For Christ’s sake. I’ve seen frigging Appleseed frigging NINE TIMES and I STILL can’t figure out what’s going on. I’ve seen it with three different sets of subtitles and two different English audio versions and they all contradict each other and I want to CRY by the end but I don’t know WHY.

(froth froth, gasp gasp)

I have always believed that the ‘Harry Potter’ series is the worst example of vacuous anti-literature aimed at the deliberate enstupidification of the coming generation (and by worst, of course, I mean best), but I had no idea it had such a brainslug-like grip on the minds of otherwise intelligent adults.

Scientists with thirteen letters after their names come sidling up to me in the hallways:
PhD: “Sooo… guess who dies in the new book?”
Me: “GO! AWAY!”
PhD: “Okay, okay, I’m going, just put down the scalpel…”

An anorexic woman has taken to jogging the same route I walk to work. Well, I say ‘jogging’ - really she doesn’t make it much over a trot. Taller than me, older than me - maybe thirty-five - she carries a water bottle and a couple of hand weights, and her track top and shorts hang off her eighty-pound body like a flag off a flagpole. The wind whistles in her ribs (producing a theremin-like noise audible from half a kilometre).

The zipping cyclists pratically wrick their necks trying not to stare at her as they pass, though their expressions (especially the girls) are inscrutable. I hope they’re thinking, “Christ, eat an Oreo!” instead of, “Christ, I wish I had her willpower!” which is, shamefully, what I’m thinking. It’s something about the look of steely determination in her eyes. I mean, every molecule in my brain is telling me that she looks terrible, that she’s sick, that she’s going to drop dead one of these mornings right in front of me and the wind will blow her away like a dandelion seed before I can trip over her. But some ghost whispers to me, At least she’s not part of the obesity epidemic.

Yeah. At least there’s that. At least she’s saying to herself and the world, No! I refuse to have the same girth as a great white shark; I refuse to sweat after one flight of stairs; I refuse to take up two seats in an airplane and smother small children in my folds. I always have trouble with the people who blame society for the fat plague. No human being is born at five hundred pounds. You’re born at like - what, six pounds? - and it takes years, sometimes decades, of consciously choosing to consume more calories than you burn until you do reach five hundred pounds. And here is a woman who is choosing otherwise.

I don’t know who disgusts me more: me, or her.