The hour badly spent

The last time we met: one day before I left for Los Angeles. A spring afternoon, in her car. I reached over to hug her bye.

"Don’t try to cop a feel."

I wasn’t. Really. But I probably should have.

This may have been the last time we would ever see each other, and really this was all we had to say to each other?

Really?

When I first met her, it seemed as though I could tell her anything. Anything.

Months later, showing her my favorite movie, she buried her face under a blanket and started crying and we could barely talk about it.

After that, we only spoke to each other in this flat, burnt-out tone. Around her, conversation was weird, alien, like we were really only just gesturing to each other in a dark room. She told me I was always trying to figure her out. And she was right. I just wanted to reach her. Why was it so difficult?

One morning I woke up in her bed. Fully clothed.

I had drunk A LOT the night before and my head felt like someone parked an Oldsmobile inside it.

Right then, I had to go. I hadn’t meant to pass out there in the first place. I needed some water and I needed it to taste like aspirin and I needed to go, and I needed all this very badly. But her hair was also right there in my face. Smelling not like chemicals or cleanliness but like her, fresh and sweet. I couldn’t move. Not yet. Even though I had to go, even though I knew that everything would be spoiled when she woke up, and I knw that this was the best it would ever get, and for the rest of the day I would both just go back to being in pain all the time and talking to her like.

It struck me, that morning, that this feeling of unnamed, dreary, half-hidden pain, illuminated this morning by sunlight and hangover, is actually always there. That it might in fact be the reason this thing between me and her, whatever it is, always feels so difficult.

And if I was ever going to cop a feel, that would have been the moment.

Collegian, I noticed you’ve been distant lately. I thought you were under a lot of pressure, that maybe you just needed your space. I guess I didn’t pay attention to all the hints Blake Osborn has been dropping in every single column he writes about how we spend too much time on Facebook instead of outdoors admiring our muscles in the sunlight. So there it is: we’re just too fat and gross for you. But did you have to go and run two obesity articles at once? Sending Veronika Novoselova with the message, instead of just talking to me face-to-face; that was just cruel.

Genetic mutations, smoking, heavy drinking and negative environmental influences are usually listed as the most common causes of cancer. Now K-State researchers are finding that obesity can be another leading factor.

Say whatever you want to me, Veronika Novoselova; I can take it. But I will not abide the slander of alcoholics. They are a noble class of people who have at long last figured out How the World Works.

According to the Web site for the National Cancer Institute, obesity and physical inactivity can account for 25 to 30 percent of several major cancers - colon, breast (postmenopausal), endometrial, kidney and cancer of the esophagus.

Okay, I get it. We’re all gonna die! Which strikes me as not only a consequence of alcoholism, but also a leading cause of it.

In "Obesity an issue among all", without even bothering to let me down easy with a snappy headline, Krystle Richards notes:

Obesity is at a national, all-time high, and many are calling it an epidemic. According to the New England Journal of Medicine in 2007, the cases of obesity have increased substantially in the last 30 years, and 66 percent of adults are overweight.

Conclusions from a 2007 study revealed infectious causes of obesity are conceivable.

"Having obese contacts might change a person’s tolerance for being obese and might influence their decision of adopting specific behaviors." Similar behaviors are noticed among those who smoke and drink.

Now we can catch the fat. And pass it on to others, like syphilis (gross, but waaaay more fun to spread).

Like I said, I get it. We’re all rotund and lazy. But I’m doing all I can. In the morning I stand in front of the mirror and circle my flaws with a Sharpie. Then I say "fattie!" and hit myself with slabs of cheese until I cry. And at night I skip dinner to snort coke. See? I’m really really trying here. So why, Collegian, why won’t you just love me?