Of all the things I love about weight loss – and these are legion: fitting into the sexy black suit again, not wanting to hold a pillow over my considerable stomach when I sit on the couch, not feeling like an elephant teetering on stilts when I wear high heels – the thing I might love most is the celebrating. Anniversaries everywhere! I’m always close to a goal or just past a goal, and this makes my obsessive little self giddy with goals. This week, not only will I likely finally be under 200, I will have also gotten rid of 40 pounds. At 196.5 I will officially no longer be obese. In half a pound I will officially be halfway to goal. Joy! Excitement! Reason after reason to sit down and celebrate with a warm loaf of French bread.

So I’ve been thinking about presents. According to people wiser than me, presenting myself with a gift will make me smile and blush and recommit myself wholeheartedly to this way of life in an Onward Christian Soldier kind of way. And you know, I’m okay with this. I like presents. In fact, of everyone I bestow trinkets on, I am by far my favorite. But there’s just one teensy problem with all this, and that’s the utter, crippling poverty. Nobody talks about utter, crippling poverty when they talk about these gifts, have you noticed?

Take last month, for example. When I hit 30 pounds down I decided to treat myself with the Season 1 Remington Steele DVDs. (Don’t laugh, man. I was weaned on that show.) And so I bought them, and then sat down in a fit of nostalgic glee and watched every episode whilst eating Soy Crisps and drinking iced tea. And that was great and all, but now I’m at 40 pounds down and it occurs to me that I’m going to have to find a cheaper alternative present or risk having to sell one of the purebred cats to pay for my motivators. But the ones that are coming up are GOOD things to celebrate, and my mother has given me $100 as a “just because” gift, so since there are so many of them I’m going to splurge one more time on something decadent. Something like this: Deliciousness or Oh My Sweet Lord, an Opera Cape! Where would I wear it? I don’t know! But an OPERA CAPE! I could swoon.

After that, though, it’s back to bottles of nail polish and other cheap things.

No, really. I swear.