A few months ago, I bought black jeans. They were the first I’d owned as an adult and as such, I didn’t plan on pairing them with a tucked in Daffy Duck t-shirt. Straight leg, 7 For All Mankind, size 8. The only problem was that, when I tried them on minutes after having them delivered, they didn’t fit. I mean, technically I could get them zipped but they made my waist look like an overflowing bowl of oatmeal and turned my ass into an innie.
I was crestfallen. I don’t obsess over how much I weigh, but at the same time, I love being a size 8. It’s the ideal size for me but when I couldn’t fit into these, I reluctantly accepted it and put them back in the box to be returned.
Around the same time, my boyfriend and I were at Target for another one of our routine visits to pick up one specific thing but leave with 11 things that are completely unrelated. So, since we were there for paper towels, we ended up bringing home two copies of Starcraft II. Even though I do really enjoy a good self-sabotage, I was completely against buying the game. The conversation went something like this:
HIM: Let’s get Starcraft, we had so much fun with the last one.
ME: No. I don’t want to have to be cut out of our apartment just so I can be weighed on a livestock scale and then watch them throw away my Pringles.
HIM: It won’t be that bad.
ME: Define “that bad.”
HIM: I’ll make sure you get to keep your Pringles.
ME: Not helping.
HIM: We’ll be responsible with it.
ME: Last time we played Starcraft, we never had sex, we only left the apartment to get pizza and I think you developed lower back problems.
HIM: So is that a no?
Starcraft, for those of you don’t know, is a real time strategy game made by Blizzard – the same people responsible for World of Warcraft. This means that, like WoW, Starcraft’s main objective is to make you fat beyond your wildest dreams. And if it doesn’t make you fat, it will give you acne in places never thought possible, social anxiety and/or an unnatural attraction to Funyuns.
It looks like this:
The objective: collect more resources than your opponents and then kill them with race-specific units (Protoss, Zerg and Terran). Kind of like Monopoly but with more blood and fewer beauty contests.
I don’t deny that Starcraft is a highly compelling game, despite the fact that 80% of the build order is the same every single time. But the independent variables are just ample enough that you keep coming back without gaining much, other than new methods for your opponent to call you a ‘cunt fag.’ And the slice of hope that 20% of your game – what, on average, amounts to maybe seven minutes – will be marginally different is what motivates a two hour time suck.
But, as you can tell, I’m playing it anyway. And as I’ve already revealed – one of the reasons for that is because I’m actually lose weight doing it. It’s simple, really, and I don’t even have to do butt clenches in my computer chair. The secret comes down to delayed gratification – which can be applied to anything. Before agreeing to buy Starcraft together, my boyfriend and I made a promise to each other that if we wanted to play, we would have to take a walk around the neighborhood for approximately 30 minutes.
Sadly, since installing this rule, I’ve probably never been in better shape. After a while, we stopped associating walking with Starcraft and began exercising on our own initiative. On the surface I thought it was great to kind of cheat the expectation that participating in online gaming meant that you were destined for a lifetime of elastic waist jeans.
Not only am I at least five years away from that reality, but I’m now regularly wearing the black jeans that previously looked like compression stockings. Recently, I took the opportunity to try them on again and not only do they fit, but there’s enough room for me to be three months pregnant without even knowing it.
But, seriously, I hope it doesn’t come to that because I don’t know how to walk that off.
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