So I’ve been thinking a lot about underwear recently.

First, someone in Ireland stole a pair of my underwear. Let me just tell you how unacceptable that is. It is ALL THE WAY unacceptable. I know I joke about packing more underwear than you need in case you need to give some out as souvenirs, but I didn’t actually mean it! But no! Last night in Ireland I get back from the disco and the guy I accidentally jilted for his best friend from grade school is in my room unattended and during the next morning’s panty count (I had to pack, and much like the Marines, I am firmly committed to No One Left Behind) I was down one pair of size 9 Delta Burke light control briefs.

Also, who steals a pair size 9 Delta Burke light control briefs? Not. Cool.

Oh, and SPEAKING of Marines, has no one told them that when one wears white pants, one should probably not wear white underpants as well? Because I won’t say my grandparents’ inurnment service was ruined at Arlington National Cemetery, and by all means Marines bending over with visible panty lines (including, surprisingly, a pair of bikinis) are better than no Marines bending over at all, but it didn’t exactly add to the solemnity of the occasion.

Finally, last week I went to an open mic comedy night fundraiser.

The catch?

All the performers had to be in their underwear.
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Considering I’m just a few days away from heading to the land of the leprechauns and liver failure,  I’ve never had that much of a yearning for the Emerald Isle. I like England, I like Scotland, I’m pretty sure I love Wales but Ireland? Meh. Never really thought about it.

Nor do I spend a lot of time thinking about St Patrick’s Day. He’s like my least favorite Celtic saint (Saint Cuthbert of Lindisfarne por vida, mijas!) plus St Patrick’s Day is right up there with New Year’s Eve, Halloween and Mardi Gras as the most amateur of amateur’s nights. And yet, we’ve all been there. We may not remember being there. But we have.

I’ve never actually been slizzered (see! I listen to the pop music!) on St Paddy’s, but I have been the designated driver of many who have, including one person when last I saw her was licking a clown’s bald head at the local expat Irish pub.

So today Miss Plumcake wants to know:

What is your best, by which I mean worse, St Patrick’s Day story? Change the names to protect the innocent…as if there are such things!

Today is my little brother’s birthday. Blithely ignoring his HIGHLY questionable sartorial decision making skills–lest we forget the pinstripe gangster suit, complete with patent pleather faux spats and stupid bifurcated goatee– he is my favorite person.

It wasn’t always thus.

As a child I was sardonic, standoffish and prone to plumpness. He was athletic, charming and had the metabolism of a coked out whippet. He would say horrible things about my size. He wasn’t alone.

My great grandmother’s final words to me were “Have you always been that fat?” and my grandmother had a long and glorious career of telling me I was fat, in case it had escaped my attention every single day of my life since I was nine years old.

My mother, who had her own struggles with weight, called me “Fatso Fogarty” a name made all the more vicious because I remember her complaining bitterly about how much she hated being called that by her parents.

So what’s the point of all this dirty laundry?

Forgiveness.

Here’s the thing: People say stupid stuff. I say stupid stuff all the damn time and I’m one of the more thoughtful people I know. I’m sure I gave as good as I got when I was younger.

I’m not saying it’s okay and especially as adults we ought to know and thus do better, but it happens and I think it happens even more to fat women because weight is a huge (as it were) bugaboo for many many people and odds are some of those people are going to be in your family.

If you internalize that stuff, if you hold onto it and nurture it, it will poison you from the inside, and poisoning is only good when you do it to rats…or that lady who took the LAST fuchsia cashmere cardigan in your size even though there is no way on this or any other earth she could possibly wear fuchsia even HALF so well as you. Because seriously, with her coloring? It is to laugh. Sleep with one eye open, you sweaternabbing harpy.

But anyway, you’ve got to get past it.

Let’s switch gears for a second. My grandmother in Nashville loves gin and one night when I was out to dinner with my favorite uncle and his groovy wife at Equinox, I ordered a gin and tonic. He laughed and said I came by it honestly.

It’s been my experience that people come by their fat hate or disordered eating honestly.

