Thanks to a bona fide doctor in the house, I have discovered the source for my belly fat.

That’s right, I’ve been biscuit poisoned. And not by any biscuit, the kind that come in cans.

Dr. B is from the south, where most genteel women (and men) know how to make a biscuit or two. When we lived in Arkansas, even my mother, an Asian military bride, got into the fine art of biscuit making. She also made cornbread and grits but that’s another gastronomical story.

Me, I don’t really care for breads of any kind. It took me two decades to eat dinner rolls at restaurants. Before I started eating dinner rolls in restaurants, they would just sit there in handsome baskets, making lovely props while I picked at my food. (One eats like a bird while dating, but makes up for it after the nuptials.) I’ve just recently started to like dinner rolls, especially the flavored chi-chi ones, which may also be a small part of why the belly fat.

When we do have biscuits at the Demonic house, I opt for the canned variety. However, canned biscuits are not without their inherent dangers.

I was scared by an exploding can of biscuits once. It was early in our marriage. To free the biscuits, one must place the end of a spoon on the edge of the can and press, but the ensuing blast is sometimes jarring. This is a hazard associated with biscuits past their expiration date.

Since the biscuit explosion (where I almost lost an eye), whenever we have biscuits (usually with soup or stew), I must enlist Mr. D’s help to open the can. Similarly, I cannot open a bottle of champagne. I was knocked to near unconsciousness by an errant cork.

He thinks this is silly. Of course, Mr. D must also open jars for me. Carpal tunnel. I can barely open the car door.

Come to think of it, I can barely open a bag of kettle corn.

When Mr. D is gone — meaning dead because he’s not ditching me now — I’ll probably lose weight because I won’t be able to free food from its containers.

Thank goodness for summer. The likelihood of biscuit ingestion goes way down with warm weather. I should use this time to thin down for winter’s upcoming biscuit poisoning.

‘Nuff said.

I have them.

Oh, yes, indeed I do.

Some people who have seen me in real life think I look better than I really do. There are two trains of thought that follow this track. One, they are just being nice to me. Two, they are blind in one eye and can’t see out of the other.

Last night, after a hard day’s work and the mowing of two lawns (one at the house and a smaller one at the office), I didn’t feel like cooking. I felt like sushi. I have bad wrists and my sushi sucks. I was hoping to be wined and dined at my favorite Japanese restaurant.

Mr. Demonic would have rather had something at home, but he agreed to meet me there. He had been riding his Harley all day and had that helmet head look going on. My Favorite Japanese Restaurant is nice, but it’s not that nice. Besides, Koji, the owner, knows me from before when his dad owned the place. He wouldn’t care what we looked like.

I was hot and sweaty after my grass-cutting expedition, so I took a shower. Then I attempted to don a cool top and jeans.

I was amazed to find out that all my cool tank tops are too small! These include some very nice ones that I had purchased at the end of last summer and had never worn. These included some that were not form fitting, but were rather loose.

They are now unfortunately all tight! I checked myself out in the mirror. Sure enough, I was all fatty and globulely.

I decided that after my sushi dinner, I was going to reform. So this morning I did ten minutes of yoga with the pretzel dude on the Oxygen Channel’s “Inhale” Show. (That guy is a total yoga nutcase.) I would have done more, but I was afraid I was going to have a heart attack.

I’m going to eat fish and veggies for dinner, no cake.

Then I’m going to jump on my dusty elliptical machine and go until I pass out.

Globules! YUCK!

No, I’m not talking about eating twigs and berries for dinner. I’m not giving up my carnivore ways, either.

I’m celebrating the results of my latest cholesterol test. My fat levels came in around 180~

Yippee!

Either medication and a proper diet helps, or my test results were switched at the lab. Because the latter is more likely than the former, I will not gorge on a double Whopper today.

I was just thinking of fatness.

I used to be what I thought was “painfully” thin. People would comment that I was so thin, I would blow away in the wind. Actually, where I grew up, it was always very windy in March. Gale force winds around 80 miles per hour. Indeed, I have blown away in the wind.

I hated that joke about turning sideways, sticking out my tongue and looking like a zipper. What genius thought up that stupid wise crack?

