Height and Weight, Please

Last month, I celebrated my birthday. And by "celebrated," I mean "curled up in a fetal position and cried myself to sleep." This year's birthday was a double dose of bummer because not only was I one year closer to the grave, but my driver's license was due to expire. I could put it off no longer. I had to go in person to the local Department of Motor Vehicles office.

My afternoon at the DMV was everything I had dreamed it would be. Long lines. Unsmiling clerks. Screaming babies. There was some awful woman there who couldn't get her brats to shut up. Oh, right. That woman was me. And those shrieking two-year-olds were my identical twin daughters, complaining loudly about being trapped in their stroller. Until they invent DMVs with play centers, everyone's going to share in my pain.

So I finally got up to the counter and the first shock of the day was the eye test. I've been successfully cheating that thing ever since I was age 14 and applied for my learner's permit. Turns out they've updated their technology with some fancy schmancy machine that no longer allows me to shift my head ever so slightly so that my left eye can do all the reading for my lazy, no-good right eye with the astigmatism. I'm now classified as a RESTRICTED DRIVER who can only operate a vehicle with all three mirrors: left, rear, and right. Bah!

The second shock was that I'm a big fat liar. No sooner had the words "Height and weight, please" fallen out of the DMV agent's mouth, then a lie slipped from mine. Now I certainly don't fib about my height. I'm 5'10 and darn proud of it. But my weight? No, no, no. That's a top-secret figure known only to myself and a handful of medical professionals who had better take privacy laws seriously because I will sue their butts if I ever find out they've leaked my real weight to the press.

Who knows who might check my ID in the near future? There's no way in H–E–double hockey sticks that I will allow the pimply-faced teenager working behind the Blockbuster counter to know that which has been kept hidden since the beginning of my time on this earth. I still haven't forgiven my mother for sending out birth announcements that advertised my enormous weight of almost ten pounds to everyone in my social circle. I certainly have no intention of providing personal information that can be used against me to a perfect stranger who curls the fingers of one hand in the universal gesture for "hand it over" while using the knuckles of his other hand to knock on the "Store Policy" sign taped to the counter. I just want to buy a bottle of creme de menthe for my grasshopper pie recipe, not be humiliated in front of a smirking liquor store clerk.

So when the DMV agent requested my weight, I didn't bat an eye as I rattled off a number some 20 pounds lighter than what my scale says. I figure it's not really a lie if I lose that 20 pounds. Which I definitely plan on doing.

Starting tomorrow.

Dinner last night: halibut tacos