adventures with leather pants: an epiphany

Hi.  This is my first blog post ever, though you probably knew that already.  You’re probably from Facebook, where you likely clicked over out of curiosity, or perhaps mild contempt.  Another chick starting a dumb blog no one is going to read*, I’m sure you’re thinking.  Fantastic.  Yeah, I know.  Why am I here, then?  Well, a few reasons.  First and foremost, I am an English major without any real direction in life (no, I don’t want to be a teacher), beyond wanting to “write”.  The only problem is, I don’t actually write very much, so I thought I should start doing that.  Secondly, I have a lot of spare time on my hands at the moment.  Thirdly, in the event that I do not have a lot of spare time on my hands in the future, this presents me with a wonderful opportunity to procrastinate my responsibilities.  And lastly, I just plain like to hear, er, read, myself talking (writing?).  I think I’m hilarious.  Fight me.

Anyway, enough formalities.  On to the leather pants, which are actually going to feature in this post, and were not merely included in the title as an attention-grab.  Approximately six months ago, I purchased a pair of faux leather pants from H&M.  I was over the moon about my leather pants.  They made me feel like the most bad-ass dominatrix biker chick around.  Even if they did make funny squeaky noises when I walked and made my legs kind of sweaty (this might come as a shock, but faux leather is not exactly breathable).

Fast forward to now; I’ve been in Edinburgh for about two and a half months (jeesh, I can’t believe it).  When I decided to come to Scotland, I had largely accepted that I was probably going to get fat.  I mean, I was pretty sure that all they ate here was, like, fish and chips.  Heck, Scotland even invented the Deep Fried Mars Bar, which surprised me, because all that time I’d thought it had been America.  (Side note, if you’ve never tried a Deep Fried Mars Bar, don’t.  Not unless you’re willing to start a slow descent to madness, the need for your next crispy, gooey, heaven-sent confection overpowering every other aspect of life.)  Strangely enough, though, it wasn’t even the local food that did me in.   It was my own food from my fridge.  See, my flatmate and I have gotten into this awful habit where we go down to the kitchen at dinnertime, eat dinner, and then sit there for five more hours.  Our (otherwise perfect) flat lacks a common living area, so the kitchen does double duty in that respect.  During those five hours, we end up consuming everything remotely consumable in the room.  Hummus, granola, muffins, peanut butter toast, a second helping of dinner…most of it not really inherently bad for you, but it’s the calories that matter.  400 extra calories of hummus is still 400 extra calories.  It all adds up.  And that + my general no-exercise policy = gaining a few.

You might be wondering what this has to do with my leather pants.  Basically, I know that they fit me fine the last time I wore them, which was a couple months ago.  But last Friday, when it felt like a leather pants kind of night, I encountered a problem: I could only just barely button the pants.  And in order to button them, I had to suck in more than I’ve ever had to suck in my entire life.  Also, they were horribly uncomfortable.  All that late-night hummus had come back to haunt me.  Fuck.

This predicament left me with three options:

1. Wear a different pair of pants.
2. Keep them buttoned, and just vow to not eat or drink anything for the duration of the night.  Also, no sitting, which would possibly result in lacerations.
3. Wear them unbuttoned, and hide it somehow.

Now, I’m not one to let a pair of pants tell me how to live my life, so I went with option 3.  Beneath my loose peplum top, my tummy was free of its size 10-imposed prison (thank God for peplums, amirite, ladies?), and nobody was any the wiser.  As an aside…following this, I also realized that the squeaks from my thighs rubbing together were quite a bother, so I decided to pat a bit of cornstarch on the offending body parts.  Pros: no more squeaking.  Cons: I now had white inner thighs, because for some reason I didn’t initially figure that white cornstarch would show up so starkly on black fake leather.  You win some, you lose some.

For real, though, the only reason I give two shits that I’ve gained weight is that I really like my leather pants and I’d like to be able to wear them buttoned without cutting off circulation and/or causing bleeding.  All my other clothes still fit, likely due to my preference for elastic waistbands (minus a particularly un-stretchy pair of high-waisted denim shorts).  I’m a bit of an oddball in my family, in that I’m the only one who doesn’t breath health and fitness.  Mom’s a personal trainer, Dad looks like Jackie Chan in his prime, brother is a lacrosse all-star, sister is a dance superstar, and other sister…um, I’m pretty sure she goes to the gym and drinks apple cider vinegar water and stuff (message me sometime, Emily).  Living in such an environment while not participating can take a toll on one’s self-esteem, and it has in the past.  I’m rather glad that I’m in a mental state, at least at the moment, to not let it affect me.

What’s the point of my writing about how I’m too fat to wear my leather pants properly?  Most would consider that pretty personal stuff.  And it is, I guess.  But with the realization that I’d gained weight, came the realization that I didn’t care all that much.  And please don’t tell me, “But you haven’t gained weight!  You look fine!”  I’ve weighed myself.  The scale don’t lie.  And the fact of the matter is, looking “fine” and being slim should not be synonymous.  Big people are still “fine”.  As a society, we have been socialized to believe that thinness is good and fatness is gross.  You can throw health statistics about obesity at me all you want, and if you personally value your own physical health above all else, then that’s great for you.  But, fat people have just as much right to exist as everyone else.  Nobody has the right to unsolicitedly tell anyone else how to live their life, even out of “concern”.  Additionally, by demonizing fatness, we have created an environment in which people (mostly girls) are so deathly afraid of “looking fat” that they beat themselves up over even the tiniest, only-visible-to-them bulges.  Low self-esteem and eating disorders ain’t cute, folks.

I’m not going to pretend that if I woke up 70 pounds heavier tomorrow I’d be immediately 100% okay with it, because I’m used to living in the body I have now.  Similarly, if I woke up 70 pounds lighter, I also don’t think I’d be okay with it, mostly because I would probably be dead.  But I would like to think that I could become okay with it.  Not the being dead scenario, obviously.  The being fat one.  Because if I were fat, to put it in the cheesiest terms possible, I’d still be me.  I’d like to think that my friends and family would still love me.  And that’s all that matters.

Anyway, to sum up this overlong post that took a rather preachy (and possibly annoying) turn, my takeaway is this: if my biggest concern is that I ate too much hummus and now my leather pants don’t fit properly, life can’t be all that bad.  That, or I’m just really good at ignoring everything else.  The latter is probably closer to the truth, but hey, I prefer to live my life in a constant state of denial and procrastination.

Bye.

*Disclaimer: To all the lovely bloggers out there, if you’re reading this, I do not think your blogs are at all dumb.  I actually quite enjoy many of them.  I’m just doing my best “lol-u-made-a-blog-thats-so-ghey” douchebag impression.