People around me have been commenting on my size of late. It does work as a disturbing wake up call when people around me become my talking mirror, when I’ve been continuously deluded by my bathroom one with its slimming effect — I can only see myself from the chest and upwards, at an arm’s length due to the sink and vanity top.
It’s when a friend says to me, “Hey, your face is really big now”, that makes me stare a bit longer at reflective surfaces when I’m out now, and has forced me to look myself in a handheld mirror to see how much of the A5 mirror I can fill (probably all of it now). Or when a friend subtly asks, “Er… do you wanna go jogging with me tomorrow?”, that compels me to (have the thought to) move my body out of the couch and work desk to start utilizing the gym card I applied for some time ago. Or basically engage in some form of cardiovascular activity and lose some weight. I know how stressed I’ll be when I visit Singapore next month with a body that can’t hide its monstrousness under these layers of winter clothing anymore.
Because if those aren’t strong enough warnings, this is. My boss and I were discussing the copy on our About page of the website we’re working on. When I wrote “burgeoning Chinese market”, he went “burger-what”? Being from Israel, English is his second language so certain words don’t work for him. “Shall I just say ‘rapidly expanding’ instead? That’s basically what ‘burgeoning’ means”, I said. His reply, epic enough to make me create this blog post in the first place, went like this: “Just say ‘rapidly growing Chinese market’. YOU are burgeoning.”
