Kathy joined Weight Watchers. Shut up. Because it apparently breaks some weight loss commandment to display even a scintilla of cynicism at meetings, Waisted is where she bitches about eating, not eating, oversharing weight watchers, and probably you.

By Kathy Cacace [Archives]

Tootie, Natalie, Blair or Jo? Jessie Spano, Kellie Kapowski, or Lisa Turtle? Melanie Wilkes or Scarlett O’Hara? Mary-ann or Ginger? Rayanne, Angela, Sharon or Delia? Mary Kate or Ashley? Kristy or Claudia or Mary Ann or Stacy or Dawn or Mallory or Jesse? There are all these archetypes under the umbrella of girldom, and I don’t buy any of them until confronted with a recently engaged Charlotte.

In my regular life, this is a situation in which I have found myself precisely zero times. Thanks to my new weekly get-togethers, however, I’m buying ever more into the fact that there are kinds of girls who cannot ever see eye to eye, despite even the shared bond of elastic waistband ruts in our stomach skin.

When I signed up for Weight Watchers, I did it to be able to walk into a store and purchase a decent pair of pants like the motherfucking gainfully employed American capitalist consumer I am, goddammit.

I was not, despite the shrieking owners of flashy new rings multiplying amongst the ranks of my meeting like termites, signing up for Miss Ovary’s Estrogen Hoedown.

The girls (and boys, actually) I know are not married. They will make out with you in a bar, and maybe they’ll send theoretically high-pitched text messages to each other about it, but in general they’re not the kind of girls who dream about wearing petticoats and feeding an I-banker cake in front of their grandmas. I like this about them. I know that when I think about being married, I picture reading in bed and cooking dinner on a Wednesday night, not someone removing a garter with their teeth from my leg in front of 350 of my parents’ closest business acquaintances who remember me from when I was “this big.”

There have been no less than three engagements in the last three weeks of my Weight Watchers meetings. There are all kinds of misty eyes from married middle-aged women in response, and lots of showing the ring around, and lots of clapping and asking if they’ve set a date yet, like it matters, like anyone is going to this wedding, like this information is for anything besides saying something nice about her choice of season regardless of what season it is. Ooh, summer wedding! I just love the fall!

And my favorite, one really funny girl who started wearing sweatsuits the day she got engaged. Just straight up velour track suits.

I understand that losing weight can be an emotional thing. I nearly had a nervous breakdown trying to get dressed this weekend because all of my pants are too big and I don’t actually own a functioning belt, meaning I think I put my ass crack on display for one really unlucky waitress for approximately an hour and a half.

But.

I just can’t do it. I don’t feel the bond. I refuse to fake the squeal. Yes, your ring is very shiny. I’m sure it can attract a curious squirrel from across an entire park. We all have vaginas and an extra digit on our clothing sizes, but otherwise, I’m not sure how much there is in common between us if I can’t produce a dog-whistle of a screech when you announce you’re planning to wed in a small ceremony in Staten Island. I mean, go marriage. Don’t get me wrong. But I’m not doing this to squeal and share and find buddies to paint my nails with, I’m doing it to look hotter in my underwear.

All these Charlottes, I don’t know what to do with them. Especially when I think I’m probably more of a Daria than anything else.