Shopping and eating disorders

Most adults shake their heads and wonder why anorexia and bulimia are in the rise in Medellin, when it is easy for any young woman to know. Clothing in stores comes in two styles: fashionable and frumpy. Guess which sizes match each style.

I went shopping today, and it is amazing how a short trip into a store could make me feel like a blimp. I´ve lost a lot of weight, and I still feel like I need to be half my size to look well dressed.

This is one of those things I miss from my visits to the US. The fact that I could find clothing that fit, and was designed to look good on my body. Here, the latest fashions are just scaled up: so if I can get something my size, it is a skinny jean that makes me look like an ice cream cone with muffin top to boot, or a shirred top that sticks to .every. curve.

I even made a mistake and tried on a bathing suit. Brr. I won´t go into details but let´s just say that I hated the experience. I wanted to hide under a rock and never again see the light of day with anything less than jeans and a long sleeved shirt.

But this time it was much different than 15 pounds ago back in February when I first tried to go shopping. Today I did manage to bring home a jean. I had to search in the "woman´s" department among muu muus and elasticized waist pants, but I found a pair of jeans that makes me look good and doesn´t go up to my arm pits. It was also under my budget, which was amazing, since it seems my taste goes with very high prices I can´t afford.

There´s a lot of pressure to be really thin here, and I´m constantly reminded how being naturally curvy isn´t as accepted as having a silicone implant chest. That´s my explanation for the bathing suit I tried on. It seemed that the sizes referred only to the chest, and the rest of the suit was left more or less intact, perfect for a size 6.

Rainstorms and Podcasts

At 6:30 I had to get together with some friends and record another episode of our podcast blogotemático. The place we meet is quite close to my house, so it´s perfect walking distance, but awkward to use public transportation to get there. Today, as soon as I stepped out of my house, a torrential downpour fell and I was completely soaked by the time I got there.

Being wet when I know I can´t get immediately dry and warm makes me angry. I start fuming and my mood spirals downward from there. It´s completely different when it´s raining and I´m heading home: then I´m quite prone to ditching the umbrella and once I get home stripping off my drenched clothes, bundling into warm pjs and settling down with a cup of hot tea. But to be outside with puddles in my shoes and having clammy wet jeans sticking to my calves annoys me to no end. I wasn´t fit company by the time I got to the coffee shop at the Parque de los Pies Descalzos . So I sat down, took out my knitting and lowered my aggressiveness to humane levels.

I have gotten better at managing my anger: I now carry items that make me happier to assist this process. This time I had a flask of hot chocolate in my bag, a cream chease and goldenberry jam sandwich, the sock I´m knitting and a dry wool sweater in my bag. After some self induced therapy I was able to enjoy the usual banter on what goes on in the Colombian and international blog scene, and record with no mishaps.

If you understand Spanish, you can download our latest episode of Podcast Blogotemático, where we discussed my adventures at Pop!Tech as the Latin American Spanish language live-blogger who didn´t look the part but played it well, the terrible BLOG magazine the largest publishing house in Colombia created (I´ve analyzed Semana´s BLOG magazine in this article) which is basically a teen magazine without even a website of its own to justify its name, and we reach the conclusion that mainstream media in Colombia have NO idea of what is going on in the wilde internets, capping off with the terrible episode in losbloggers.tv (which doesn´t have anything to do with blogs) where they say that mac´s Operating System is Linux.