There's Always the Lies in the Locker Room

So, on the 15th (two scant weeks from today), I start work with a personal trainer. The current plan is for 50 sessions, which will take me right up to the wedding. It's a chance to finally transform myself in a quantifiable, tangible way -- I watch celebs like Madge transform from waify-feed-me-I'm-a-starving-dancerdom to cute-80s-danceteria-pudge to lean-post-Penn-yoga/jogger-tour-whore. And I wonder how far I can push the envelope myself.

I have always been amazed by transformation. Evolution, aging, makeovers, plastic surgery, drag queenery... watching someone go beyond the limits of what you thought was possible from the raw material they were given. One could say that getting fat is a means of transformation as well, of pushing the (flesh) envelope. But to me, getting fat, the acquiring of fat, is less an act of transforming than an act of obscuring and obfuscating. Transformation is the carving of the elephant from the rock by removing everything that does not look like an elephant. Getting fat is hiding elephant in the rock, like a fossil waiting to be uncovered. Fat is the La Brea Tar Pits.

I'm nervous -- I know I can do it, but am afraid I won't. I'm excited -- the next seven months (see newly added countdown clock) will be an amazing time, en route to becoming a new person... in both name and body, spirit and flesh.