Girl Talk (And A New Game!)

A recent email exchange between myself and my friend Lucy:

Lucy: I just bought some yogurt-covered coconut clusters, thinking they sound fairly healthy... only to find the main ingredient is chocolate... and they're amazing. Damn you, diet! No wheat in them, though. I win!

Léonie: My "diet" is also going badly. Food-wise I'm doing...ok... but I think drinking 5 glasses of wine (last night) and three pints of beer (night before) is not strictly ideal. I am thinking I am going to stop drinking anything but gin/vodka and tonic for a bit, because it's all very well cutting down calories food-wise, but if you basically double your intake via alcohol it kind of negates the whole damn thing.

Must...be...thin...for...festivals...

Lucy: Yet not skinny... at least not legs?! It's confusing being a girl - I was talking about my diet earlier, and got a bit offended when the woman next to me gave me some advice - as though she was agreeing with me that it was for the best that I diet...

Léonie: Ha! Last night my friend said something like, yeah, well we're just normal sized people, right? And I of course agreed but in my head I was going what? Normal? Normal like fat? Fat normal? I can't believe you just called me fat! Aaaaah!

Which perhaps is not terribly rational. Because it's really not 'cool' to talk about oneself as fat (third wave feminism tells us not to) so we all deny we're on diets (at least I do). I deny it, but then get home and stare woefully at my (really quite normal) self and impose a One Love Bar A Week And No Chocolate And If You So Much As Look At A Bit Of Toast You're A Horrible Weak Person injunction to try and become skinnier. I hate the word skinny but if someone used it to describe me (not just my legs - as the implication to me is pig on sticks) I would be secretly absolutely bloody delighted.

Anyway Lucy you don't need to diet, you're tiny.

Love Bars all round, I say. We can always puke them up afterwards. (Too far?)

Lucy: Haha! God, I hate being a girl. We're ridiculous creatures, all of us. There's actually no way to win. All straight men must be bonkers!

And you don't need to diet either. Go buy yourself some yogurt coconut clusters.

Riots, not diets!

I think this sums up perfectly the relationship that most women my age have with their bodies. We tell ourselves and each other that We Don't Care, and Down With Size Zero etc, but secretly we all want to be a bit thinner. Peculiar creatures, aren't we?

Also, on a side note, I drink too much.

Anyway.

I have developed a new game to entertain myself on the tube. It's called Imaginary Counting, and basically involves pretending to count stuff in your head. For example perhaps you're trying to remember which cats you put in that saucepan or how many ponies it take to change a lightbulb. If you use your fingers to count on, and do some pausing/squinting between each number, it can be really fun. There is, of course, no reason for it, but therein lies the joy. Only somebody with a penchant for the ridiculous would sit on public transport and pretend to count stuff for no reason, and that, my friends, is exactly why we should all do it.