Average in LA

For me, the sign of how bad a breakup was isn’t how many sleepless nights I spend re-watching Say Anything wishing that my Lloyd Dobler would come blast Peter Gabriel outside my window or how many bottles of Jack I go through. The true sign of heartbreak for me has always been how much I change my hair afterward.

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I didn’t want to go out that night. It was the first Saturday night in the history of my semi-adult life that I think I’ve ever tried to turn down a party. It was going to be a long drive. The people were my ex-coworkers whom I hadn’t liked when I was paid to be around them, and I had a fresh bottle of cheap white wine chilling in my fridge. I gave my friend Alexis, the only other bartender I’d kept in touch with, my string of excuses, but she persisted.

“Please, you don’t have to stay long. Just come. I have someone who’s dying to meet you.”

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My mom is constantly convinced that I’m going to become fat. Not a little chubby, but wheelchair-bound morbidly obese. When I was 13 and really was fat, she would tell me that I was beautiful and she didn’t know why the other kids teased me all of the time, but as soon as I was no longer wearing plus sizes she became convinced that I was overweight.

She used to offer me constructive criticism such as “You have such a nice figure underneath the fat,” and “You have such a pretty face, if you could just lose a few pounds you’d be a knockout!”

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My name is Shanna and I’m a jealous-oholic. If the first step is the hardest, then it should all be down hill from here. I admit that I’ve suffered from it all my life but I’m just now coming to terms with how deeply it’s affected myself and those around me. My mom claims that she hated taking me grocery shopping because even as a baby in the cart, if she paid any attention to another baby at the store, I’d scream and wail while reaching out and trying to hit the competition with my tiny fists. Not a lot has changed since then.

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It’s only appropriate that I went to the store because I was having a craving. I didn’t need to go grocery shopping for another week, but I was craving borsch. I’m not very picky when it comes to food, but when I do get a hankering for something, I have to satisfy my urge or it won’t go away. And this time, I was craving beets soup. Once I arrived at the store, I decided to go all out and make it an impoverished Eastern European night as I love theme dinners. I had potato dumplings at home, so I added some apple sauce to the cart. My mouth watered as I thought about enjoying my poor Soviet food and how my pasty, bountiful curves would be more accepted if I was named Olga and didn’t live in L.A.

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