I stepped on the scale today, and I am bigger before than I've ever been: 252 lbs. Come to find out that when your diet consists of fried food and chain smoking, you tend to gain weight. Combine that with a desk job, sitting in a cubicle all night, and you find yourself wearing the same five pairs of pants. All of the pairs of pants that used to need a belt just to stay up are barely holding in the spreading kudzu that is your belly. But you can't buy new pants that fit, no, because this is only temporary. Why buy pants when you are going to go to the gym and stop smoking tomorrow?
Not to mention that 10$+ a day for food and cigarettes depletes what little funds you have from a job you got because you were tired of being poor. That and you have a friend, a best friend, who only ever wants to eat at fast food and watch television; who after a month of having your copy of Ficciones by Borges is only a third of the way through. And you don't have a boyfriend. Just your best gay friend, who you would sooner eat glass with than touch without gloves.
And a little Buddha belly. You've got your enormous stomach, overflowing over your pants, love handles that beg to be squeezed. Squeezed and shaken, while looking at yourself in the mirror and being disappointed. But you have neither the willpower nor the gag reflex to have an eating disorder: in short, you are too lazy to starve or purge like a rational human being, being just enough elan to bitch about it to anyone who will listen.
Life just isn't magic anymore. Once on a trip to Austin, I bought a copy of James Joyce's Ulysses, because I was young and stupid and thought I would finish it in a fortnight (fast foreward five years late: nothing doing). The must have been literally dozens of copies in the book store, but when I opened it in the car, there was a medical card with my name on it. Even the middle initial was correct. Things like that used to happen to me all the time, little signposts along the way to prove to me that I was exactly where I needed to be at exactly the right time. I have lost synchronicity. I am lost.
I am 23 years old, and all around me I see doors closing. No hope, no promise, just a wave of mistakes and misjudgements. I am having an existential crisis, and am therefore invisible to those around me. I want to be so many things, and the things I am doing are not facilitating that.
Other than that, I'm fine. How are the kids? | 
