I returned to the Aroma spa today, and I was late. You know when you are in LA and you are just trying to go to Koreatown, like 10 minutes from my house, but in LA Friday Traffic Time, which are like the DOG YEARS of drivetime, it can take you – well, a lot longer.

My incident last week there, which I wrote about here caused quite an uproar.

Lots of people were angry about things, mostly proud of me for speaking up, angry that I had been mistreated (while naked no less), but some mad because they felt I was being ‘full of myself’. I might be full of myself, but I would much rather be full of YOU baby – that’s my misguided attempt at responding to hatred with flirting.

Anyway, anyone who criticized my body last week just hear this – you who are without stretch marks, cast the first stone.

Sometimes I want to respond to people who say, “I read what you wrote and you are disgusting.”

Me: First of all, congratulations! I didn’t know you could read! Well, read this – FUCK YOU

But I don’t do that, at least I try not to.

People who hate my body don’t realize how much I love them, as they are in pain, and direct it at me because they don’t what else to do with their pain, so they want me to feel it. If you hate me, please continue to, and maybe the hate will come out of you enough where you will one day be happy. I will take your misery and turn it into poetry. I am like the Soymilkman of Human Kindness, like my hero Billy Bragg, but I am lactose intolerant.

I bowed so much when I finally arrived at Aroma Spa and Sport, and the whole staff came out to greet me. The sweet manager who had to deal with the tough job of negotiating with some irate Korean women who were terrified of my body and then who had to come to ME and talk to me about it – a bad situation for her and everyone involved – was there to help me. She apologized again, and thanked me profusely for returning to the spa, without hard feelings, without anger, but with lots of clogged pores that needed extractions.

Everyone was so nice to me in the spa, women even coming up and complimenting my tattoos and smiling and friendly. I wondered for a moment if they had closed the spa for the day and hired a bunch of actors to play the parts of Korean women bathers, but I actually recognized some of the faces – some of the same women who had judged me so harshly the previous week, those mean ladies, came up to me, with kindness and curiosity in their eyes. I sat in the sauna and watched golf and wept.

The treatments were remarkable, and although they tried to stop me from giving them any money, but I forced about $50 on them, as I am so Korean, and I can fight over a check until the police and ambulance are called and the golf clubs are out and swinging at heads. Sometimes the fight over the check at Asian restaurants is so intense, one family will leave in the squad car, one will leave in the ambulance, but I know whichever emergency vehicle I wind up in, I am going to be the one to pay. That is the winner. Winners pay.

I thanked them up and down, bowed like 100 times, and we took pictures together to post on the Aroma Facebook and my Twitter. I told them that it’s hard to be a Korean American comedian sometimes, because for me, as I work in an industry where there are not many who look like me and do what I do, and I grew up in this showbiz world, feeling alternately hated then invisible for my inability to fit in, and then I go to a place, where everyone is like me – looks like me that is (ok just in the face, not in the tattooed body) and they seem to hate me, I feel so lonely, as if there is no place for me in the world at all.

Also, the jimjilbang, Aroma Spa in particular, reminds me of the women in my family, especially my beloved Kun Immo (my mom’s Unee, i.e. Big Sis, i.e. The Notorious KIM, RIP  Kun Immo – I am pouring a 40 of makgeolli into the ground for her and all my mom’s dead homies) who would take me to their favorite ones in Korea. They would wash my back and braid my hair and hold my face in their hands and ask me if I had any idea how beautiful I was, and how beautiful a woman I was going to grow up to be.

All I have of them now is their jewelry, willed to me in embarrassingly large amounts and stored in safety boxes all over the West Side, as they couldn’t give me any more days, because they only had so many, and had spent them all loving me and my mom, but in death, they could still give me jade and diamonds, to carry into my days, as the beautiful woman they all knew I would grow up to be. (my mom is slightly pissed off that I have it, but I totally let her borrow it! especially the emeralds. She works an emerald better than joan fucking Collins.)

