Lose a Fatty

In the Loseafatty world, we get paid once a month. Some months, you get lucky and direct deposit hits around the 28th or 29th -- if the last day of the month is Sunday or Monday, for example, our money hits Friday. Then other months, you fight it out to the bitter end. March is a bitter end kind of month. So here are actual signs from my real life that my paycheck hits in about four hours. Keep in mind that I'm a single-income homeowner with student loans, so making one check stretch for all the things ain't easy. I have $8 in my checking account and $1.50 in cash/coins. This doesn't count change in my VW bug bank, though. I only roll that when things get really bad. I didn't have anything to take for lunch today, so I had to find the cheapest campus food that would keep me full the longest. Or just not eat. I chose the first option, but it also sort of made me sick, so tonight I'm just sitting around moaning. I'm out of popcorn. (Gasp!) I'm out of...

I had to break up with my physical therapist today. Talk about awkward. I started PT for my old lady knee (I call her "Edna") about a month ago. I've seen some improvement, but I felt like the therapist was a little ... off. She seemed rushed if I had to leave my 9 a.m. appointment by 10:30. She continued to give me more and more exercises to do at home, while doing little more than ultrasound and some electro-stimulation moves in the office. How did she fill that 90 minutes, you ask? Well, I'm a talker myself, but she took the cake. So much information. So much justification of treatment decisions. So. Much. Talking. She's a nice woman so I kept it up, but I reached my tipping point on Monday. My knee had started catching weirdly. I'd be walking all confident and normal, and my knee would catch and jerk. I can easily walk it out, but it was new and weird. I thought for sure she could help. After about 20 minutes of watching me walk and talking about hamst...

Since birth, I've been a "bad sleeper." Mom would work for hours when I was an infant to get me down, just to have the slightest thing startle me awake again. (Note: 'Slightest thing' was often my sister, who liked how I'd throw my hands over my head and scream when I was startled.) Apparently I fussed a lot and I breathed strangely. They tell stories about propping the crib mattress up so I'd wheeze less. I snored like my dad, didn't sleep through the night, frequently woke up in a cold sweat from nightmares. Sleeping, the most restorative thing we can do for our brains and bodies, has been the bane of my existence. Despite promises from my pediatrician that I'd grow out of all this, nothing has changed for me as an adult except that I'm old enough to know that I'm chronically exhausted. I wear a sexy Darth Vader mask every night that's supposed to keep me from suffocating in my sleep. But even with the mask, I'm pooped. The sl...

Friday night, I broke my own "nothing but jammie pants and the couch on Fridays" rule and headed downtown to meet a friend for a talk by some editors of "The Onion." After an amusing opening schtick and a way-less-interesting Q&A with the audience, we hit up a nearby restaurant for a snack and drink before parting ways. That ways-parting happened a lot later than I'm used to downtown, but since it was one of our first really lovely spring-like nights, the streets were still pretty busy within a block of the restaurant we'd gone to. I'd lucked out on parking and had snagged a spot in the garage in that block -- kind of a miracle because I generally have terrible luck parking, my feet were super sore from standing for two hours in pinchy boots at a retirement party earlier that evening, and the ballet, symphony and Public Theater were all in business that night. Unfortunately, the elevator with the easiest access to my car was around the block, and...

For a little less than a year, I've been helping two amazing tweenage boys become better writers and readers. I still feel like the world's worst teacher -- I don't have formal lesson plans, and sometimes we just work on homework assignments together. But the experience has offered up enough wins that I keep at it. The best day, by far, was when the three of us acted out a scene from "Much Ado About Nothing" and the kids actually GOT the humor. Their laughs and smiles played through my head as I left their house that night, and I gotta say, I had a little swagger in my step. Obviously, I am awesome. Another win? The fifth grader, who just wrote an essay a few weeks ago about how much he wants to be a mathematician, now wants to be a journalist. I'm not saying I'm a miracle worker, but I'm just about the only writer he knows. So...I'll take it. At the same time, I don't want to be the reason the kid ends up in a dead-end, no-promotions-on-th...

It's been three weeks since last we were together, Facebook. And in my breakup letter, I offered the old platitude that it wasn't you, it was me. Truth is, it really was you all along. Some distance has helped me see that you're a time-waster. A black hole of lost energy and effort. You put people into my life who didn't need to be there. You wielded unyielding, gleeful control over me. Your constantly fluctuating "What should we show people today?" algorithm meant that every encounter I had or post I saw was what you wanted me to see. You manipulated my reality. You're like the worst boyfriend in the history of the world. Really. I know. I won't say that being without you has been easy. In fact, I caved at the one-week mark and used my work account -- where I have no friends, no photo and exist only to post things on one page -- to slip through a back door and stalk someone. And of course, I saw what I didn't want to see and I felt terrible ...

Being female in the workplace ain't no picnic. Sometimes it's such a challenge that I even use words like "ain't." In my 16 years out in the world, I've had four situations with male colleagues that have necessitated managerial, HR or police intervention. And in each instance, I always spent days or weeks or even months thinking "I bet I'm overreacting. I'll just wait and see what happens." I'll wait and see what happens after a colleague stands two inches from me and screams in my face, spittle splattering my skin as veins throb in his bald head. I'll wait and see what happens after a coworker uses his body mass to pin me against a wall so I can't escape from him at a work party. I'll wait and see what happens when a former intern appears in my office to physically intimidate me, follows up with an angry email about my failings as a human being, and then begins calling my office extension endlessly and hanging up. I...