The wonderful thing about the olden days was that I could eat and eat and eat and not gain an ounce. I vividly remember eating double Whoppers with cheese like they were no big deal.

Then I went to Germany and lived there for nine months. I went from a bone-thin 92 pounds to 105, thanks to bratwurst, jager schnitzel, spaetzle and Greek food. (Yes, Greek food.) When I came home, American food suddenly was bland and tasteless, and I lost the 13 pounds I had gained.

The best job I ever had was at the Post Office, or so my husband says. Somehow, I wrangled a position pushing mail around on huge carts. My job was to get it from elevator, push it over to a floor scale, have it weighed, then push it to where people were waiting (dejectedly) to sort it. Many of the carts weighed in excess of thousands of pounds. I kept all my slips and totaled them, just for fun. Some nights I would push around 50,000 pounds of mail. I was slim and trim, lean and mean when I worked there. I had arm muscles and leg muscles that went for miles.

I met my husband at the Post Office. (He worked there, too.) My husband hasn’t done much in the meantime to keep me lean and mean, slim and trim. In fact, he is the reason why I am a mother, twice over. Pregnancy will make a woman fat in no time at all. Sure there’s a baby in there, and some other stuff that has no purpose in a woman’s life. In fact, after gaining 42 pounds with the first one, I cried and gave up getting on the scale again. He wasn’t due for another three weeks. I jumped up and down trying to get him out of there.

My husband is also a consummate chow hound. He’s a gastronome. He loves food. I do too, but I have to stop eating before my buttons pop off, and I do. He doesn’t. He has very little self control. Anyway, at 6′ 3″, he can hide excess poundage pretty well. I, on the other hand, am a dwarf at 5′ 3 and one half inches, so ten pounds of extra blubber on me looks like I’m pregnant again.

My husband and I also indulge in really nice wines, usually from California, although we are expanding our repertoire by jumping to the continent of Australia. These days we are also auditioning the fine Spanish wines, like Temperanillo and Riojas. Wine might look light, but it has just as many calories as a beer. Maybe more so, since it’s heavily sugared.

Since my son left for college three years ago, I’ve gained a good 15 pounds. I’d like to have my son as a back-up scapegoat in case the husband one falls through. I can no longer wear tiny little slip dresses with spaghetti straps. That is because when I put those on, I look like a sausage in a casing two sizes too small. I threw away my over-sized tee shirts, because I felt someone of my age should wear something a little more formal. Now I am kicking myself over that move. I could use roomy and comfortable lounge wear.

When I look in the mirror, I see something on my stomach that wasn’t there before. It’s FAT. It’s rather unappetizing, but I’ve seen worse on others, so I’m counting myself lucky.

I don’t have time to exercise, and with the exception of yard work, am pretty sedentary. I like food too much to go on a diet, although I’m thinking of buying my daughter’s ADD pills. They’ve worked wonders on her. I tried several diet “aids” but the side effects weren’t worth it. Plus, I didn’t lose an ounce.

Damn it. I sure wish I was thin.

Gotcha!

No, this post isn’t about pine cones, although I’ve been thinking about them. I’ve been thinking of them since I can’t see them under a blanket of lingering snow. I’m thinking I must have a barrel’s worth of them lying on the bottom of my fish pond, rotting away.

No, I’ve actually been pondering this post which I wrote yesterday. (Plugging oneself is a good thing, no?)

It appears I might have made a hasty judgment with regard to the nature of the site in question. (I’m not mentioning it, because I don’t want people to click over there and give them more page views. That site doesn’t deserve any encouragement. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you can take the back alley route of finding out the insider knowledge by clicking on my pal, Wanda Rizzuto.) As only a brief visitor of the offending site, I got the impression that the site was all about glorifying being thin, and making a mockery of those who are fat.

I may be the only one on Earth who doesn’t really want to see my favorite celebrities in various forms of undress. (Not Viggo, not even Richard Gere.) Right now, I’m having a difficult time with the term “celebrities.” First of all, half of the people featured on the site have no real skills, and are famous for being famous, or famous for being rich. Secondly, does it really matter what their Body Mass Index is? Why we invest so much time and energy on these people is beyond me. (Yes, I’m investing some time discussing this tripe here, but it’s not my usual thing. You won’t catch me watching “Keeping up with the Kardashians” or “The Real Housewives of Orange County.” I’ll give it a couple hundred words and then drop it.)