The women at the Aroma Spa look like my family, who are all gone now, but are maybe watching me from heaven, where there’s probably an Aroma spa with a big screen tv  in the sauna showing what is happening on earth, and I feel like, they are proud of me, because I found some new ladies that might do the same things for me that they did, until I see them once more, in the great jimjilbang in the sky.

When I used to go buy books, stacks and stacks of dusty old ones for 10 cents each at used bookstores, I always went for the beauty manuals. Sometimes there were celebrity ones, like Raquel Welch’s, which gave all the credit to yoga and this disgusting green vegetable soup with no salt she swore gave her that unstoppable figure – and just gave me unstoppable diarrhea. There was also Cheryl Tiegs book, which spent many chapters going into almost pornographic detail about her binge eating(!) and how to overcome a paralyzing dependence on food. She describes her low point in life at the beginning of her modeling career where she weighed 155 lbs, which is actually what I weigh now, likely one of the lighter incarnations of my body, truly. 155 isn’t my low point and frankly I don’t think it’s too shabby. Cheryl Tiegs book has a lot of unappetizing recipes coupled with extremely appetizing photos of her in her high 1973 heyday. I love the fashion, makeup and hair and i think she looks great even though I am, to her, at a low point. Well, one supermodel’s low point is my high point. And i can look great in a crazy ski outfit too – which im not sure Cheryl wore, but I know Suzy Chapstick wore, and I always get them confused.

I guess I should write a beauty book too, even though I may not be considered a great beauty, I really am, and everyone should know. My beauty book would contain no judgemental numbers as low points and certainly no disgusting recipes for green things without salt. My beauty secrets are simple. Don’t wash that much. Eat but only the really good stuff and eat it when you really are hungry. Try not to eat to escape your problems. If you drink alcohol, chase it down with water if you can. Drink water anyway if you remember. The most important thing is tell other people you are really beautiful, and carry yourself like you are really beautiful. It’s more like labeling yourself beautiful, so that everyone knows to call you that, and if they don’t think you are, then they feel stupid for not being in the know. Share this secret with everyone and just believe you are the best looking thing that ever walked the earth. It’s weird but it totally works. Try it!

Skin anomaly why oh why? Go away please leave me in peace.

I have a red, throbbing, pulsating skin problem on my face that will not go away, no matter what I put on it. Even the special grey white erase stick that I got in paris, which takes most blemishes down in its waxy kiss does nothing to it. It stays red and aching on my face, like it is marking a city on my visage, my skin a map of capillaries and veins and problems that need solving.

I never had acne as a teenager, which is fine I guess, as I had enough problems. Acne in general hasn’t been a plague on me, as I have the opposite – dry skin, which gets so tight it threatens to shrink me right out of it. Dry skin doesn’t pimple, rather it flakes, it pulls, it splits – but it rarely erupts in the volcanic fashion of oily or combination skin. We all have our skin to bear, which is a sickening truth.

I’d like to slap this blemish away, vain as I am, but there’s nothing that can be done but leave it alone and allow it to heal, turn my attention within, try to drink more water and be a better person and do anything else but come for this pustule with a flame sterilized business end of a safety pin.

It’s really too small and hard to pop. It isn’t one of those great satisfying whiteheads that grows luminous and full like the moon, exploding into red raw craters that harden and bury themselves into scar. It’s one that will go away if attention is not paid it and it isn’t allowed to fester and irritate itself into permanence.

I have been known to do youtube searches for popped pimples and ingrown toenails, as the skin’s constant war against itself is an avid interest, but I refrain from posting my own. This is as much as I am willing to do – share my feelings and thoughts on it, using words as a way to bind my arms from further self harm.

