Fat Nerd
(Warning: lots of profanity behind the cut.)
I didn’t use to be a fat nerd.
I was a beanpole through my twenties before my computer lifestyle caught me at thirty, threw me on the ground, and shoved eighty extra pounds of fat under my shirt. I was pretty content with that until around 2018.
It is embarrassing just how far into adulthood I was worried about grudges from old high school cliques. Go out and exercise? Watch your diet?
Fuck you, I’m slacker and an otaku. I live on pizza and mountain dew and my tan is 100% CRT. I’m not some preppie, and I’m not some vain, anorexic twit.
I’m within a stone’s throw of fourty. The salt-n-pepper hair suits me just fine, and so do the problems of adulthood. What doesn’t suit me, at all, is those extra eighty pounds, feeling tired all the time, not being able to touch my own toes.
I hit my limit when I caught myself thinking “I will drive around the parking lot a little longer looking for a closer space” in 2018. Twenty-two year old Vanyanan, footing it around China with a backpack, would have blown his own brains out rather than choose to age into a guy that would sooner drive a car around a parking lot than walk an extra hundred feet.
A preppie no, but need a car? Fuck you, old man, fuck you. I’m not turning into some Wall-Esque joke of a human. Get out and walk!
I ran my fourth 5k Monday and got what I thought was my best time ever, but it turns out I got a better pace, by just a few seconds, on an almost 5k back in 2018. In that initial burst of enthusiastic disgust, everything about my life felt off the rails. The doctor wanted me on blood pressure meds, and I weighed in at 290 pounds. Liswamire was long gone, Trump was president, my church felt like a foreign country (try being a Catholic with my crazy marriage story), Calemorrina was there and kept me sane, but we were still feeling out who the “we” were going to become.
Calemorrina and I were reading a book together (“The Wizard Knight” by Gene Wolfe) and Ravd said that when you are a disgrace, you should “find a fight to die in.” And then you either die, or you don’t, and if you repeat that process enough times, instead of your disgrace defining you, your disgrace becomes unthinkable.
That probably wasn’t supposed to be a light-bulb, but it was to me.
Don’t like my annulment and “remarriage”? Fuck you, I’m going to mass.
You don’t measure up to your own principles anymore? Fuck you. You’re going to mass.
Tired and want a spot close the store? Fuck you. I’m parking at the back.
Harboring some high school clique grudge that blinds you to what you are doing to yourself? Fuck you. I’m going jogging, and I’m calorie counting.
You just want to sit and watch TV? Fuck you, you knew the answer to that twenty-years ago. I’m selling the thing.
Want to play video games? Fuck you! You know damned well how you’ll feel after even an hour of that!
Some of those don’t even make sense from the context, but they all added up to me: I’m not going to die the sort of person I was slowly turning myself into. I’m not going to hell because I trusted Liswamire a little more than I should have, and now church is uncomfortable and I know what I would have thought about the guy there with his “second wife.” I may yet die fat, but I’m not going to die sliding mindlessly and without a fight into “People of Walmart” land. I’ll almost certainly die a fool, but I’m not going to my death refusing the life-line because it involves admitting that my schoolyard bullies had at least something going for them: they knew how to stay fit. I’m not watching anime I don’t like anymore and playing video games that make me feel ill just because it’s what I would have done at sixteen.
I’m down 30 pounds now. Which means I’m still a fat nerd, but it’s better than it was. I ran my fourth 5k Monday and got what I thought was my best time ever.
I also threw-out my back, which I didn’t even know could happen from jogging. All of a sudden, I’m in this race against my body decaying into a jumbled-up bag of bones, and all the clarity in the world doesn’t help you when you walk like a hunchback. So, I’m resting and reading up. The backpain is tied to a lack of core strength. Okay, I’ll work on that.
blog comments powered by Disqus