Am I Fat?

Take a great big sigh of relief. I don't want you to actually answer that.

I was supposed to start my new job at Special Collections today. Paperwork, however, thwarted that plan.

Special Collections is on the seventh floor of the Graduate Library. To get to Human Resources, one must take the far elevator down to floor 3A, where the Asia collection stacks are housed.

The first time I went into the stacks they frightened me. The guts of the building are exposed, the ceilings of the half-floors nearly graze my head, and there is worn, colored tape on the floor leading lost students to the exits (follow, follow, follow, follow, follow the yellow duct tape!). According to one librarian, people have gotten lost for hours or even days in the stacks...Anyway.

One must walk all the way to the back of the stacks, climb a half-flight of stairs, and traverse a long corridor of offices before one arrives at the den of the human-resource trolls (have you ever noticed that all bureaucratic offices look exactly alike?). The desk troll informed me that she would try to answer any questions, but she didn't know much about taxes (on a similar note, the customer service representative on the Department of Education's loan consolidation hotline didn't understand the difference between principal and interest). So, after filling out 10 identical forms, I realized I didn't have my SS card with me. Really, I had three forms of official picture ID with me--why did they need the blue slip of bondage?? It's not like I don't know the bloody number by heart!

Anyway, so I spent the afternoon doing my volunteer work, evaluating almanacs from 1868 and medical books from 1823 (did you know that studious lives in libraries tend to unbalance the mind?).

As I was leaving the library I decided to grab some pleasure reading books. As I checked out either
(a) I was wearing clothes that made me look incredibly obese
(b) My esteem appeared to be low because I was checking out a biography of the Ugly Stepsister
Or (c) Five hours of staring at miscellaneous Americana from the 19th century had made me glum.

In any case, the lone circulation clerk, a middle-aged man with a skull-cap, either out of compassion or boredom, initiated the following conversation:

Him: "Do you know what Jamaicans think is wrong with American women?"
Me: "Um . . . they don't have enough fun?" (thinking of the Malibu rum commercial)
Him: "No--they think American women are too skinny. In fact, many other cultures don't like skinny women. When I was a kid I had a book with this painting by Rubens. Our society promotes this uniform body type."
Me: "Um . . . yeah . . . like Kate Moss . . . yeah--Rubens definitely didn't paint skinny women."
Him: "I tell my wife and daughters that they don't need to be skinny. My wife is 5 foot and 160 pounds, and I tell her she doesn't need to change a thing."
Me: "Oh--that's great---well--um--thank you--have a nice day."