I Want to Be an Anorexic

Los Angeles is a competitive town. It is also a vainglorious town. And it is a really thin town.

I am not per se... fat... but I am also not thin. But by this town's standards, I am surprised that Greenpeace isn't following me around making sure I don't get harpooned by Japanese tourists. Throw on top of that that everyone is also preternaturally beautiful and you create a breeder reactor for insecurity.

In the early nineties there was a school of educational thought that posited that best way to stem the inevitable soul-crushing insecurity of adulthood was to bolster a kid's self-esteem. So if you tried out for the football team... you're on the team. If you wanted to be a cheerleader... you made it. If you wanted to be a high class hooker with a heart of gold... done. The reasoning was that kids with amazing self-esteem, which was a result of not knowing failure and disappointment, would be incapable of insecurity because they didn't know what it was. It would follow that with a whole generation of children with amazing self-esteem would then go out into the world and be a force for good and unbridled capitalism. The whole world would be transformed into a utopian paradise of ideas where we would use sexually charged images to sell each other jeans.

Needless to say, the experiment failed. The reality is that even though you may not give something a name doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Kinda like not knowing Ebola is called "Ebola" doesn't keep it from melting your liver. Hence failure would eventually rear its ugly head in the form of college admissions. Apparently the very same colleges that had devised the whole self-esteem notion has failed to apply it to their admissions process. So the march to Utopia was halted by a scantron sheet and the SAT people. And insecurity would set in. So much for progress.

Today we find ourselves mired in Iraq, the economy is stagnant for everyone but the top one percent and it seems like there are no great challenges or big ideas. No moon to get to. No new political systems to try. No new calorie free sweeteners. Nothing. So the challenges must then be internal. Self-imposed. But also, it's not to say that self esteem isn't a cure for crushing insecurity. It is. But it must be gained honestly. By overcoming obstacles and adversity to reach a goal. The American way.

That gets me back to my weight. When I fell out of my mom I thought I was going to be thin. I was a beanpole up until the second grade. Then something happened. Not sure whether it was football, genetic factors or all the beige food I was subjected to growing up, but I was a rotund little kid. Dare I say husky? I am not saying that I was necessarily obese (and according to Time Magazine, if I went back today I would svelte compared to the juice-fattened kids of today) but I wasn't thin. Asking me to run a mile in the fifth grade was the equivalent of asking me to run the Boston Marathon backwards. An impossible task or at least near impossible.

In college I managed to drop a ton of weight and I looked pretty good if I do say so myself. It was a glorious three year period that was eventually derailed by the working world. When I first moved to LA, I was still able to mix into the crowd of attractive twenty somethings but before long the commitment to being bound to a desk caused an east-west expansion of my waistline. The next years were spent with a back and forth battle between "dude, you look like you've lost some weight." and "dude, you need to lose some weight."

I consider myself a goal-setter and goal-achiever. I think I learned it in football when I realized that I would not be allowed to quit no matter how much I wanted to and that I would never lose my virginity if I quit because cheerleaders don't fuck fat kids. But they do fuck football players. Every year I would set a goal. And that goal was to make it to the end of the season without being paralyzed. Was I succesful? Let me put it this way. I can get around without blowing into a tube.

It was this ability to realize goals that helped me get ahead. It got me through college and it got me to LA. But somewhere along the way, I became lax in maintaining this practice. So as part of a self-improvement regimen I picked it back up. I first implemented it in my professional life and things are going swimmingly. But that old bugaboo still haunts me and that thing is my weight. It has always been the major source for my insecurity and I have made up my mind to not let it beat me anymore. So this is a new year and it is a new year of challenges and that challenge is weight. I want to lose weight and there is no sure fire way to drop pounds like simply not eating. And what is the most effective way to not eat? Anorexia.

It's really a straightforward plan. If I can simply succeed at starving myself to emaciation I will have not only solved a practical problem, weight gain, I will have solved some existential problems as well. I will not only be thin, I will also know internally that I can... one... achieve anything I set my mind to and... two... suppress any self-doubt by achieving a goal. I will have created a colossal store of self-esteem that will not only keep me thin but will also bleed over into other aspects of my life. As the pounds melt off of me, I will suddenly find myself amazingly capable and successful in so many other aspects of my life. I will be the self-actualized man. I will be the Nietzschean Uberman. And I will be strikingly thin. And popular. Because thin people are popular. Although you can say that really fat people are popular too, but just not as long lived.

So when you are driving down the street and you see a walking skeleton with a distended stomach but an amazing air of confidence, honk and give me a big thumbs-up because what you will be witnessing is the absolute destruction of self-imposed limits and the creation of a boundless fountain of self-esteem. And that’s a good thing.

You Can't Stop Progress

I really don't consider myself much of an adult. Granted, I am starting to get wrinkles, I don't rebound from debauchery the way I once did and 18 year olds think I am someone to be mocked as opposed to emulated. But there seem to be subtle suggestions that I might be slowly but surely entering adulthood. For instance, I recently bought a toiler paper holder. There I said. I bought it. And I even went to Bed, Bath & Beyond to buy it. I... get this... intended to buy it. A plastic and metal cylindar designed to store and hide in plain sight three additional rolls of toilet paper besides the one already available to the bathroom user on the dispenser. I got in my car. Turned the key. Got on the road. And walked through the door of Bed, Bath & Beyond with one thing on my list - toilet paper holder.

There is a book called The Tipping Point which I am sure you have heard of but if you haven't it examines how trends begin and reach critical mass. When they really explode is what is called the tipping point. I think that adulthood for a guy has a tipping point. It occurs when you voluntarily enter a Pottery Barn as opposed to being coerced by someone... most likely someone you are trying to nail. Or at least see naked. Without paying them for that. And love.

I've always considered myself to have some level of design-conciousness. When I was a kid I liked giant japanese robots with swords. Then I got into D&D. Then I collected comics. OK. I was a geek growing up. In fact, I used to were the same colored shirt everyday in the eight grade. My friends called me "Blue Shirt". I convinced myself it was a style choice, but frankly money was tight and blue pinpoint oxford short sleeved shirts were inexpensive. But it did give me some indavertant level of stylistic simplicity, allowed me to know at an early age what pinpoint oxford was and, most importantly, reinforced my geekdom.

In High School, I was able to start shedding my outward geek tendencies even though I harbored geek tendencies internally. (I closet collected transformers in the ninth grade - seriously) Eventually in college I came into my own and found some measure of style by working in a hip clothing store. So again, I had an external presentation of cool. And at that point 18 year olds thought I was cool. They even said so. And I could date them without looking like a pedophile. Finally I was spurt out of the college system into the adult world which at that point means that you start in what some of us call "the working world".

And therein lies the rub. I am supposed to be an adult but if a FBI profiler went to my apartment, they would conclude that it was occupied by a kid. Mismatched furniture. Black furniture. Sheets under 500 thread count. Non-natural fibers. So you could really say that while I was maintaining the appearance of an adult, the lair was giving me away. And it was like that through most of my twenties.

Then it occurred. Not sure when. But it did. I walked past a Pottery Barn and as opposed to being deflected like an up-quark in a partical collider... I walked in. Not only did I walk in... I liked it. All of it. The furniture. The window treaments (I didn't know that phrase before Pottery Barn). The candles. All of it. And thus began a subtle transformation wherein one externally presented adult was becoming and internally registered adult.

So it began with pottery barn and then led to overstock.com then to me getting in my car to go buy a toilet paper holder at Bed, Bath & Beyond. And as I was walking in the store I walked past a group of 18 year olds and as they looked at me in what I interpreted as an internally mocking manner I thought, "Dude, pull up your pants."