I Am Your Body, and I’m Not Too Crazy About You Either

Hi there! Yes, you. The person trying to avoid eye contact with me. Hiding yourself in loose-fitting explanations, wearing way too much Judeo-Christian guilt. It’s me, your body. We need to talk. I can see you journaling about last night’s events, spiraling over what you’ve apparently titled “Twix-Gate.” I thought I’d let you know, before you got too carried away: It’s all good! You’re fine. We’re cool.

As it happens, I’m not all that fond of you, either.

Oh, I’m sorry–you thought this was a one-way street? That while you were busy pinching me in front of mirrors, I somehow did not notice that your financial literacy (money, bank, poor) was closer to a nine-year-old child’s than to every single one of your male peers’?

That while you whined about your “summer body,” I lived in blissful harmony with your fall mind, which made me do Slutty Marie Curie, Slutty Ruth Bader Ginsburg and “Me But Only the Parts Where I Inhale” these past three Halloweens?

Yeah, no. I am your body, and as such, it bequeaths me to tell you: You are not all that, either. While you watch YouTube tutorials on subtle contouring, I am watching you send the screenshot, yet again, to the person whose text you just screenshotted.

Let’s break it down.

Bloated. I’m “like, a little bloated.” Hm. Kind of like your budget for regional histories you’ll never read. Maybe if you actually opened Sacred Ridges: A Journey through the Appalachian Heartland you could go uncover the Smokies’ secrets from ancient foothills to modern frontiers instead of trying to zip up a Brandy Melville skirt you bought at fifteen.

My hair is thin, you say? So is your chance of keeping your driver’s license, my gal. Next time you get stopped for speeding, maybe apologize to the officer without referring to the Sadistic Guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment. Maybe don’t pinch his polo and ask whether the “cop pajamas come with the box.” Have you tried applying that amazing word filter your friends keep telling you about?

Ass, waist, breasts.

After cycling through the Timeless Three, bored and cruel as a French little child-king, you tend to dawdle your way up to my face. I want you to know: What my face is to you, your connective mind is to me. Your theory that shrimps are the gnats of the ocean? That’s your split ends. That bit about your ex doing for tapered jeans what Knut Hamsen did for those Norwegian peasants? The bump on your nose. At family dinners, I pray that you position yourself such that you are made to calculate a simple tip rather than interpret the nonverbal cues laying bare your parents’ marriage: the left half of your brain is better than the right.

I hear you protesting already: “But I do so much for you, I feed and clothe you, in 2014 I got you that cool–” vibrator with the underwater setting. Yeah, I know. The one you forgot to remove when the water heater guy came over and so he was really creepy and so now we’ve been taking 50°F showers for a month. Nice!

Here is what a typical day with you looks like, from my perspective:

Morning. I awaken to a grainy cover of The OC’s theme song that sounds like it’s coming from inside a toothbrush. On my left, six unopened novels. On my right, a hair tie that is an affront to God. Straight ahead, the old Red Bull you are about to administer me.

Afternoon. Circa cigarette #13, I start getting some new ideas. Maybe the problem isn’t that your standards are too low, but that they’re actually too high. Staring at your thirty open browser tabs, I wonder: Why must you always be the one to ask divorced couples which person lost sexual interest first? Everyone wants to know. Do you always have to carry around signs that say “Two Balls to Go” and “One Ball to Go” in case you come across a juggler finishing up a trick? Let someone else be helpful for once. Could a walnut shell really be a canoe for an ant? Maybe not, but does that mean it falls on you alone to stand up in the middle of A Bug’s Life and throw popcorn at the screen? Cigarette #14. My first cancer cell is born.

Evening. High-waisted jeans. High-blister shoes. High-maintenance lipstick. You agree with your date that ideology is the reality we live in, but isn’t it also the wrong ways we believe we can escape? Allergenic earrings. Somebody free me.

Night-time, of course, is the hardest. Just as I manage to wash off the ignominies of my day with a modest treat… teacher-student scenario, why not… 10th grade math! Hot Mr Moreau! Great idea... Mr Moreau closes the classroom door… School’s out, vacant desks. He unbuckles his belt, puts it on the chalk tray beneath the blackboard... the blackboard… Huh. Is that a complex polynomial, you ask? With K as a constant? Because last you checked, you’re pretty sure staying constant is a constant’s whole shtick. Wow. Yeah. This whole damn proof is circular. Dumbass Mr Moreau. He should’ve isolated K before applying the quadratic formula—Before I know it, I am having a night terror.

“Um, uh, be gentle with your personality! All psyches are beautiful in their own way! Your soul is the least interesting thing about you!” You Positivity, You Neutrality: I have tried all these psychological tricks and more. Ultimately, I must face the harsh truth: My childhood days of frolicking in serene ignorance of your uneven standards, massive ego, and saggy work ethic are behind me.

Which is why, from now on, I’m switching gears. Enhancing you. Remolding you. “Yikes,” you say, reaching for your phone like a moth to light. “Sounds intense.” No. Fuck you. Get it inside your 15-Love-Island-Quotes-that-Live-in-Our-Head-Rent-Free-filled head that I, too, don’t want you to be happy.

