This is what happens when you don't have Tivo...

When you don't have a TiVo and you are prone to fits of malaise and melancholy, posts like the one below result. Disclaimer/Post Script provided before the fact/Pre-mature Punchline: I wrote this last night after getting home from an evening excursion out for drinks with colleagues where I felt about as sociable as bathroom mold (and about as popular and well-liked as well). The true accounting of what happened, we'll never know. What lies below is a paniched, over the top recounting of my many miseries. I shudder to read it now, if only that I was greeted today by several life lessons. Some jarring, some more gentle. First, A friend is dealing with the sudden life-threatening stroke inflicted upon her mother. She saw it happen, she now sits in the ICU holding her mother's hand, hoping she will make it through the night. This, unlike all the other static of my daily life, is true cause for heartbreak. The static is luxury, this is hard truth. My heart just hurts for her. My parents are crazy, but they are healthy. They are okay. I flout it, and yet fortune smiles on me. Second, A friend whose face I have not seen live and in person for several years, through divine intervention and work related functions, was immediate and available today and we had a discussion that comes only with the familiarity and quality of friendship that allows for a two year absence of immediacy and yet allows you to pick up right where you left off as though no time has passed. It is a trust that does not expire. He reminded me that the gift I have is the freedom and the ability to control my present, my day to day life, my right now. I know this. But somehow a friendly face and voice of reason echoing the sentiment at such a time and place seemed oddly appropriate and incredibly resonant. As always, the burden of implementation rests within me. There is a certainty and an assurance in today, in the moment. A responsibility to enjoy, to appreciate. To give meaning. To give. The rest is speculation. So on that note, the drivel below is provided only because, in the interest of being a full and accurate documentarian of my own crazy, I ought to put it out there. If only as a lesson of what to avoid....

There is a commercial-length infomercial on TV right now for one of the many
magic bullets of weight-loss. Its name is unimportant (and unretained by the
author). The commercial is seemingly uncanny though because every time I flip
past it, or I actually pause from my relative stupor that sets in during the
commercial break (Ah, the much needed two minute and thirty second respite I
needed from my persistent vegetative state of enraptured Law & Order
viewing. Sweet leisure!) to take notice for a fleeting second, the commercial
seems to continually be braying this same refrain, “Tired of trying to get rid
of stubborn belly fat?” And somehow this anthropomorphic incantation sticks in
my mind. Not just because I am tired of trying to get rid of my stubborn belly
fat (though it does give me an added sense of security that I have increased my
buoyancy, and have thus my chances of survival, at least five-fold in case of a
water landing) but because it is true: Belly fat, born of the same mold as inner
thigh fat, saddle bags, and cottage cheese butt, is truly damn stubborn.
Infuriating, vexing, perplexing, maddening and stress inducing as well. But
tempestuous as it character may be, belly fat is no match in its nefariousness
for a concept I would like to anoint as “head fat.”

Head Fat, not to be
confused with “fat head” (read: narcissistic, having a high opinion of oneself,
or, alternatively, someone with a large and literally inflated noggin) is a
figurative concept. An apt descriptor for an insidious metaphysical state. My
self-loathing (and all of the anxiety, guilt and misery which flow directly from
it) is a prime example of head fat. It is stubborn as all hell. Stubborn head
fat. Mule-like head fat. Jack-ass head fat. It won’t go away, no matter what I
seem to do to exercise, exorcise, excise it away. Much like my stubborn belly
fat (SBF), I am vigilant about trying to eliminate my stubborn head fat (SHF)
for a limited period of time. I begin to see results, I believe I am fine. It is
good enough. I believe I have bought myself some leeway. And I fall back upon my
old ways. And it comes back. But much like the SBF, the SHF never really went
away. I never really made the improvements I thought I did, because the changes
were ephemeral. I treated them as permanent before I knew them to actually be
so.

I am tired of the stubborn head fat. I wonder if I can every win the
battle of the bulge over-sized gourd.

My latest covert op/cover of
darkness assault on the SHF is Operation Smile and Nod aka Operation Eat Your
Peas. As of the SHF has left me drained and tired. I have no energy to even
pretend to be interesting, witty and/or remotely worthwhile. When things get
this way, I get into a trench warfare mentality, differing from the traditional
metaphor, in that I build the proverbial trench of isolation (with just enough
contact so as not to seem too weird , because apparently sort of weird and
extremely odd is just fine) for purposes of facilitating my hiding. There will
be neither a frontal attack nor even any kind of salient defense mounted from
the trench. The trench is a monument to inertia and fear. It is a lame attempt
at stasis. It is a misguided vision of a world where I cause no one trouble nor
pain. It is, in short, self defeating and a waste of time.

The longer I
stay in my self-imposed trench of sorts, the worse my situation becomes. It
becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, most clearly played out in the contempt or
worse, indifference, in the eyes of people I had thought to be allies/friends. I
want to save people from the devouring effect of my SHF – to hide away so as to
leave them unaffected – but even in the hiding there is an effect. And I can’t
ever seem to get past the pain the loneliness (self-imposed as it may be) seems
to inflict.

So Operation Smile and Nod is this: No energy for dealing
with anyone but my closest circle of friends, but I must make sure to smooth out
the social waters with all of the rest of the people in my life (my friends
thousands of miles away, my acquaintances at work, my colleagues at work, the
people at work who I thought were my friends who know treat me as though I am
barely an acquaintance). It is better for me to get out and participate in the
world.