Monday, March 10, 2014

You Can't Write About Fat Girls

I just finished reading a book last night that was about a fat girl.  I realized upon its completion that I've read a lot of fat girl books and they all annoy the poo out of me.  It must be my holier than thou attitude thanks to my supermodel thin physique.  Stop laughing....

This book was about a fat girl who meets a personal trainer by happenstance and he takes pity on her and decides to make her his project and once she is fit and skinny, he actually falls in love with her despite her former fatness and magnanimously decides to ignore the extra 20 pounds she still could stand to lose.  You'd think I'd be thin after reading 200+ pages of this barftastic book.

Other fat girl books are different.  They are based on the fatties who find men to love them in spite of their girth.  Those are gems, too.  The man finally realizes that her witty personality is all that matters, not her dress size.  In addition to the men being willing to love them, they're filled with women just sitting around waiting to be loved.  Often our heroines have great careers, friends, etc, but without the man, they are worthless.  Those books don't induce my urge to purge.  Instead, they make me want to track down the authors and punch them.  In the face.  With their books.

I realize that there should be books about pleasantly plump people, because the world is full of this epidemic of obesity (one that I am a shameful member of).  But, it would be nice if the books were a little less, I don't know.... INSULTING.  Maybe men do fall in love with fat women in spite of their looks, but I'd like to think that some men just fall in love, looks and all. Not that I'm praising those pervs trolling the 500 lbs. and up porn sites, but maybe some guys find curves appealing.  Maybe some men don't need a stick person to be happy.  Maybe husbands of women that aren't thin are just happy.  Not in spite of anything....  just in love with everything.  And maybe some overweight women don't sit around pining for a husband.  Hard to imagine, but maybe they have self confidence even though they could use a Zumba class or two, and lead full lives with or without a man in it.  Maybe it would be refreshing to see a book like that.  Then again, a book about two normal people who meet, fall in love and just live probably wouldn't sell.  But, I for one would like to see someone try.

Monday, March 3, 2014

What Men See

Disclaimer:  The following is an anthropological essay on differences between husbands and wives.  Mark, this isn't entirely about you, nor is it from a place of anger.  It is about most men in general, and comes from a place of utter mystery and confusion.  End disclaimer.

My husband is a good man.  You can ask him to do things and while he will heave a hefty sigh of "I Don't Want To" (which he denies, by the way), he will do it.  But, my utter mystification comes not from the things he/they are willing to do, but from the fact that he/they don't do it until you ask them to.  Let me explain.

If Mark suspects the computers, Internet, laptop, Xbox, or smart phones are running improperly... he can sniff that problem out from a mile away and devote endless hours to its repair.  Endless.  However, if the pictures on our walls need leveling and sticky tacking, even if he sits in that room to Xbox with the boys on a daily basis, either he doesn't see that the pictures are so crooked it looks like a blind person hung them, or he feels there's no time to get such a monumental task accomplished (which took me 10 minutes today to do all our pictures in our house) or he likes them like that.  I don't know the answer.  I only know that is man-land, it doesn't exist and will not get done until I ask.  Wait... let me rephrase.  Until I nag him to death.

Other men have similar blind spots.  Some men will use a glass, walk over to the kitchen and deposit the used glass either on the counter or in the sink, seemingly blissfully unaware of this machine just inches below that if you open the door and deposit said glass, it will eventually come out clean.  I'm not sure if its the abundance of science fiction that most men watch or sheer ignorance of how things become clean, but if you put the glass on the counter, its never going to get inside the washer without a human's help.  There's no teleportation.  There's no little arm that comes out of the machine and reaches for the glass and sets it on the rack.  Another person (I'll go out on a limb and assume its the other adult living in your home) has to do that step. 

Another conundrum...  In our house, we have a relatively new dog who occasionally seems to confuse our playroom with a park full of fire hydrants in the middle of the night and leave a little present on our carpet. See above where said husband plays video games with my boys in that room every day.  I'm guessing that his laser sharp vision is so acutely aware of the critical happenings on Lego Marvel that he is blind to the yellow circle on the carpet.  My vision must be more suited to pee spots than Lego versions of Pepper Potts, because I tend to spot them upon entry. 

These things are not worth fighting about.  They are not reasons for divorce or even the female patented snippy "I'm fine" followed by the silent treatment.  Its just something that I ponder.  If men are from Mars, who puts the dishes in the dishwashers there, and how many pictures are permanently crooked?  Wait, who would tell them to purchase and hang pictures in the first place?  Mars must be the land of blank walls and unlimited supplies of Solo cups.  I know that the genders are chromosomally different, but until marriage I had no idea the affect that Y chromosome has on vision.  That, or it stand for "y bother to clean up the urine if there's a digital citizen in peril on my video game?"