I apologize for the delay in posting this. I shouldn't have promised a completion as early as I did. Shit happened, mostly in a figurative sense.
If you are just now joining the story, read Part 1 first, which can be found here. Then read this part.
Steven was fat. Not as fat as Becky, though that isn't saying much. Also unlike Becky (extremely unlike Becky, as will soon be explained), he was trying. He worked at D&M, a local bar and sandwich shop, and he spent most of what he made there on what they served. That was primarily beer; which he, having recently left the Southern Baptist church of his youth for the wide open spaces of Episcopalianism, had been enjoying to the excess characteristic of those who have recently broken loose from a controlling environment.
D&M also sells the best sandwiches in the world. Homemade sauce, fresh-baked bread, and locally-processed cold cuts. 18 inches of culinary orgasm. Before I got serious about weight loss, it was mainly beer and D&M sandwiches that were to blame for my being fat. Well... beer, D&M sandwiches, and my complete lack of self-control.
Steven was learning self-control, but it was coming hard. Let's not judge him too harshly. I'm not sure that if I had to spend eight hours there, five days a week, I wouldn't have cheated on my diet a lot more than I did. And at least he knew that his eating habits were the sole culprit for his weight.
I had given him the old advice: "You can't outrun a bad diet." Later, he would actually listen to it, but at that time, he was determined to try and disprove it. Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday were our running days; those days along with Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday were his drinking and eating too much days. The day when this story takes place was a Thursday.
Becky, you will recall from Part 1, had interrupted me at my work, and I was humoring her apparent need for immediate conversation. I don't remember what we were talking about but I do remember that it was something of urgent importance to her; maybe a slight rise in the price of Häagen-Dazs.
That's when Steven arrived. We acknowledged each other with nods and he came over.
"You ready, bro?" he said.
"Wait, are you going somewhere?" Becky asked, apparently disappointed.
"Yeah, we're going for a run," I said. "This is Steven, my running buddy. Steven, this is Becky."
"Hi," said Steven.
Becky's face crinkled with the displeasure of an infant being forcefed Gerber's finest carp liver paté. "Oh. You didn't tell me you were a runner."
"Uh... is there something wrong with that?" I responded.
She drew herself up - or, tried to; changes in posture really aren't available to people of that shape - and said "Well I just don't see why anyone would want to torture themselves like that. It's just not right."
This was said in the tone of a frankly bigoted person who knows they are a bigot, and is okay with that. Think of someone stuck in the early 1950s who thinks the rest of the world needs to rejoin them there (but not before cutting itself a good switch for the thrashing it's going to get when it does), commenting on interracial marriage. That's the tone I mean.
"I actually sort of like it," Steven said, bemused.
"You don't look like you like it," Becky said.
"Well, I'm just starting," he said cheerfully, utterly unfazed by the insult.
I was indignant on his behalf though. "Hold on," I said. "I'm confused. On your profile you said you are only interested in athletic men. So why are you objecting to men wanting to exercise?"
She narrowed her eyes and stared at me. Her squint made her eyes look like marbles sunk deep into a lump of bread dough.
Whoops.
"You didn't tell me you had seen my profile," she said accusingly.
"You didn't ask," I replied, honestly enough.
"You didn't send me a message or a wink or anything!"
"Well, no. I really don't do much on those sites-"
"It's because I'm fat, isn't it?" She put her arms on her hips and stuck out some of her chins in an expression of defiant pride.
Yes, I thought. Absolutely. Finally, after living my whole life with such low self-esteem that I thought I deserved to be with someone I didn't find attractive, I can admit this, with a clear conscience: I'm not attracted to fat women.
But I didn't say that. What I said was, "Well, I'm really looking for someone who shares my interests. And fitness is one of my interests."
"Oh," she said sharply. "Well you're allowed to have your interests. But you don't have to rub it in my face."
I looked around and noticed a few people were looking in our general direction. They noticed me noticing and looked away. There were a couple of smirks.
"Rub what in your face?" I asked, even though I had figured it out by then. "I like working out. I want to date someone who will be a partner with me in that. Is that a problem?"
"Just... go run and leave me alone." She stamped off across the room, slurping angrily on her Essence of Beetus, resumed her former seat, and very pointedly did not look at me.
