thing is, i don't like surprises
December 26, 2001 02:29 PM

It was another delightful family holiday.

Really. That statement was completely without irony. The holiday was nice. I left relaxed, and wondering if previous dreadful holiday experiences were purely the result of my own dread. And whether I need to apologise to other people for being so sour before. Maybe they'll forget. They may have forgotten already.

We all bought our own presents, giving each other things best described as trinkets. A word that isn't used nearly often enough.

I still contend that the pre-holiday haircut is key. It offsets my surprise upon seeing myself in my family's mirrors. I am much larger than I expect to be. I bump into things I expect to slip past, which is enough of an annoyance that I have finally decided that I'd like to shrink. It's not a great challenge to my value of self, being fat (despite things like the lack of cute clothes, which have been known to dissolve me into a puddle of useless, angry tears that mumbles back anything horrid a diet ad has ever said about fat, I really am largely alright with myself), but I would like to have fewer bruises. And be less astonished by myself in mirrors.

The problem being. My internal vision is stuck on a self that ate so little she often fainted, so I need to work from both directions at once. That is, I have no desire to be that girl. She is younger and sillier and much more lonely than I am. But if I move the actual towards the imagined while I move the imagined towards the actual, I meet in the middle somewhere far past young silly girlself. Or so goes the logic. Which may be flawed, I accept, as it's hardly even developed yet. Not unlike the plan that should accompany it, which doesn't even exist.

I had expected to find diet companies capitalizing on girl power vibes when I went looking for feminist weight loss, but the search only turned up sites like body positive. So the world at large and marketers in specific aren't nearly as cynical as I might have thought. I'm pleasantly surprised.

By the way, my hair looks great. I'm really starting to like the color orange, as all my delicious hair products come in swanky orange bottles. Another surprise; I hate orange. Like oranges, simply not the color. Or the juice, which makes me ill.