Gabi Gregg is a beautiful woman, and I love her Fatkini pictures and her spirit. Let’s all put on bikinis and take pictures!!! It’s gorgeous, it’s empowering and it’s about time we celebrated and enjoyed our bodies and our selves. Why not be cool when the sun threatens to take over the whole sky? Why not vamp it up in a two piece, allow some time to find shelter in the shade, easy and free, pretty and pleasing, reclining and relaxing in what could practically be our undies? Exposure to the sun’s rays (within reason of course as they can still be pretty dangerous so don’t skimp on sunblock) is delightful and one of the true blissful attributes of summer. We should take our pleasure and document it, as we all have a right to joy no matter what size we are. If you have a body, you deserve to be happy in it, and that is that.

I am spending my summer in Atlanta, where the weather would be unbearable if I literally were not almost naked all the time. I usually do a bikini bottom and a little t-shirt just to protect all my tattoos from the sun, but I will wear this even when I am not going for a swim! To me – it’s proper attire everywhere! I just wore this ensemble on The View! Why shouldn’t I wear a bikini, and more importantly, why shouldn’t I wear a bikini on TV in front of millions of viewers? It’s hot outside!! it’s hot inside. I am hot, inside and out – so there.

There are many positive comments for Gabi and all her deliciously lovely unclad friends, but there are also those who are saying the photos “promote unhealthy weight”? What is an ‘unhealthy weight’? and also, what the hell is ‘promoting unhealthy weight’ supposed to mean? If we don’t adhere to certain societal standards, we shouldn’t take pictures of ourselves and post them online? Are we not allowed to witness our own reflection, much less enjoy the summer – the water and the sand, the lengthy days and heated nights, the beaches and the barbecues, June/July/August – the most sensual season, truly, as there are few gentle pastimes greater than casually eating a cool slice of watermelon poolside while flicking the seeds at a sexy stranger, allowing the juice to drip down your graceful neck right into your prodigious cleavage – because it might be considered ‘unhealthy’?

Is thin always healthy? I am not sure if thinness is all you need to get through this life. I have seen some thin people who looked as if they wouldn’t survive a sneeze, so I wouldn’t say that size is a fair indication of health or lack thereof. Perhaps we would all like to change something about ourselves, whether it is weight or height or proportion or age or skin/hair color or even race – but we are merely a product not only of our own collective decisions but also many made before us, before we were even born, and for this, we are what we are. Is it not right to just enjoy and accept who we are at this very moment?

My own relentless obsession with thinness has proved far more detrimental to my health than anything else. In my twenties, I became a terrible alcoholic, not because I needed to drink myself to the brink of insanity for the sake of drunkenness, but because I was so hungry I didn’t know what else to do. I starved my body and drank solely to kill my unfathomable hunger, and in doing so, I nearly killed myself. I took numerous drugs – uppers/downers/inners/outers not to get high, but in order to keep myself from eating.

Food was and is and will be forever my true jones, the drug of choice that will trump all my choices, my eternal nemesis and what I dream of every night, the monkey on my ever widening back. It’s a waste of drugs and drink  – because I didn’t appreciate these things on their own merits nor did I ever get truly high – rather I used them as escape route, trying to circumvent my stomach by overloading my nervous system.

All of my self destructive behavior can be traced back to wanting to be thinner, to beat down my appetite with chemical weapons. I waged war on my growling stomach, tried to immobilize the forces within me that existed solely to keep me alive. You can’t win when you battle with yourself. All you do is lose everything, except weight.

I have made peace with my body, and in the most extraordinary of ironies, I have now a body that my younger helplessly addicted, ravaged, starved, drunken, immobilized by workouts self could have only dreamed of having. I may not be as thin as the models in the magazines or other girls on tv, but I look good to myself, which is enough for me. To come to a place where I don’t avoid reflective surfaces – wanting to evade proof that I am who I am as I judged myself relentlessly for being fat/ugly/whatever/anything but beautiful – is a kind of heaven on earth.

All my gratitude to Gabi, the fatkini, mirrors, summer and life. I have learned the hard way to appreciate what I have, what others have, what I have lost and what I have found in all my 43 years (!) and I am just trying to pass it on and put it in a 2 piece.

www.gabifresh.com

www.gabifresh.com