It doesn’t make it okay to say hurtful things, but I’ve found that by understanding the backstory, it makes it easier to go “okay, well of course that’s what she’s going to say. That’s about her, not about me.”

The woman who grew up starving in the Depression might very well equate hunger and thinness with virtuousness, the woman who remembered being teased and miserable in school for being a fatty fatty boombalatty might be a leetle too invested and easily triggered when she sees her young daughter filling out a bit more fully than the rest of the kids.

As we complete the old year and look forward to the new, I invite you to think about a problematic relationship you’d like to resolve in 2011. Resolution can look like many things, not just hugs and lollipops. If you’d like to, put the information in the comments. I’d love to hear them.

You guys…no seriously, you guys…can we take it to the reals for a minute?

I know we’re all excited about the holidays and the orgiastic consumer frenzy we’re all supposed to get in, and I get it I swear. I mean like Orgiastic Consumer Frenzy is my middle name but I think we need to step back from our spittle-flecked high-interest credit cards and reflect what this season is truly all about.

That’s right. Haviland Orange Thin Mints.

OMG I love these so hard. They remind me of that orange/mint body wash my Dutch boyfriend used to get shipping from Den Haag when we were in college. But there’s chocolate! And I don’t need to worry about it using all the hair product.

I don’t really get excited by candy. I like those gummy ginger bears because if it’s ginger, I’m pretty much guaranteed to put it in my mouth eventually and the chewing relaxes my jaw so the tension of the day doesn’t cause me to grind down my pearly whites into pearly nubs OF RAGE, but when I saw Walgreen’s had these gorgeous little silver dollar-sized goodies back in stock I nearly wet myself all over a non-sectarian blue aluminum holiday tree, and frankly since I nearly burned my church down this time last year (it wasn’t NEARLY as big a fire as you’d think) I can’t really risk that sort of electrical malfunction.

Anyhoodle, Today Miss Plumcake wants to know:

What’s your favorite seasonal small pleasure? Tangible or not, I want to hear it.

Did you guys know it’s Thanksgiving next week?! NEXT WEEK!

Listen, it’s not that I don’t like Thanksgiving, because I do. I mean granted my ancestors had the decency to:
a) Be part of the Established Church
b) Not get lost on their way to Virginia and wind up in some godforsaken place where they didn’t have the sense not to trade Babe Ruth.

So Thanksgiving isn’t really my thing, it’s pretty much just pre-gaming Advent for me, but there’s Obligatory Pie and any holiday involving Obligatory Pie is the sort of holiday that’s a-ok by me.

It’s also the season of Unwelcome Potlucks. There are few things I love more than a good potluck, because a good potluck is a blood sport in the South, and your covered-dish event can’t be considered a true success until someone cries, with extra points if someone gets tomato aspic –with homemade mayonnaise, of course– tossed at their head in a fit of pique.

Unfortunately, Unwelcome Potlucks –the office potluck being the worst– are as banal as their counterpoints are sublime. At this very moment I am staring at the food altar onto which a veritable sea of Cool Whip cheesecakes, dump cakes (how, uh, evocative) and deflated veggie trays have been placed. Which isn’t to say there aren’t a few guilty pleasures to be had. There is something shiny and beige in a casserole that was pretty good, and it’s hard to go wrong with a properly stuffed egg (although I will go to my grave thinking sweet stuffed eggs are a lowbrow abomination, if you turn your head for more than a second you will return to a surprisingly quiet and puff-cheeked Miss Plumcake).

So in the spirit of the food coma into which I will shortly enter, Today Miss Plumcake wants to know:

What is your favorite potluck food? Do you have a guilty pleasure? What’s the most embarrassing, tragic foodstuffs you’ve seen at a covered-dish and more importantly, was it delicious?

Hello my little cassowaries, how’s every little thing?

