Going Green... Not That Way

I am a bit of a treehugger, these days. It's true. I do what I can to 'go green' in my daily life. I even put money toward a Carbon offset for my flight home last Christmas.

Still... I go green the other way far too often.

Envy.

If my skin acted as a mood ring for all the world to see just how I was feeling at any given moment of the day, it would probably be green more often than most.

See, here's the way it goes:

- I can't buy clothes in Japan. Sometimes I can squeeze my rolls into mens' shirts, but only if they're stretchy and a bit oversized to begin with. I couldn't buy pants (and certainly not jeans), even if my life depended on it. When I go shopping with friends, I like shopping with them, but I can't help feeling envious of them.

- When I go to a restaurant, I painstakingly scour the menu, comparing both prices and calorie counts. The "healthiest" options are often also the most expensive and I am living my life on a strict budget recently. I usually try to choose something in the middle of the road for both calories and yen. My dining companions, on the other hand, flip blithely through menus, looking at pictures of deliciously fried, sauced, sweetened, honeyed, and any other manner of unhealthily prepared foods. They choose what looks tasty. The food that their eyes and their tongue say that they want. What does it feel like to go to a restaurant without suffering from menu anxiety, I wonder? Do tell.

- I have missed out on any number of opportunities in my life because of my embarrassment about my size. KODO (internationally famous taiko drumming group) came to one of my schools to give a performance and people were offered a chance to play with them. I didn't do it because I didn't want to be banging on a drum with hot taiko men in front of my 300 students with my arm flab swaying in the breeze. I have burned too many internet-built bridges with contacts in Japan (boys, yes) because the prospect of meeting them in real life is just too terrifying and depressing. I won't even dream of trying to go on a fan club trip with GACKT until I am half the woman I am now. No. Freaking. Way.

- I can't eat anything in public without near-crippling guilt and shame descending on me. Today, on the way home, I had a bowl of cut up watermelon from the grocery store. Watermelon. I ate it in the waiting room at the train station and knew, simply knew that everyone else in the waiting room was mentally berating the fat girl for eating anything - even something relatively harmless like watermelon. Friends can eat ice cream, French fries, crepes, frothy 500 calorie Starbucks ambrosia... and not think twice about it or about what other people are thinking. Admittedly, I have gotten better about this particular phobia over the past few years. When going out for dinner with friends four or five years ago, I would pre-eat before getting to the restaurant, so that I would eat less in public than I would have had I not pre-eaten. I've gotten over that.

Hopefully, my current budget crunch will help to keep things in perspective (and crap out of my kitchen) and I can kill this crazy green-eyed monster that makes life so miserable some days.