WORKING MY BUTT OFF, AND OTHER LIES:
I said to myself for the eighteenth time (yes, I do talk to myself) “I’ve been working my butt off promoting Diana Lively,” when I was visited by a ghastly epiphany. My butt has not diminished one little bit. In fact, were were measuring, we might be discovering the sad-but-true fact that Sheila’s butt is growing by leaps and bounds!
Tarnation, as they say in someone else’s South.
I have several theories on this astonishing reversal of natural law.
- I am naturally selected to be an efficient user of caloric intake. The more I worry, the more my brain sends messages to my body to quiver just so, and get ready for the famine. The more work I have to do, the more I ought to burn, with sheer anxiety, if nothing else, but some sort of inner control freak is second-guessing my brain and making sure that the furnace is turned down as low as possible, the better to conserve. Alternately, my spending hand appears to work in the exact opposite way, so I hurry willy-nilly to acquire important staples like REAL SIMPLE magazine (which I don’t have time to read) nail polish (which I don’t have time to apply) and T.J. MAXX clearance items that match nothing in my wardrobe and in fact, I’m too hurried to try on.
- I do in fact eat with a similarly frenetic pace, and my stomach makes these horrible gnawing sounds that I cannot easily ignore without worrying that maybe there are ancestors of my own (say, like Eric the Red) in there, whose coastal rampages caught them in an eternal revolving door of reincarnation as protozoa or mitochondria or maybe bacterium in the lining of my stomach. No matter what he’s done, no relative of mine’s going to go hungry if I have something to say about it.
- It’s possible that my anxiety about deadlines emits subtle changes in my electro-magnetic field so that mirrors begin to reflect badly on the very parts of self one would normally like to be less, shall we say, protuberant.
- Also possible that similar physical forces are scaring the beejesus out of my clothing fibers, sending them into a prolonged retraction otherwise known as shrinkage, just like George Castanza’s meat-and-two-veg after a dip in the ocean.
- Sometimes, an extra beer when you know you shouldn’t, except that you are really, really tense about being a complete flop, is very calming. Sometimes it isn’t, in which case it’s necessary to offer Eric the Red a war tribute to keep him from moving into the isles of langerhorn, or, God-forbid, the appendix, which I just know is going to explode some inconvenient moment, unleashing a battery of watermelon seeds, swallowed Bazooka and chewed-off fingernails. Besides, no relative of mine is going to go thirsty if I have anything to say about it.
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