dress for success

On Tuesday, the day I go get weighed and clap for everyone and gather into groups to share (though I frequently try to leave before we get to the sharing part of the festivities, because I do not so much play well with others), about an hour before I had to leave to make it to the meeting, I looked down at my lap and realized I was wearing jeans.

Jeans! I don't usually wear jeans. These are my new Hooray Jeans in which I look kind of sweet, and it was all well and good that I was dressed comfortably and attractively and did not actively hate my reflection every time I chanced upon it, but there was a problem. Jeans are heavy. Heavy fabric. Heavy fabric adds imaginary pounds! Imaginary pounds show up on the scale exactly just like regular non-imaginary ones, and once joined, the regular pounds and the imaginary pounds, they would make a number that I really didn't fucking want to see after a week of turning down cookies.

That's right, I turned down cookies. It sucked.

Anyway. So I considered my options. I could not go at all. But that would be wrong. Okay, I could go pantsless. But that would be wrong, too, in a much different way. I could take off my undergarments, thereby lessening the overall bulk and perhaps mitigating the effect of the jeans.

Or I could change into the dress I had in the bag at my feet. The very clingy, very low-cut, somewhat short black one that I had worn one night when I went out with Guy, which I ended up leaving laying on his floor, which he thoughtfully (along with the fishnets) had washed and folded and given back to me to take home, urging me to consider possibly maybe wearing the outfit again soon. Because, you know, it's nice to get dressed up!

So I had a totally inappropriate dress which weighed, by virtue, funnily enough, of its severe inappropriateness for Tuesday at noon at work, much less than the jeans and blouse I was wearing. But there was a ten minute walk over to the building where the meeting is, and it was kind of cold out, and I didn't want to go parading across campus in hooker-wear and a pair of sneakers, because that? Is just a little bit sad. Also, I'd look like a faculty member on a Walk of Shame from a kid's dorm room. Which now that I think about it, is kind of awesome.

A plan! An excellent plan would be to carry the dress with me to the weigh-in! And then I could change in the building there, pop onto the scale, and change back out, and no one would even notice my brief appearance as a Las Vegas lounge act! I was a genius!

And I didn't feel at all like a freak, wearing an evening gown in front of a room full of nice middle-aged nuns. Or when I came back to the meeting, having changed back into my jeans, and another member asked me, very puzzled, "Did you – change?"

The Plan worked, however, and I posted a charming 1.4 pound loss, bringing me to a total of 5 point, uh, something. It is funny how those points of pounds are so important to me, and yet, I keep forgetting what they are exactly.

There was a brief moment of disappointment when I realized that I had been expecting – after having a really brilliant week of Excellent Choices and Good Decision-Making – to have lost at least three pounds, and to have dropped below the Scary No-Good number that gives me fucking hives. Instead, I came neatly to rest right on top of that number, round and perfect and full of ugly.

Next week, though, I will lose, and even if it is a point one of a pound, I will be below that number, and that is something to huzzah about. If I make it through the fourth of july weekend.

This entry was posted by anne, on Friday, July 01, 2005. You can leave your response.