Akimba Revisited.

A couple nights ago I went to my high school reunion. To begin with reunions are pretty awkward: experiencing a solitary night of friendship with people you chose long ago not to stay in touch with? Yeah... My big complaint, however, was that reunions are only fun if one of your former classmates has gained a shit ton of weight and now looks like he/she has his/her own gravitational pull. Unfortunately, I'm that classmate. But I bet no one noticed it too much since I was fat in high school too. [*Fist Pump!*]

It wasn't that bad though. I had fun being intentionally vague about my future plans, drinking way too much, and laughing at some boys who grew extra hands when drunk and others who took the reunion's open bar as an opportunity for a nice long sob.

But the most memorable part of the evening was hands down a hug I received from a fellow classmate. I don't remember it because of the poignancy of a reunion of two dear friends, but because of the dread I felt when I saw her coming in for a hug while completely and utterly (and obviously) akimba.

This is why I'm fat, PART 1: Elementary School PE

The best part about middle school was the fact that the seniors had to park their cars on the football field because of the construction. I wish I could negate that statement with something about how the best part was how accomplished I felt being in the middle school play (I actually felt deeply, deeply embarrassed over how stupid it was; I played the role of someone's conscience) or how the best part was Science Fair (The teacher actually told me he was "embarrassed" over how idiotic my experiment was), but in reality the aspect of middle school that at the end of the day made me feel the warmest and fuzziest inside was the fact that I was able to hide from the PE coaches while running laps.

I look back now and wonder how my life would be different if I had just given in to the barely intelligible demands that I run faster and longer which were delivered through a bullhorn held by a woman who looked like a Brazilian Arnold Schwarzenegger driving a golf cart. I would be much less of a lardass, that's for sure. Or maybe I wouldn't. When I think of all the diving behind Volvos, ducking underneath Jeeps and William Shatner shoulder rolling to the other side of BMWs that my friends and I did, we worked up quite a sweat. And I'm not entirely sure that it was less work than just doing the laps in the first place.

But before I go any further about how I ended up sucking at PE in middle and upper school, let's take a trip back to elementary school...

Ah, to be 13 again

It's kind of reassuring to me that, even across the pond, gravity still pulls us downward, the sky is still above us, and 13 year old boys are still complete perverts. I am greatly comforted by the fact that the 13 year old boy's unique composition has the same kind of obvious international presence as McDonald's. Except instead of ubiquitous Big Macs it's this ubiquitous struggle of feeling extremely frightened and confused (like the male version of "Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret") while also trying to project total confidence (“Although I only figured out what my penis was for just yesterday, I have now decided that I am Casanova/the God of Sex/Gene Simmons.”).

Call me strange, but this is what I find so wonderful about 13 year olds—the girls have sprinted ahead in the puberty race by this point and from an outsider perspective seem to have quite suddenly woken up one morning with a bad case of the boobs, and the guys have to pretend that they’ve caught up. No, the guys have to pretend that they were never behind, and so they resort to wildly inventing stories and experiences that they can boast about to their similarly pre-pubescent guy friends (within earshot of the girls, who by this point are so far advanced in their development that some have actually started menopause), but the wonderful thing about a lot of these boasts is that they don’t ring true to the ears of someone with actual experience or to the ears of anyone in possession of female anatomy. But, most of the time, this doesn’t apply to 13 year old boys—I mean, there can’t possibly be too many of them with female anatomy. ...