I looked at Steven. He gestured towards the door. I got my stuff and put it in his car.
"Fat chicks, man," he said, as we finished our pre-run stretching. He had been smirking the whole time. It was obvious he was enjoying my discomfort.
"Yes, there are some of those in existence," I said.
"But that one, in there." He gestured over the parking lot towards the Starbucks. "She's, like, totally into you bro." He could have put the municipal sewage company out of business with that shit-eating grin.
"It's not mutual." I took off at a jog. He caught up.
"Yeah, I know. I wouldn't date her either."
During our warm-up jog, we had an interesting discussion about the mechanics of sex with such a Person of Abdominal Magnitude, and after painstaking scientific reasoning, came to the conclusion that a normally-hung gentleman needing to wear a porn-sized strap-on in order to achieve vaginal penetration is probably not what God or nature intended.
"Look on the bright side," Steven said. "Even if you get off, she won't get pregnant because you'll just be coming between her rolls."
I didn't know whether to gag or laugh, so I punched him instead.
As we ran on, I felt a mixture of frustration and relief. Frustration, because I don't like alienating people, even those whom I don't particularly like. Relief, because I thought that Becky now realized that I wasn't a prospect and would leave me alone.
I would soon find out that my relief was misplaced.
The next day when I checked my email, I saw that I had a private message from BigSouthernLove, a user on [dating site]. My heart sunk. I knew who it was without looking, and considered just ignoring it. But curiosity eventually got the best of me and I opened it.
"Hey." It began. "I wanted to say sorry for the way I acted yesterday. I'm just real sensitive about my weight and I have a lot of trauma connected to it and I get triggered when people start talking about diet and exercise around me."
"Triggered." I thought of my former Marine friend with combat-induced PTSD who has to hide in his basement on Independence Day, blaring death metal at top volume to drown out the sound of the fireworks.
"It's okay if you like to exercise but I worry about people who are like, really INTO it. But hey it's your life. Anyway I really like you and I hope we can get to know each other better. <3 Becky"
Oh, well that's nice. So glad I have her permission to exercise.
It was a few days before I saw her again.
Not at Starbucks. It was at a barbecue hosted on a Friday afternoon by Crissy, a mutual friend who was celebrating getting hired as a professor at the local college. She had really splurged on food. Ribs or steaks were available, one per person, in addition to a practically endless supply of burgers and hotdogs. Crissy had even bought me a package of Hebrew National, knowing that I avoided hotdogs that used starchy fillers.
I was in charge of burgers, and I had just finished a platter cooked to masterful perfection, even if I say so myself. That's when she arrived. And she wasn't alone.
She was with Mara, one of her friends whom I had also seen at the Starbucks.
Mara was a different shape to Becky. She was roughly pear-shaped, but only by virtue of her height and a long neck that elevated her head well above her torso. Or at least, I assume she had a long neck. Her jowls and neck folds made it hard to tell.
They were both munching Chick-Fil-A out of drive-through bags.
I pretended not to notice them and prayed for at least a few more minutes of enjoyment before they noticed me. Fortunately, they decided to go somewhere out of sight, I assume to finish their "pregaming" in private, since when they eventually rejoined the party they had ditched the Chick-Fil-A bags.
I was finishing my last tray of burgers, and was managing to enjoy a messy, failed attempt at a lettuce wrapped burger while putting my Hebrew Nationals on the grill, when she appeared at my side.
"Hey. What's up, grillmaster?"
"Not much. You?"
"Just enjoying the party." She dropped her voice to a conspiratorial level. "Just wanted to let you know that I brought some beer."
A bit of background: it was a dry party because I'm in the Bible Belt. I'd been to other events like it, where it is common for those who don't think that alcohol is the devil's semen to go to a bar afterward for some "adult refreshment", but I doubt that the hostess would have appreciated it if she had known about the beer.
"Maybe you can sneak off with me for a drink. Might get a chance to see me get tipsy." I think she tried to wink at me then, but it was hard to discern any facial expression in the mass of non-Newtonian matter that was her face.
"You know I don't drink beer anymore."
"Oh yeah," she said with annoyance. "The low-carb thing. But this is a special event."
