...so you do what you always do when the going gets tough. You make yourself a graph, and you give it an inspirational title
and to help you lose weight, you draw little stars to keep you on track, and you plan little rewards for yourself along the way
And you have a few rough starts, which is when you realize you lacked foresight when you didn't account for the possibility of any weight gain when you drew the graph
But still, you persevere, and you slowly manage to drop ten pounds or so
To motivate yourself, you tape your Graph of Success on your bathroom wall above your scale, in the empty space right below the hooked rug your mom made for you of your cat Rufus
which she started in 1988 when Rufus was a kitten and didn't finish until years after he'd died, and gave to you for your birthday, and you were all "Wow! It's a rug of Rufus! My dead cat from middle school!" *concerned sideways eyes to your brother*
And you feel like hot stuff even though in your rational mind you know you're really about 15-20 pounds away from being hot stuff, but that part of your brain stopped working as soon as you got out of the shower the other night and saw that your belly had stopped casting a shadow down over your vagina, so you go shopping and buy your first ever pair of skinny jeans, purple ones, even though your high-waisted stone-washed Gap jeans, the ones with the permanent oil stains from using your knees and thighs as a cooling rack for your late-night butter and tortilla snacks (Butteritos!), are still totally in style, and you feel like a douchebag for buying skinny jeans after making fun of them for so long, but you're so happy at the prospect of wearing something other than workout capris for the first time in months that you don't even care.
And a longish fitted shirt to go over it, a shirt with buttons...yes, buttons! I know! Like a fucking CEO or something.
And you know what goes well with a shirt with buttons, don't you? A bra. A real one, not a sports bra, even though your sports bra is orange and for some reason that helps you rationalize wearing it out to fancy sushi restaurants and bridal showers.
And maybe some bootlets because even though the fleece lined bedroom slippers you've been wearing every day have treads on the soles, you know in your heart that you've been kidding yourself. Those aren't really shoes, are they Becky. Are they. No.
And as it so happens, you've recently discovered that there is a kind of makeup that you can buy, and also wear on your face, that covers up dark circles under your eyes. Instead of dark circles, you now have white circles, but it doesn't matter because you're pretty sure you've never looked so rested in all your life.
And guess what else? You hit the reward star labeled "Haircut!" on your Graph of Success, which actually means you get highlights, but you like to pretend it's the removal of all those split ends that magically brightens up your roots. So you go in for your "haircut" and decide, on a whim, because you have purple skinny jeans now and if there were a Graph of Cool your line would go off the paper way up past the dead cat rug and right into space, that your hair should be the color of FIRE!
But only the lower half of your hair, because you're chicken shit.
And the hair lady does it, and when it's all done, your hair isn't so much the color of FIRE! as it is the color of old scab. And you realize you should never try to go funky with your hair color at a place that has this sign on all the mirrors.
So many caregivers, they need actual SIGNS to tell them not to
leave their old people laying around everywhere all willy nilly.
You realize it's time to pull out the big guns if you're ever going to fix your scab hair. You need an Asian, and quick, because Asians rule at hair.
When you find the Asian, you tell her you want your hair to look like fire, and after a minor miscommunication which results in her leaving you waiting in the chair for ten minutes while she goes down the street to buy you a spicy noodle bowl, you eventually break through the language barrier and she does indeed make your hair look like fire.
She smiles and repeatedly tells you that your hair "looks like ass", but then she spells it out for you, "Ass. You know! A-R-T. Ass." You agree, your hair truly is a work of ass. You don't even care that the chemicals in the dye will likely weaken your hair to the point that you'll be hard pressed to find a strand strong enough to floss with after today, because you feel like hot stuff.
Even though you know you're not hot stuff, you feel like hot stuff. And that's just as good.
But now you are hot stuff with nothing to do, so you get all dressed up and head down to Pep Boys for a new car battery, with your purple skinny jeans, your fitted shirt with a bra under it, your white under-eye circles, and your half-fire hair. You hold yourself with the maturity of a 35 year old woman, but your whimsical color palette and your lack of dark eye circles suggest someone much, much younger. You're an enigma.
Except, the walking. You haven't quite gotten the hang of the high heel bootlets and instead of that land on your heel/push off with your toe thing that's supposed to happen when you walk, you're walking like a marionette, arms swinging in wide semicircles around your body for balance, knees up high, and heels and toes landing simultaneously. Like you're walking through an obstacle course made of monster truck tires.
And you haven't bought a new bra in so long that you're wearing an old A-cup, and because your boobs are not A-cup anymore, both your nipples and most of your right boob are hanging over the edge of your bra cups, which have accordioned themselves down against the underwire like little crybaby quitters. It's okay though, you decide. Own it, hot stuff.
Oh what's this now? A quick glance in a shiny new rims on the wall of the Pep Boys waiting area confirms your suspicion that your face is bleeding. Two bloody back-to-back crescent-moon fingernail marks on your cheek from that aggressive impromptu facial you gave yourself at that long red light a few miles back.
No problem. You lick the collar of your new fitted shirt, clean the wound, and apply pressure. Holding your collar to your cheek looks normal if you make a very concentratey face like it's just what you do when you're making tough decisions like which rims to buy.
It will stain, but it's okay because the shirt's plaid. You're not out of the game yet, hot stuff.
God, you have got to get a handle on your picking problem. You begin to brainstorm your newest reward graph (Becky's Chart of Victory Over Compulsive Picking!) and are trying to decide how many stars will earn you a bra, but all the planning is making you feel very picky, and you discover what might be a tick on the back of your head. Is it a tick? Or a skin tag? A scab?
Maintaining pressure with your collar against your cheek wound, you pull the back of your shirt up to the spot in question and press the cloth against the bump and then twist your shirt around back-to-front to check for a blood spot. This two-handed double skull-wound press and rotate is more difficult to pull off than the simple one-handed collar spit tourniquet, and requires some alone time behind the wall of rims.
In the reflection of the rims, your undereye circles really do look fabulous, you conclude, as you retrieve your therapist's business card form your wallet and use its corners to clean the dried head-blood out from under your fingernails.
Hot stuff, Becky, you think to yourself. Hot stuff.
You know how it is.
