This despicable society we live in today is driving my self-image into the ground where it previously was, before I was shoved headlong through two years of heavily vain days, all spent fighting with a conceited girl and my own hatred of anything uglier than I thought deserved to exist.

I am a slave of my surroundings, chained to the habits of every day. I eat a little, or a lot, or sometimes nothing at all. Carbohydrates, saturated fats, hydrogenated oils and high fructose corn syrups. I sit in a chair for eight, ten, twenty hours. The most walking I do is from that chair to the car, from the car to a house, from the car to a classroom. My absurd strength given my stature still intact through all of this, reminding me of what someone else has more of and in a more varied amount than I do. I despise it because it makes me look as huge as I am.

There was a point in my family's history where the cupboards were stocked with cans upon cans of vegetables and fruits, replenished weekly and encouraged above anything else. The only cans we have in our cupboard now are of soups and tomato paste. I wonder where these times went, why the motives changed and exactly what were they thinking when all-day beef jerky overcame five-minute crackers as a snack.

I got so sick of this situation two years ago that I decided I needed to ride my bike more. I would ride it until sweat trickled down my back, put it away and continue inside to sit in the chair. Chased by dogs, flat tire after flat tire, nothing but hills and pressure from my persuasive surroundings to stop, I soon did. The people on the screen asking "Where were you? You're late."

Becoming winded after walking two blocks isn't healthy, I hear myself inside my head. Do you remember what you looked like this summer? Bronze-backed and tough, hiking legs and, though they were bigger than you liked to look at, at least it wasn't this disgusting cellulite that rides your midsection piggy-back. Spider veins and stretch marks, purple lighting on your thunder thighs. Can't even bother your fat ass to get up and clean your room a little. You glare at a thin friend with contempt as she eats the same diet as you and gains nothing. Her size zero jeans. The dancing body you could never have. The worst part is you and the girlfriend before you have something so sickeningly in common you'd ask for a knife to cut out the ugly parts if you thought they wouldn't commit you.

I didn't know you could hold hatred against a rib cage until it was pointed out to me that mine wasn't like everyone else's. No, I can't even have a slim rib cage. I sit here with my beginnings of a spare tire because from barrel-chest rib cage to bellybutton, everything's even steven, but when you get to my loins, an ugly little slope adding another curve to an already dangerous road. Not a straight line on me, I'm the bad end of a pregnancy. Feminine to the shell.

I keep losing the things that make me want to go outside. The fear of a mis-thrown frisbee sends me underneath the covers of my boyfriend's bed. I'm a headcase with naught but a misguided figure and the exercise habits of concrete. Before this lump of unsatisfaction closes my throat off, I want to say it one last time before I slip off into a stationary coma: If only things were different.