Devil's confusion

I think it was Paul D in Beloved that constantly shrugged off compliments to his appearance with the line "Devil's confusion - he keeps me lookin' good when I'm feelin' bad." I was reminded of this upon running into someone I knew in downtown Northampton on my way to work and having her compliment me, even though I'm about as scruffy as I usually am when I go to work.

I've been getting those compliments a lot lately, and I'm pretty sure they're related to the recent nonconsensual weight loss, since it's quite visible these days. It kinda makes me want to rip out the complimenter's spleen and feed it to them instead of being gracious. Especially since the past three or four months I've been oscillating from barely okay to shitty both physically and mentally. (yes, going to the doctor on the 20th.) Really the only person that doesn't see me every day that seemed appropriately concerned was captainlove, who took one look at me on Valentine's day and was like "Hon? Have you been ill?" *snort*

( cut for the squeamish )

And then there's the weird proto-dysmorphia I'm having about my body... last week I got on the scale for poops and hahas and discovered that for the first time since Smith, I'm under 200 pounds. Which is just crazy to me. My feelings about my own body image are much like my feeling about my favorite red pants, which are now totally two sizes too big for me (you know it's bad when you can pull out your waistband enough to see the floor down your pants leg), but there's that moment of denial and adjustement to the idea that I'm a lot smaller now than I was. I put on XXL t-shirts and can't understand for a minute how a size that was once comfy on me now seems tent-like. It's messed up and I hate it. I had finally gotten really comfortable with myself at 230ish, and now... I feel like I've been jacked out of the matrix and instead of being all gelled and leather clad with cool sunglasses and hey, look, hair, I'm all scruffy, wearing rags, combat boots, a buzzcut and have all these strange plastic/metal implants in my skin. Except my residual self image is thirty pounds heavier, stronger and a lot healthier. The fuck. I can see every single bone in my hands and wrists now, and it totally freaks me out.

And at the same time, I'd be lying if I didn't admit that there was some small part of me that still buys into the glossy paged standard of beauty that gets in a Kermit the frog style yay before being roundly smacked by the rest of the denizens of my brain.

So yeah... I'm a little fucked up health and body image-wise right now, and the compliments are making me tweaky, unless they come from the usual suspects. And since I can't feed people their own spleens without them filing criminal charges, the most I can do is give up and say thank you or be mean and go, "yeah I know, I've been ill for the past four months" and throw them into a frenzy of backpedaling tailspin goodness.

In other news, I'm going out for hot drinks with lostinnocencia after work today! Yay, I get to see her before she takes off in a westerly direction!

One more note

I have to wonder how much LJ drama has been caused by the fact that you can see the sum totals of LJ posts someone has made in the archives/calendar view, and yet when you click on any of the little numbers, the entries shown blatently doesn't match the number you clicked on. Or if you're browsing through someone's entries using the forward and back buttons, getting the "YOU DON"T HAVE ACCESS TO THIS ENTRY" instead of skipping to the next one. I mean really, a simple if... else statement would fix that.

That's just sheer laziness on the LJ programming team's part in my humble opinion.