I’m gratified so many of you responded to the Letters to a Young Fat Girl series.  I’m semi-ambivalent about giving Meaningful Life Advice because last night (well, last night at the time of writing) I fell asleep in a hotel room somewhere in the beautiful hunt country of Virginia wearing nothing but a pair of Lane Bryant microstretch briefs and my fur coat and when I was greeted by the dawn, I was spooning an unopened bottle of 30 year-old Glenfiddich and that, generally speaking, is NOT the behavior of person from whom you should take instruction in the fine art of …well, doing much of anything other than maybe getting drool out of Eurasian lynx.

I’ve been on vacation for the past week and a half and although the beginning of my hols suckdiddlyucked the second half has been ten pounds of awesome in a five pound bag courtesy of my best friend Meg.

Once upon a time when dinosaurs ruled the earth and Justin Bieber was just a roofie in his mother’s mapletini, Meg and I met at the Shenandoah Conservatory of Music in a summer program for teenage musicians. We became fast friends in the way  young teenage girls do, swore allegiance for eternity –or the two weeks of camp, whichever came first– and after a cursory attempt to keep in touch after summer, fell out of contact.

Fast forward to the winter of 1998.

I’m a sophomore in college preparing my gourmet dinner of fishsticks and uh, fishticks in the dilapidated deathtrap glamorous confines of the very first Chateau Gateau when the phone rings.

It’s Meg.

I hadn’t heard from her for years, but in one of those fabulous bits of serendipity, she had been assigned to the exact dorm room I had occupied the year before and in the back of the closet was a brick doorstop with just my first –relatively unusual– name on it. She got her Nancy Drew on, tracked me down and we’ve lived happily ever after.

Sure we’ve had our rough patches, but she’s a once-in-a-lifetime pal and I wouldn’t trade her for a guided tour of Daniel Craig’s swim trunks, even if he was in them at the time.

Today Miss Plumcake wants to know:

Tell me all about your best girlfriend. How did you meet, what do you love about her? Got a fun adventure you’ve shared? I want to hear about that too!

Do you know what I love about this blog?

I mean other than the money and free stuff and all you crazy wonderful dames? I love that this is a space where you don’t have to hate yourself.

Because you know what? I am thirty-one damn years old and Mama is TIRED of being told I’m supposed to hate myself because I’m too something and not something else enough. I don’t, okay? Never did. Sorry! And you probably don’t either and even if you DID feel that way I am here to tell you right here, right now, in front of God, Gaultier and everybody else, that you officially can stop feeling bad about the way you look because I like you just fine the way you are and I am pretty much always right when it comes to people I’m not going to sleep with and although I love you, I don’t, you know, love you.

It might sound strange coming from someone who is for all intents and purposes a Professional Fat Chick, but I really don’t care about fat. I barely stop to think about mine so you can be darn sure I don’t think about yours.

What I DO care about is connecting with people who have been told their whole lives that they had to change the way they look to be accepted, popular and loved.

Because that? Is horsehockey. Big, stinky, steaming, gelatinous, horsehockey, with flies and worms and all other gross things I can’t really think too much about because I just ate lunch.

Woo! Okay enough of that rant.

Let’s have some fun, shall we? Tomorrow I’ve got some fab fall clothes I’m really excited about, so today let’s do a Big Question:

Today Miss Plumcake wants to know:

What is the most ridiculous fad diet you have tried or been forced to try?

I think my mother bought every snake oil on the planet and tried it on me. She also tried to wax my fourth-grade moustachio using PARAFFIN, because it’s wax, right? blessherheart, which is neither here nor there except to remind you that if you do screwed up things to your kid, be prepared for her to get at least semi-famous and tell her thousands and thousands of awesome fans alllll about it. ANYHOODLE, I know I was subjected to various shakes and puddings and unnatural things to do with cabbage, but the one that sticks out in my memory was when I was about in fourth grade, and she brought home this little spray. From what I remember now it was bitter grapefruit oil and you were supposed to spray it directly on your tongue every time you were hungry so it would suppress your appetite. Anyone want to guess the end results? That’s right, I found it delicious and to this day bitter, almost mentholated grapefruit, is one of my favorite flavors on earth.