Here's your fat people joke for the day. Kind of.

Had kind of an unpleasant moment this afternoon as I was shuffling my way through the parking lot on my way into the Loblaw Superstore.

Some plumpish blonde and a non-discript other woman were heading toward me as they headed back to their car with some bags of whatever.

She had a black t-shirt with something on it, but I wasn’t paying attention.

Why would I. 

Anyway, she slows down and when she gets pretty close she starts pointing insistently at her own shirt and then pointing to me.

At first I thought she was deaf and needed my help with something, but I couldn’t figure out what her difficulty was. All I could notice was her reverse-skunk black streak in her hair.

Then she kept pointing to her shirt. She was about 10 feet away at this point so I did look at it to try to read it.

It said something like,

"I'm Fat, But

You're Ugly ... AND Fat!

I Just Need To Lose Weight"

I didn’t quite understand it when I first read it. It's kind of a brain teaser fat people joke (at least it was for me) and I couldn't process the meaning of it right away.

I guess I kind of stood there as I was working through the logic of her shirt message. She then just turned to her friend and they both burst out laughing hysterically as they scurried for their car.

I finally 'got' their clever fat guy joke. Then I wish I'd had some eggs. And I wondered if I'd have actually tossed them at those morons.

So I just hollered to them, “You must feel so proud.” It's my catch-all come-backer for assholes. Like the guy a few years ago who drove by me on a slow street as I was on my bicycle and yelled, "Hey, you've got a really fat ass!" I flipped him the bird and yelled my come-back.

But as I think on today, the thing is that these refined ladies with their little t-shirt hit-and-run does bother me. Because the shirt wasn’t, in fact, wrong. Realistically, I actually really am not only fat but also unattractive:

• My hair only grows out of the back of my head
• My eyes are set at two different levels if you look a little bit closely
• I’ve night-grinded my teeth to virtual stubs
• And all my back problems and destroyed knees and arthritis make me a quite top-heavy wobbly penguin-y sight to behold

I would prefer to look like Brad Pitt underneath all this fat. But I am well aware of the realities.

And I make fun of them myself constantly, if only to keep my spirits up as I maintain some semblance of hope that I’ll get it together and get healthier and smaller.

I just don’t particularly need to be both reminded and ridiculed at the same time. It is just too much reality. Which would be the whole point of the fat joke shirt.

So, message received. Thanks for sharing, ladies.

I kind of got my wits about me, did some scurrying myself back to my car to get my camera and try to get a picture of these clowns for the site.

They were almost gone by the time I got it together. Oh well.

But I think I actually get the last laugh on this one, because her t-shirt missed one other unchangeable thing that could have said:

“You’re old.”