a better title when i can think of one when i'm not so jetlagged

Bali is beautiful and busy and crowded and dirty and full.  It is full.  It’s bursting at the seams.  People want to give you taksi rides. People want to say hello. People want to give you massage.  The currency has so many zeros that it’s dizzying.  It’s hard to do math.  I’ve never been good with math and coverting so I’m especially challenged here.

This is Kuta and Seminyak. 

Day 0, arrival late afternoon, we finally made it to the villa after the madness of leaving the airport and weaving through crowded streets in a car with a driver.  I don’t know how people maneuver here.  It looks like it’s almost all instinct. You don’t have any set of rules of organization or “you go now and then I go then the next person goes and we all take turns.” Which seems to be the unspoken rule of traffic in the US when faced with an intersection.   You take a turn when it feels right to you and everyone else has to adjust and somehow we have not seen anyone plowed off the road.

Delirious and sweaty from 24+ hours of travel I nursed a warm bottle of water Sadia bought me in Taipei after I drank from the water fountain and she was unsure if that was ok.

I was grateful for the water because it was leaving my body through my pores at an alarming rate.

It’s like I had stepped into a hot tub with all my clothes on and then decided to hang out in a country wide steam room. 

The air conditioning in the car was nice but in a weird way it made me sweatier. Later on I would find this happening again and again whenever my body encountered air conditioning after being out in the tropical humidity. Sweating outside made sense and felt normal. Stepping into an air conditioned store for 5 minutes would cause my body to release all moisture inside of it through my skin and sweat would pour down my face like an unstoppable waterfall.

Surprisingly enough I’m ok with being this wet all the time. I typically hate the humidity and the heat.  There is nothing that reminds you more of your girth, your size, your weight, than being hot and sticky.  I guess in America when I find myself in humidity I assume it’s just me. I’m the one suffering because of all my extra layers of chub.  The thin people don’t look as sweaty. They must certainly feel much cooler since none of their limbs seem to be touching. They have much more air flow.

Here, south of the equator, it is no mistake that no matter your size, you are all incredibly sweaty.  Even playing field.

The only people I see who are my size seem to be vacationing Australians. 

I’m ok with this.

As soon as our French air bnb host left us after giving us the lay of the land, restaurants, the tenuous taxi situation and a vague explanation of massage that she describes as jiggy-jiggly, we put on our bathing suits and I was the first one in the pool.  The water was warm and I swam back and forth risking losing a contact lense or two because it felt so good to be moving in water that I couldn’t be bothered to get my goggles.

3 planes in 24 hours with odd meal times my body was ecstatic to be swimming.

This is freedom. I am weightless and movement is full of ease and joy.

Stepping out of the pool to go to the bathroom I am reminded of gravity, of knee pain, stiff joints and my heaviness.  Knee surgery cannot come soon enough.  January 24.

I am uncomfortable with my size but I am mostly interested in where this feeling is coming from.  I tune out the obesity and diabetes and epidemic talk.  This is not new.  People have always been judgmental of fat people.  It’s normal.  Standard sized bodies are scared of catching “the fat”.  Being fat means you have no control.  It means you do not care about your health. It obviously means that you don’t exercise and spend your time eating fast food and watching too much television and not leaving your house.

Obviously.

Right.

I move so poorly outside of bodies of water.  I should just sign a pact with a sea witch and give her my human legs so I could live in the murky deep and not have to deal with real people who are scared to catch my fatness disease.