Um, yeah, just to let you know up front, this is going to be a bit of an overshare I'm sure, but I feel like at least one of y'all will feel me on this, so I'mma go 'head and say it anyway. It's really something that you know that if we were actually hangin' out - I was in your room, on your couch, in your car ridin' ...wherever - I would totally say this without any qualms. But since I'm not there with you and you don't have the pleasure of being here with me, I have to say it here ...
Uh, Fidge, you'll probably want to skip this one (or maybe I'll have posted something else again by the time you read this so this won't even matter ... still, you've been forewarned).
Body talk.
I typed that and heard Ms. Newton John immediately singing in my head --
lemme hear your body talk (body talk) lemme hear your body talk.
I hate that song.
Naw. I would rather la-la-la-la-la with my fingers plugged in my ears because I know I need to get physical, because I don't need to hear my knees crackin' and back poppin' all the time. My sternum even pops, which is just incredible to me. I mean, I can't even see that thing. What is that?
Anyway, here's what inspired this post, if you could call it inspiration. Earlier today I was talking to Nikki and at some point during our e-mailings I went into my room to retrieve a book and I was sitting on my bed thumbing through it and then something alarming happened. I saw myself out of the corner of my eye and wondered if like, my retina or something had become detached ... surely that was not all me.
Oh, ho, ho, no, friends. But it was. I gathered myself and the book and scurried from the room like I'd committed a crime and was fleeing. Stupid mirror.
Then I went back to the laptop and said this:
i am going to try to go walking today myself. something must be done, as the return to sedentary life has, you know, crept back up on me ... literally, as in, i caught myself in the mirror and thought that i could either wear my bra frontwards or backwards and that it'd still be covering something that needed to be covered regardless.
Seriously.
Not cool.
You know how there are days when you might check yourself out in the mirror and you will say to yourself as if you were the Fonze:
Hey, you. (Snap, wink and point) Lookin' good. (Pucker lips and pose, as a cool hand glides over the hair.)
Today was not one of those days at all. Tuesdays are terrible.
I was so disturbed by the flash self-sighting that I just had to go back and check. Like maybe the mirror was, I don't know, maybe I knocked it off its hinge or something and there was distortion involved. So I went back in there. Let me just tell you that I - perhaps in the literal sense of the word - am a glutton ... but in this case I mean for punishment.
As I was checking my back to see if maybe the moles back there were really nipples I was horrified. Mortified. Stupified. Aghast.
Stretch marks.
At what point do you think they will reach their destination? When I think of this word, stretch, I feel it implies a reaching, a destination ... which is why I'd like to know just where in the hell these things think they are going?
Have you ever examined a map - I think they're called physical maps - ones that show you bodies of water? Yeah, flashback to 3rd grade social studies or science or whenever/wherever it was that I learned about tributaries.
The Mississippi Delta is "tattooed" on my lower back apparently. So maybe I should just attach a shade to the back of my neck - you know the overhead projector kind - so that when teachers want to point out our nation's intricate waterways to kids, they can just call me in, yank up the shade and light up that laser pointer.
Teacher(gesturing in wide, swirly circles before zooming in):
This kids is where the mighty Mississippi River dumps itself into the Gulf of Mexico. See these little riverlets here and here and here ... and here ... oh! and here, too, these all flow directly into the ocean.
(Kids will Ah and Oooh collectively.)
And then one kid will raise his hand and ask about that one big line, no the really big one that's running, like, perpendicular to the tributaries ... and I will pipe up and tell the kids that that (while pointing to the crack of my behind), oh, that is just a fault line ...