The message these sites and the media projects on our young people (both boys and girls) is frightening. We can fill our lives with endless shopping, bad behavior, law breaking and rudeness and it will all be good because we’re “beautiful.” If we’re not “beautiful” we can make ourselves that way by a quick trip to the spa or to the plastic surgeon. We can poke fun of those who aren’t “beautiful” just because we can.

I’ve raised two children, and even with my daughter almost grown, it’s hard to instill a sense of values with her that go beyond the boundaries of external packaging. If she fails a test, she launches into “I don’t need to be smart, I’m pretty,” which makes me want to assume the position of instant backhand, but I resist the urge and tell her to fill her head with more than moronic episodes of reality TV. She didn’t believe me when I told her that most images these days are digitally enhanced, until I linked her to a web site with before and after photos of her favorite people. But with constant bombardment from media, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for a mother’s common sense to illuminate through the muck.

I’m not calling for a war, but I’m calling for a personal boycott of the frivolous mediocrity of sites like this one who exploit people like these.

And if you really must know, I’d rather contemplate the wondrousness of a pine cone.

Please keep in mind that I don’t harbor any prejudices for fat or thin people; these are just my observations. Many people know I’m sort of on a diet and exercise regimen (I say “sort of” because I’m really weak-willed and things can change daily-actually, now that I think about it, things can make a drastic turn by the minute…), and those who really know me think I’m being weird and patronizing. Maybe condescending, too. This is because I’m short (5′3″) and appear to be small. I say “appear” because I’m a master at hiding my fat globules. I have a drawer full of bikinis and bustiers, but you won’t see me wearing them right now. It’s been several years since they’ve seen the light of day, if you must know. These days, I’ve taken to wearing over-sized sweat shirts and loose sweaters.

I admit that I may have a skewed view on fat. My view probably originated from the late 1960s and early 1970s, when I was growing up into adulthood. Back then, we didn’t have ways to measure transfats or your body mass index, and the popular diets didn’t come into vogue until a couple of decades later. Back then, you just took a look at a person and decided they were “fat” or not.

There weren’t many fat kids in my high school, and my graduating class had over 500 kids in it. In looking over my senior year book, I would think that maybe five kids would be considered “fat.” Their level of “fatness” was not what you see these days when looking at the general population. I didn’t know anyone who was morbidly obese, for example, and I now have a woman who is morbidly obese working for me. Kids were more active in those days. For example, I never rode a school bus. I always walked to school, and it was a mile and a quarter away. I never see anyone walking around my area where I live now, especially not kids. God forbid if someone grabs one and rapes him/her before killing them. And you didn’t have to be an athlete to stay in shape. Even the stoners at my school took hikes into the mountains, where they could smoke pot in peace and enjoy Mother Nature. Back then, we also only had three channels of television, no internet and no video games. If you were a teenager with no inside diversion, you found a quick way to be out of the house.

Both my parents weren’t fat. My father, in fact, was thin most of his life. In the last 15 years, he’s put on a sizeable beer gut, but he’s still basically a normal sized man. My mother, who had six kids before the age of 43, was very short and struggled with her weight. At her hugest (which I know isn’t huge), she was a size 12, which was only noticeable because she was only 4′10′. However, at the end of her life, she had pared down the extra pounds and started playing tennis religiously. She looked pretty good, but damn that cholesterol that killed her. My father’s mother was thin as well. His sibs were thin. In fact, we were so thin that my cousins, who were “normal” sized didn’t think we were related. I was so thin, I was mocked at school. It wasn’t because I was striving to be that way. It was natural for me. I ate like a horse, as many can attest.

Which brings me to present-day me. I still love food, too much. I love fine wine with my food, too much. Yes, I’ve had two kids, but they are grown now, so I’ve had 18 years to get myself back into pre-wedding shape. Alas, it’s not going to happen. Once you birth a couple of kids, your hips move outwardly. I couldn’t fit one leg into those size 1 jeans I so proudly wore before marriage, and there’s no possible way I could get my body into my strapless wedding dress without major reconstruction of the bodice and waist area. I do want to lose enough weight (about ten pounds) to get back to where I was in 1998. I think I could achieve a goal from ten years ago.

