Archive for January, 2009

They don’t tell you, in freelancing school, how great the potential for enormous amounts of guilt is, coming at you from all directions and every angle, pew pew pew. Maybe that’s because there is actually no Freelancing School. If there were, there ought be a class called Warmth vs. Freedom: The Pants/No-Pants Divide. Oh, and Are You Really Going to Eat That, Over the Sink, With Your Hands? Isolation and the Freelancer’s Fragile Dignity and Self-Respect. But mostly, You Will Work Every Hour and Regret the Hours You Don’t Work, and When You Are Waiting For More Work to Come in You Will Panic Because You’re Not Working and the Idea of Sleeping in Just a Little or Even Watching a Movie Fills You with Shame. That might be a little long for a class title, though.

So for the past two weeks or so, I’ve had a handful of rush jobs, for the proofreading people I work for.

Two weekends ago I tore through The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl–Shauna’s awesome book, based on her awesome blog. I knew it would be funny, and that it would be well-written, thoughtful, catch me off guard sometimes, that it would be moving. That I’d do that embarrassing thing where you snort out loud and choke on your laugh because you are in public and doing a Quiet Activity and because you are not supposed to be giggling to yourself on public transportation, because that’s just weird. And I got caught out without a tissue for the emotional parts and I got upset at the stressful parts because there was no one around to exclaim to about how worried you were about how things were going to turn out (even though you knew how thing turned out, because you had read the blog).

One of my very favorite things in the world is that I have been adopted by a sweet, loving, utterly crazy dog. She is a Neapolitan mastiff who belongs to my sweetheart’s brother, A. A is never home–he has work, school, a new girlfriend–and she was terribly lonely, and I took over feeding her and giving her a treat every night and in that way, I won her heart. When I come into the house, she is so excited to see me that her entire back end wags and her tiny little tail goes whap whap whap whap . She rubs up against me and weaves around my legs and between my knees like she is a cat, except she’s almost as tall as my waist and weighs a hundred pounds, so it works out rather less well than it does for a cat.

She is neurotic, anxious, and insecure.

There is nothing in the world weirder than revisiting your past in great and glorious Technicolor surround-sound. I am working on a project about my weight loss surgery, about what came before and what came after, and I am spending a lot of time sitting down and looking through things I want to call relics–my old blog, my body of work posts on elastic waist, the countess emails I wrote when I was thinking about it.

Pictures, lists of measurements, a Word document I found on my computer that listed all the ways my life would change and all the things I would do that spoke more of the great bone-deep unhappiness I was filled up with than any determination or hope or ambition.

I was such a different person, two hundred pounds ago, three years ago. I am also exactly the same.

I’m writing again. Wait, let me say that with proper emphasis and maybe you will hear the awe and wonder and excitement that surrounds every word in that sentence with a sparkly aura of amazement and glee (and even notice the little shadow behind it that says quietly in a mournful Eeyore voice “but for how long?”): I. Am writing. Again.

I am writing words, that combine into sentences that comprise paragraphs that come together to fill up page after page with prose, that I wrote, that traveled from my head down through my neck and split up at my shoulders and zoomed down through my elbows and came barreling down my forearms and out my fingertips which move like lightning across the keyboard, every day.

Every day, for real. A thousand words, I am aiming for, and a thousand words I usually get, though sometimes less, but also sometimes more than that.

I like to think of myself as a happy-go-lucky kind of gal, spontaneous and full of fun, up for any excitement, flexible, inventive, turn-on-a-dime and ready to go. It’s a vibrant and dynamic way to be, to be always poised for something good and ready to take advantage of it; it’s the way I want to be. It’s a way I try to be, and in my off time, on a weekend when the hours stretch ahead lazily like a cat, it is both a good way to be and something I am good at. Let’s go take over the world! I shout. And we do. Sometimes we stay in a dark room and play EverQuest, but that’s okay too.

As it turns out, however, I’m not always good at it. When I am faced with many tasks all of them due at once, sometimes all of them due at once three days ago or before I was born, all of them huge, all of them daunting, all of them starting to throb and throw up steam and tick like they are going to explode if I don’t attend to them immediately, with some slightly less-urgent but no less important tasks scrabbling in between, making impatient squawking noises and spinning round like whirligigs, I shut down.

It’s like a hilarious joke, or something. One of the things that used to make me angry when I was fat was that my body was considered public property. That I had a very visible and distinct physical characteristic which people felt the need to comment on. As if the fact of my fat and my size needed to be acknowledged, strangers felt it was important to demonstrate their powers of observation, helpful assholes felt it necessary to remind me of my great and space-hogging size and how offensive it was to right-thinking people. That when someone would look at me, you could almost hear them measuring out my width in inches, comparing it to their own width, breathing a sigh of relief when they assured themselves that they may have Figure Flaws, but at least their figured wasn’t that flawed!

It has been, officially and by the numbers, exactly one year since I finished packing up the U-Haul truck that was sitting in the driveway in front of my San Francisco apartment, slammed down the back door, and got on the road to Utah. Packing frantically, hauling all your crap down a long hallway and down a steep driveway and around back of the truck and throwing it up onto the bed and running back inside for more and having arguments about what fits where and how, and why the other person is crazy go-nuts and should just be quiet, that doesn’t leave much time for introspection, for the I am leaving beautiful San Francisco and my beautiful apartment and my friends and my job and everything I know to move to Utah? freakout.

God, when you put it that way it sounds completely insane. Exchanging California for Utah? For Utah? Really, for Utah?