Jon and I don't talk about our exes, pretty much ever. They tend crop up in conversation when one of mine is doing something annoying/ foists his existence on me, which is the case far more often than one would desire. His come up in conversation when I choose to mock him for his previous predilection for pretty dumb girls (or at least in my mind, that's what they were... I don't care if one of them won a Nobel Prize for blahblahblah, they still dated my boyfriend. And one of them was French, which makes it even worse. Trollops.) or... when the subject of Wellesley College comes up.

Now Jon's longest previous relationship was with a Wellesley girl, for which fact I tease him endlessley. Nevermind the wonderful caliber of the guys I've dated in the past. It's usually all kept relatively nice, except... last night Alex and I were talking about a friend of hers who is now dating a Wellesley girl, and I mentioned Jon's past indiscretions. Alex guffawed from the other end of IM, Jon protested violently from this end (he had, to his credit, just been very sweet and picked up my mother from the airport) and I made the mistake of asking what she looked like.

"Light brown hair, green eyes, 120 pounds, about 5'8 or 5'9..."

ONE HUNDRED TWENTY POUNDS? AT MY HEIGHT?

I very sweetly inquired as to how exactly it was he knew the weight of his ex girlfriend.

"Oh," he replied, "I just asked her, and she told me."

Now, I'm not the thinnest of girls. I'm not saying I'm wearing the "easy fit" sizes or god forbid, "husky" clothes, but let's just say that my East African ancestry has possessed me with an ass, and then my German ancestry has given me big ol' field-plowing legs. I'm not fat-- I tend to weigh about 145 on a very miraculously good day-- but 120 has never even really entered my spectrum of weights I would want to shoot for. I'm generally, finally, pretty at peace with my body, but... did he HAVE to go and say that?

(Actual weight omitted from rant at boyfriend. Also, all mention of Easy fit, husky, and big ol' legs. I try to keep my man interested, not paralysed with disgust at the thought of elastic waistbands.)

"Well, what did you want me to say? You told me to describe her. Would it have been better for me to say she was skinny? You're prettier than she was anyway!"

Pretty or not pretty, no longer dating or not, the fact still remained that she was thinner. Oh, the irrationality that guides female thinking. Thoughts swirled into a panic of "oh sweet jesus I actually consume food! In front of him!" Never mind the fact that I've dated more conventionally attractive (Doesn't that sound awful? I just mean... oh, I can't say what I mean. But he was pretty.) though MUCH dumber and less interesting guys. And then I pretty immediately dumped their asses. But this was a little hoochie from Wellesley, getting her claws into MY MAN. Never mind that it was way before we met.

I suggested that for future reference, all mentions of body type/ weight be omitted from conversations with girlfriends, unless the girlfriend in question is thinner than the ex being described. And then, don't mention it if her boobs were bigger.

"Alex-- !"

Moral of the story? Your current girlfriend is always the hottest girl you've ever encountered, in fact, ever dreamed of. In fact, any bodily flaws of hers? They fit your image of the IDEAL WOMAN in the way that media-crafted bimbos do not. (But don't say this in a creepy way or else that'll kind of gross her out, cf. my exes who liked a. hairy legs, which was just WEIRD and I staunchly refused to give in, because I am FRIVOLOUS, dammit, and I will not run about like Nature Woman, and b. fatter women, which was firmly denied for ditto reasons, and also because I frankly wouldn't feel attractive with a wobblier belly.) Pander to her insecurities. Jon, in the end, was quite lovely about my silly tantrum, spending about an hour telling me how beautiful I am and how much he loves me.. Not that he doesn't do that regularly. Just nice to hear it when I'm being minorly unreasonable, having started the whole fight myself.

Ok, I have to go write a Russian essay. Topic: Why does "Leningrad [dangle] like a useless weight from its prisons"? The quote is from Akhmatova's Requiem, my mission: to make sense of it. In Russian. I am up obscenely early because my mums is in town and I must play valiant tour guide-ess. Or rather, wander around and squabble. I opened my email this morning and discovered a section of Russian, sent out last night, that I'm supposed to have translated for tutorial today. Ahhh... it's going to be a long day.