Since realizing I have a 1970s view of fat, I am making some changes, which I hope will help with my weight loss program. I’m limiting myself to three channels, and getting out of the house more.

It’s going to be my birthday, soon. Really, really soon.

I was hoping to forget it altogether, but unfortunately one cannot get into February without passing up my birthday. After that, I tend to dismiss any notions of age and birthdays until just about twenty days before the next one. Then I freak out as per usual and fret and become horribly depressed. I look at my sagging stomach and my huge ass and my wrinkling skin and sometimes graying hair and shed tears for my misspent youth, thinking the entire time that I shouldn’t have dropped that acid and maybe should have finished college and definitely should have moved to California instead of going the other direction. After the whoo-ha, February arrives like a beacon of hope. I strive anew to make my life less misbegotten. My New Year’s resolution comes the day after my birthday.

Yesterday, as I was going through the mail, I noticed that I now am receiving catalogs for the ugliest clothes on the planet. Surely, fashion trends aren’t spiraling this far downward, are they? The clothes from here, and here, and even here are a testament to the kind of catalog I’m receiving. I still get Victoria’s Secret catalogs, but I notice that they are fewer and far between these days. (Just a note, while I am getting older, I still have boobs, and I still need shoes, and I might be encouraged to wear a miniskirt on occasion.)

These retailers offer clothes that even my mother wouldn’t wear, that is, if she were still alive. My mother could be a tad bit on the chunky side, but she liked a lot of sequins, plunging necklines and transparent blouses, as do sometimes I. There’s none of that in these retailers, my friend. It’s all elastic waistbands, tunic tents and nurses shoes in the most putrid colors of the rainbow. I take one quick look and immediately pitch these glossy advertisements right into the circular file. By the end of the week, they need a dolly to take out my trash. No wonder my mailman has left his post because of back problems!

Then I open up WordPress today and read MimiSuzy’s hysterical post about her struggle with weight loss and that one of her boobs is now lighter than the other. (If you are listening, God, that is the one area where I do NOT need to lose weight!) I laugh, and laugh some more, until I realize that I’m older than Mimi and probably in worse shape.

Now depression has truly reared its ugly head, bringing with it the ugly clothes and the ugly fat molecules that are fast protesting my diet and exercise plans. My dilemma is this: if I do indeed eventually lose the weight I’ve so inauspiciously gained in the last year, I will not be able to treat myself with a cute wardrobe once the extra pounds have adiosed. This, alone, is cause for great alarm and consternation. I mean, really. Where’s the pay-off?
Anyone have any happy pills they are willing to share?

Because my work takes me to many locations, there are a few days a week where I do not return home until after 7 p.m. Because of this, I am really not in the mood to make a wholesome and nutritious dinner. It is more likely that we will get take out from our local seafood restaurant, or go to the local seafood restaurant, than it is me actually making a meal.

I don’t particularly like this. I love to cook! I fancy myself a gastronome, and love to taste different wines and come up with wine/food combinations that are pleasing yet adventurous. Did you know certain whites can stand up to steak? Many reds are complimentary to chocolate cake. Oh, but I digress…

The last couple of weeks have been enormously brutal. Even though this is the time of year where business should be dying down, I seem to have several projects on the back burner. It’s become hard for me to remember where I am and what I am doing.

At my age, I like to compartmentalize my life. I like to play music at certain times of the day; this way I know I will practice. I also started working out at certain times of the day. Writing is the same, and I love writing during the late afternoon. If I don’t set up some sort of a schedule, then my life tends to careen out of control. (Of course, eating and drinking are not on a schedule, and perhaps they should be.)

Well, obviously the lack of control has happened yet again. I have managed to stay true to my writing and musical schedule, but somehow my working out schedule has suffered. I know this, because after two weeks, I can barely fasten my pants.

So, today after writing, it will be back to business. Back to working out. I will turn up the frequency as punishment, and hope I don’t pass out from exhaustion.