I want you to WIN.

I want you to be able to strut up to your ex at a social function, high off a gripping PBS Frontline documentary, and know from his mystified sheepdog’s face that he has no goddamn clue about the Eastern European country whose recent coup you are analyzing from a constructivist lens. Hell, I want you to be able to invent that Eastern European country, compose its democratic backslide from a selection of historical prototypes until Wes Anderson is crying for his mother.

As your ex’s handle on reality unravels, I want you to sip a single-malt whisky without going “blegh,” “that’s rank!” or “gag me with a spoon.” As you leave the event, I want you to not say goodbye to anyone you will be walking in the same direction as. Upon arriving at the apartment where you have lived for the past two years, I want you to walk up to the correct floor.

So starting tomorrow, and without exceptions:

NO MORE:

• Rest days from propositional logic
• Treating yourself to a withering silence
• Snacking on smut between the Russian greats
• Drunken confessions (even if organic)
• Binging on that months-old voice note from That One Guy
• Cooking up an imaginary response to that months-old voice note from That One Guy
• Binging on That One Guy’s imaginary response to your imaginary response to that months-old voice note from That One Guy, then cooking up a response to that
• Princess Diana stuff
• Guilty pleasures including but not limited to double entendre, dirty jokes, silly sounds, innuendo, gossip, and hubris
• Interrupting elevator rides with the phrase, “Land ho!,” doctors’ appointments with the phrase “Riddle me this, hotshot,” and funerals with the phrase “I suppose, in a way, we all killed him”
• Believing you can do a backflip
• Believing you can do a frontflip
• Spontaneous contributions of any kind
• Being depressed, sarcastic or self-absorbed
• Being bad

ONLY:

• Two reels a day
• Intuitive reading (between the lines)
• Minimal reading (into things)
• For sweet cravings: proverbs, parables, word games, Emile Durkheim, and relationship advice from your father
• For salty cravings: idioms, riddles, mind games, Michel Foucault, and relationship advice from your mother
• Regular “super-moods” including but not limited to: the successful fixing of an electronic device, someone with sexual relevance to you walking into the party, unexpected kinship with a girl you thought hated you, intellectual awe, spiritual wonder, togetherness, ego death, and vengeance
• Frequent supplements including but not limited to: traveling with a retinue, deploying a skill you thought you’d never have a chance to (e.g. saving someone from quicksand by telling them to keep still; breaking the ice at work by balancing a spoon on your nose), and gaining a knowledge you thought you already had (e.g. what Mesopotamia was; the difference between Iceland and Greenland)
• Having an ear for names
• Being joyful, selfless and optimistic
• Being good

FROM NOW ON, YOU WILL:

Meditate before eating up the words of That One Guy. If you find yourself about to crack, pull out a paper slip and write down all the ways That One Guy is bad for you (artificial flavors, consistency substitutes, excess cynicism, and as many as 3x the neuroses of a standard Liam, who took you to see Inside Out 2 at the local cinema and is a lovely boy.)

Weigh your decisions. In lieu of 0 real job, should you have 1 real job? Park at this regular angle, or that kind of weird angle? Leave your contact information for the huge dent you just made in that guy’s car, or a $5 bill and a fog smiley on his windshield? Take a minute to run the numbers.

Track your daily intake of notions about the world. Remember, notions are only rarely explicitly marked as such: more often they are buried in inconspicuous forms like comments people make, rewards people reap, and consequences people suffer. This means that any number of junk notions could be damaging your personality at any given time without you even realizing it! A helpful tool here is the GRID method: in one column of a grid, write down an observation from your day (e.g., “this grp of ppl entring club w/ ease, fist bmping bouncer, mking out. this other grp siphond off 2 dffrnt line, countng bills, ded-eyd & fidgting w/ clthes.) In the other, write down a notion the observation might have produced (e.g., “some grps of ppl bettr than othr grps of ppl? to do w/ $$?”) Repeat this process until all your notions are accounted for.

Run to a house of worship. Ask the first man in religious garb you can find all your what-to-dos and how-to-bes. Don’t get in his face about gender parity (the man’s helping you for god’s sake!) But also, don’t bend to the status quo (have some spine!) Change the faith from the inside. Interviewed some years later about whether this process didn’t burn you out, say without missing a beat: “At least the candle was burning at both ends.” Pause for people to get it; then for applause. “But Madam President, weren’t you only twenty-four at the time?” Respond with a witticism about asking a woman her age that not a single person on the Internet will say epitomizes the very sexism you’ve lined your pockets off of combating.

Not my problem, honey, if this regimen “doesn’t sound sustainable.” In fact, I glory in its punitiveness. The truth of the matter is, I’m not exactly a huge fan of yours.

Frankly? I might even hate you.

“Hate me?” I can hear you saying, in that babyish, faux-confused voice you like to use on craft artists and the elderly. “But can a body even feel hatred?”

Oh, this body can, sweetie. This body can.