Love in the Time of Calories

Love is something between everything and nothing, which is perhaps the reason why it takes some people a lifetime before they realize that it has been there all along. Some others simply look in all the wrong places under all the wrong instances. And, somehow, they still end up right. But let's cut the cheese right there and go straight to the money shot. To make our lives easier, let's assume we're fat.

These are times when loveless romantics chastise themselves by eating anorexia for breakfast, bulimia for lunch, and a slice of Nicole Richie for dinner. They want to lose weight because Valentine's Day is drawing near and it's not the best time of the year to grow a double chin just to prove the point that they have a job. They are serious with finding a date and they are equally serious with burning their fat, at least just in time before summer. They want to justify everything by looking back at history, to no avail. Renaissance was a time when being "fat" by contemporary standards—not obese, still judging by contemporary standards—was beautiful and admired, even worshiped. But the Renaissance lost its magic hundreds of years before Sir Tim Berners-Lee gave birth to the internet in 1990. Apparently, Tim does not even have a vagina to begin with but that's beside the point. Today, skinny is praised as the new sexy and fashion magazines are willing to shove that idea down your throat. Fat on the other hand has remained more or less the same—it's still called "fat" in the dictionary. You will have to deal with it, or it will have to deal with you. With an extra rice and another extra rice, love in the time of calories has never been quite a drag.

But all is not lost. As one parish priest puts it: "never underestimate the power of a woman's cleavage." Well, I don't recall now if it was a priest who said it, but what the hell. Even the French call it décolletage and we don't really care either. Other than that, there's another parallel, which is this: a dog is to a man as a cleavage is to a woman. You might mistake that mammary cleft for just another crevice on a woman's body that is as harmless as an erection during Sunday mass. If you do, you can't get any more wrong. It's a woman's best ally in the toughest of times, and it can make some men change their minds and others change their girlfriends—some others capable of doing both at the same time, notwithstanding frequently. That is true especially if a woman wears her cleavage like massive plate tectonics that look as though they're waiting for a vein to pop. Besides, you don't have to be thin to have a chest tunnel. In fact, you'll hardly have that precious chasm if you barely have the meat to back it all up. And who needs a bra if your bra can't get jiggy with it?

Others say, too, that you don't even have to be a woman to have one, but that's just not our cup of tea. If it's from a man, technically, it's not a cleavage. It's most likely a gene anomaly which biologists have yet to name because nomenclature is a tricky business.

As for us, fat guys, searching for love in the time of calories, I don't know but let's think of something.

Either we have to be a "rap" star or a random schmuck who wears large shirts and large pants, all dressed-up like a rack of clothes and nowhere to go except beside our car's shiny rims. Come to think of it, there's no real difference between the two. Only imagined.

Or you can try Facebook. Try to post a sad love quote for your status update, "like" it, post a comment on it, and "like" your comment. Take a nap and wake-up after two hours. Check if a female friend did the same thing—which is that she posted another sad love quote, "liked" her post, posted a comment on it, and "liked" her comment. If you do happen to find one, you may well be in luck. Congratulate yourself by watching porn for thirty minutes for you might just have found your soul mate. Maybe a lost soul. Or maybe a potential mate. But who cares? The point is you're both lonely and thrilled at poking each other at Facebook. Never mind what happened to your original post. There's a good chance that nobody gives a shit about it anyway.

I really don't know. But what I do know is that Gabriel García Márquez' Love in the Time of Cholera is a gem of inspired madness it's unmistakably genius.