – a question that, according to the faces of everyone sitting around me, I was expected to answer.
"Hey, big piggy fat-face, you've gotten so fat that people can barely make out the normal human face inside your new fat fatty pig-face – don't you agree?"
I really didn't know how I was supposed to respond. I've always made it a point to carry around a few "backup pounds," just in case I was ever marooned on an island or something like that. You never know when your airplane might crack in half and dump you and a bunch of strangers on an uncharted mass of land inhabited by polar bears, body-snatchers, deadly clouds and mysterious government hatches.
But still, I've never been overweight enough for someone to actually call me fat. To my face. In front of lots of strangers. How is someone supposed to react in a situation like that? Britney, where were you when I needed you?
The way I figured it, I had two options available to me: 1) Take the childish route and punch him in the face, or 2) Take the childish route and punch him in the neck. Never underestimate chubby-kid angst.
But I didn't do either. I decided that my greatest weapon wasn't my fists, but my rapier wit. I'd give him a good, old-fashioned tongue-lashing, a devastating verbal assault, a kick right in the proverbial hoo-has.
So here's what I came up with:
"Yeah. Heh. I guess I have."
Zing!
I spent most of the following week thinking up other lines I could have used to stun him, including such classics as, "Shut up!" and "You're the one who's fat!"
When I wasn't busy doing that, I was obsessively staring at my own ass in the mirror and trying to decide if I really had gotten so fat that my face had imploded.
I consulted with a panel of experts, by which I mean my mommy, and was thoroughly assured that I hadn't gained a pound since high school. I just had a little extra cuddliness to me. Baby fat, is what she called it.
When I asked my wife what she thought about the issue, she tossed one of our cats at my face and ran out the door, which I chose to interpret as, "I am hot for your body, and I have to leave now before I am overcome with fiery passion."
But still, numbers don't lie. Especially the numbers on the tag of my pants, which reveal to anyone who cares to look that, from the waist down at least, I am officially rounder than I am tall. This is a shocking thing to realize. Like, if you tried to wrap one of my pant legs around my waist, I'd smack you. But then if you tried again, you'd discover that the pant leg doesn't go the whole way around. Something has gone terribly wrong.
I figure that a person can choose to react to being a fatty in one of two ways: by accepting responsibility and taking action, or by refusing responsibility and blaming someone else.
So far, I've got about 10 or 15 names on my list, all of whom in some way are responsible for my weight gain.
Mitt Romney, Tom Cruise, Gene Simmons – I know they all factor in somehow, although I can't prove it. Either way, they creep me out.
In the end, though, my list wasn't helping any, so I decided to take up jogging. Well, not so much "jogging" as "flailing around the elementary school track like a wounded walrus." After a month of jogging every morning, I somehow managed to actually gain about two pounds, which is kind of remarkable. But I stuck with it, and now I'm proud to report that I've lost a grand total of five pounds, which, if you're really bad at math, is practically 10 percent of my body weight. So take that, dude in the bar that I barely know. Now who's fat!
Oh, it's still me? Crap.
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