IZ: "Have you lost weight?"
Me: "No!"
IZ: "Hmm… you look thinner."
Me: "I live in Oregon, I am thin."
It’s a crazy
notion, a scary sensation, really, to be the THIN girl in town.
Aside from
the tourists, that is. When I look around me I realize I’m
seriously underweight in comparison to the general population. I
got my first taste of this new "reality" at a McDonald’s
somewhere along the I5. (It all looks the same to me.) Anyhow, I
came out of the bathroom to be greeted by a row of men all
staring. At me. Now seriously, I checked, my skirt wasn’t tucked
into my
panties and I didn’t have toilet paper stuck to any part of me.
There was NO reason what-so-ever to be ogling me. Trust me on this–
like linen, I
do not travel well. I’m typically wrinkled and bloated, a
somewhat disheveled mess. It
didn’t dawn on me until a few days later when IZ came home from the
supermarket and said, "You
are so the Marin Babe!" that all those men were actually looking at
me. WTF?
Um, hello. Same girl
here. Same AVERAGE girl. Not skinny, not fat.
Just average. In fact, by Marin standards, I have a serious
weight
problem. But then, Marin is delusional. It’s where
grown women attempt
to look like 14 year old girls. Think of them as Barbies with Brains.
They are the epitome of
everything you see in magazines. Tall, thin, tan– putting
nothing in their bodies that isn’t "organic". Clad in the uber
uniform of trendy velor track suits, they meet for skinny soy lattes
to hash out the details of their macrobiotic diets and dish about the
new trainer they just hired to "whip them into shape."
Seriously, Marin women are the archetype of self-obsessed, body
conscious Californians. The only people "checking me out" when I
lived in Marin were those same women who seemed to roll their eyes at
my lumpy shape in an universal judgment that seemed to say, "Now
there’s a woman who could use a good colonic!"
You
would think this new shift in reality, this new found "popularity"
would not grow old. However, I nearly throttled the produce guy
in Safeway on Tuesday who insisted on following me around and inquiring
every 10 feet if "I needed anything." Yes, I need you to
stop following me. When he finally stopped stalking me, the
cashier did a double take on my I.D declaring that I looked nothing
like my picture and implying that there was NO way I could be that old. Um. Yeah. I am that old, now give me my damn alcohol before I sic Jr. over there in the produce department on you.
Here in Oregon, life is just. . .
meatier. And so by comparison, I am thin. Which is why, my
next book is going to be entitled, "Don’t Diet! Move to Oregon!"
