Sucking in

Blogger has a stat counter that tracks how many hits each of my posts gets, and I have, on occasion, checked this feature and, in checking, discovered that my posts with the more provocative titles get considerably more hits than the more lamely titled (e.g. "A picnic poem") posts get. My post with the "trigger warning" title has twice as many hits as the post with the second-highest hits, which distresses me a little, because I don't know what about that post makes it more interesting than the others. I shared that story to eschew the shame that I had been harboring for a decade, and I hope it wasn't read as having any sort of sensationalistic value. But I can't control reception, and it's probably not appropriate logically to make any qualitative inferences from the meager quantitative fact of number of hits. My post with the second-highest number of hits is "The answer to the question of siblings is sex," but maybe that post is comparatively popular because it contains a fabulous pseudo-sonnet and not because it sounds like I might talk about fucking in it.

I don't know what the title "Sucking in" might make you think I'm going to talk about. "Sucking in" does sound vaguely sexual. I could write a post about my temper and call it "Spitting," because spitting is an urge I have when I get angry. According to my mom, my dad spat in her face during an argument once, which is both disgusting and comforting:  disgusting for obvious reasons, and comforting because it seems to suggest that he must have cared about her deeply if she was capable of making him angry enough to spit. Maybe it's better to think of divorced parents hating each other than being indifferent towards each other. It's unfathomable that my parents, who together made me, are strangers now. What are we? Bugs?

This post should probably be called "Cynicism," because what I intended to write about is how tired I became of seeing fit mothers pushing around their children in exercise strollers at the zoo when we went on Thursday. Some zoo mothers even wore dri-fit tank tops and tennis shoes, attire that attested to their preparedness for spontaneous outbreaks of aerobics. Or maybe this post should be titled "Jealousy," because underneath these athletic mothers' tank tops were muscles instead of flab, and I felt resentment tinged with admiration about it.

Last semester I took a class called Feminism and the Body, and I remember hearing some of my classmates say that they suspect that body goals are never satisfied. I would like to weigh 120 pounds, which is achievable. I'd like a smaller nose—not achievable. The idea is that there could be endlessly many reasons to be dissatisfied with your body, so if you have a critical disposition towards your body, that disposition will persist and evolve even after you achieve the goals you've made for your body and appearance. Maybe if my nose got out of my face I'd be able to see that my hair is the real problem.

I haven't eaten much dessert in the past few weeks, and I have started to like the way my stomach looks … when I suck in. This is an achievement. It's the first time since having Graham that sucking in makes a desirable difference in my tummy appearance, and it means that I'm getting pretty close to the way I want to look. But the fear I have is that once I look, without sucking in, the way I want to look, I'll suck in again and want to look that way. If I keep chasing the goal of getting thinner and thinner, my stomach will disappear altogether, and then I'll just be boobs on top of hips. It's an idea, but how, then, would I reach into the cabinets for my protein powder? And where would Graham sleep?

I have a large mole on the inside of my left foot. If you've seen, you're part of a privileged group of people known as the people around whom I'll let my mole show. The mole is oddly huge not just in surface area but also in its three-dimensionality, and it isn't too attractive, and I feel more than a little shyness about it. Although I prefer warm weather to cold, I spent many years of my life preferring winter to summer, because winter's footwear doesn't risk the exposure of my mole the way summer footwear does. I have embarrassingly many times pretended to have a cut on my foot so that I could cover my mole with a bandaid. I bring the mole up because I wish I could be as comfortable with my body around anyone as I am about my mole around Aron. But I am even ashamed of my stomach in front of Aron, even though he has never given me reason to doubt that he finds me attractive. He's a kind liar, my husband. I can't decide if I want to fix my stomach or fix how I feel about my stomach, and I'm not entirely convinced that doing the first would do the second.

I wonder how many hits I'd get for this post if I had called it "the mole." Now that's sex-say.