"Not special enough for me to ditch my diet," I said, allowing my tone an uncharacteristic expression of annoyance.
"You're eating a burger right now. That's not health food."
Normally, I don't talk about my diet. For a while I had been a bit of a ketovangelist and quickly discovered that it tended to alienate people. In this case, I considered the alienation of a person to be a positive outcome. So I explained that my diet was low-carb, high-fat, adequate protein.
"So I can eat some burgers with mustard and mayo as long as I don't go over my calorie limit," I said in the deliberately annoying tone of a patronizing adult speaking to a small child.
"Ugh, your calorie limit." She rolled her eyes. "Did you even read that email I sent? I really don't want to hear about that kind of thing."
I think that if I had the presence of mind, I would have said something like, "Well, I'm really into calorie counting. It's just part of who I am," and let her deal with the idea of her being attracted to the living embodiment of one of her "triggers". But before I could say anything, Mara showed up with two plates of food. One was piled high with ribs. The other with steaks.
"Food time!" she announced.
"Hold on," I said. "Ribs and steaks are supposed to be one per person. If you want more food there are plenty of burgers and dogs." Not to mention potato salad, chips and salsa, and a huge array of veggies with hummus and other dips.
Mara stood blank-faced for a moment. I think she probably legitimately hadn't known that.
"Oh, my mistake, I'll just put these back then", is what a normal, sensible person would have said. But Mara was not a normal, sensible person. So she decided to lie instead.
"Oh I talked to Crissy and she said it was okay because a lot of people didn't show up."
"I think you must have misunderstood. It's still early so people are still going to show up. Also, people brought friends who weren't invited. If anything, we're probably going to come up short."
Mara looked like she was about to throw a temper tantrum. Her face screwed up into a grimace (which, I noted in retrospect, matched her body type). But Becky, who was at least not a complete social imbecile, convinced her to do the right thing. They walked over to the table where the entrees were laid out, and came back with one steak and rib section each.
I considered clarifying, giving them the benefit of the doubt that they had misunderstood that it was meant to be one rib section or one steak each. But I decided to let it slide.
Eventually, Becky told me I should get away from the grill and mingle.
"Have to finish my hot dogs," I said.
"Your hotdogs?"
"Uh... yeah, these are Hebrew Nationals. No carbs. Crissy got them for me."
"Are you going to eat all of them?" she asked, a conspicuous note of jealousy in her voice.
There were five of the jumbo-frank variety, and honestly, I wasn't planning on eating more than two. But I was also not planning on giving any of them to Becky or Mara, who had already treated themselves beyond the expectations of the hostess. I was going to take the other three home with me and give them to my roommate, who had been unable to come due to having to work.
"Yeah," I said.
"You don't need to eat that much," said Becky, Personal Nutrition Expert.
"Actually I do," I said, forming a plan. "I'm going to the gym later to lift, and I need protein."
That was true; I was going to the gym later. It was walking distance from Crissy's house, and I figured I could go there after taking some time to digest my dinner, knock out my sets, and come back to the party to chill for a few hours.
Her response was predictable in terms of content, but volume-wise it was surprising. "YOU GO TO THE GYM???" she practically screeched.
"Yep," I said cheerfully.
"Oh. My. God. That is not okay."
"Really? Why not?"
"People who go to the gym have, like, serious self-esteem issues. Like I said, it's okay for you to work out, but not to obsess about it!" She added a wounded tone to her voice and dropped her volume. "I care about you, you know."
"I care about me, too. That's why I lift. I want to be strong." I said this while I put the dogs on a plate, and walked away.
I decided I'd rather get my workout over with sooner rather than later, so I quickly made the rounds, saying "hello" to friends and letting people know I'd be back soon. A couple of people who go to the same gym as me were there, and one offered to join me. So I quickly ate two of the hotdogs and stored the others in Crissy's refrigerator, intending to take them home with me, and departed for the gym.
They didn't make it home with me, and those of you who know how food-obsessed hamplanets work will know why.
But that's going to have to come in Part 3, because once again I'm running out of charact
Submitted July 28, 2015 at 03:51AM by fatlogic_throwaway http://ift.tt/1S9xgSX fatpeoplestories
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