EPTYou just don't fucking matter to anyone.
In high school, I managed to starve myself from 270 to 170. How did I do it? By eating two apples in the morning and then running five miles after I left school. This routine was carried entirely by my dream of becoming a progamer in Korea. All I did was starve, exercise, and then practice Starcraft. It became quickly apparent that I could never manage to keep the undying discipline to become a progamer and to also be thin. Females were showing an interest in me for the first time in my life. One of them even asked me to prom. I mean, given the choice, I absolutely sank myself in the females. Wanting to look thin and handsome in a VOD in Korea was my dream, but looking thin and handsome in my little shit-splat town was providing just as much, if not more, gratification. For those of you who don't understand anything about my perspective within the last two paragraphs, I grew up in an immigrant family. My parents were German refugees who built a life together in Suriname, the only fucking country in South America where the beach waters glow with a filthy brown tint and the most profitable export is Christmas ornaments. Once we boarded a plane in Brazil for the US, my life was already decided: we would go to Texas, close to Houston, where I would attend med school and become a doctor. My parents were too old and jaded by their awful, awful lives shaped by the war in Europe and their displacement to ever consider that there might be a step between that plane and my career as a doctor: My childhood.
My mother fed me with the intensity and the entirety of the new country's offerings. She could not get over the fact that she didn't have to struggle to buy meat. In Suriname, a pack of chicken thighs was more than a pack of cigarettes, here, it was completely reversed. Meat was already cooked and readily in supply by the half dozen chain restaurants. She wasn't happy unless she fed me with McDonald's, Domino's, or the local fried catfish shop at least twice a day. And I loved and cherished every last morsel of it. Growing up in Suriname, I was barefoot, thin, and tanned. I had no sense of any alternative and was completely content with the circumstances. But once I got a taste of what life had to feed me here in the most influential, complex, and dominant country in the world, there was no turning back.
I was American. I was born with German on my tongue and Surinamese on my passport, but I would be buried in an American cemetery. And probably with either of the top two causes of death for Americans: heart disease or cancer.
Growing up in America, I became a fat, pasty glob of shit. Since I had experienced a completely different way of life before, I knew that it was possible for me to change. But I just didn't want to. When I started kindergarten, the most blatant, apparent division slapped me right in the face: I was living in a lower-income school district and was going to school with the darkest, thinnest blacks and Hispanics you've ever seen. They all looked like they should have been hunting me. Their dark skin, graced upon them by genetics, but weathered and settled by the elements stood in dark contrast only when they stood next to me: the glowing, fat piglet waiting to be pierced by their sharpened bamboo spears. They should have wiped war paint beneath each eyelid and smashed me with a rock like that kid from Lord of the Flies. Being a fat, white kid in America is representing everything that is wrong, and not only wrong, but fucking sinful about modern Western society: being overfed, oversheltered, and overindulged. Every fucking story we read in school involved a thin, starving, indigenous man outsmarting or overcoming the yoke of a fat, pasty white man of authority. Everything I thought was amazing about this country quickly backfired:
Being fat and pale is not socially acceptable.
In third grade, Valentine's Day was, for no apparent reason, declared to be a school holiday. We had a week to prepare Valentine's presents for everyone in class. You could buy some shitty, pre-fabricated cards or you could create something on your own, the only catch was that you had to give every student in the class at least one of whatever you were dispensing. Thinking this was my big chance, I convinced my daddy to help me bake cookies. I then wrapped each cookie in cellophane, personalized with each student's name, and then, proud as could be, gave each kid a giant cookie with their name written on it. I sat at my desk satisfied with my effort to make the other kids like me until I saw what the next kid did:
She passed out Anastasia-themed Valentine's cards. That Disney movie was the biggest hit in 1997 and all the kids in my class were obsessed with it. I knew that and thought "Hey, I went through the trouble to bake, wrap, and sign each kid's name with my cookies, so they're gonna appreciate me more than her"
Except the kid after had also passed out Anastasia cards.
And the kid after that one also passed Anastasia cards.
And the kid after that one passed out Anastasia cards.
It went on until the last student in class started passing out Anastasia cards that I realized I was the ONLY person in the ENTIRE GODDAMN CLASS who tried to give something thoughtful to each student. That was enough to crush my confidence until I looked down at the Anastasia cards which I was given ....
Every single one of them, every single fucking one of them, was a card of Vladimir, the big, fat fucking father in Anastasia
Out of twenty five kids, one of them (fucking ME) tried to give something thoughtful to the other kids and then the other twenty four kids gave me the SAME FUCKING CARD of the fat guy from the popular cartoon movie because I was fat.
I came in with twenty four, cellophane-wrapped, personalized cookies, and left with twenty four big fat fucking Vladimir cards, given to me SOLELY because I was fat.
That memory has never left me. One night, before my wife and I were dating, I drunkenly raged to her about that day. I forgot telling her about it and I was never reminded of it again after her and I began to date. I had her and everything about my wretched, awful life was evaporating into our twilight.
After our daughter was born, my wife told me this verbatim: "I bought the Disney classic box! And I threw out the one you hate!"
"The one I ... what?"
"The one you hate!"
"The Disney move that I hate?"
I tried to remember which Disney movie I hated ... I just didn't know what the fuck she was talking about.
"Yes, the one you hate"
"I don't hate any of them ..."
She wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me and then said something which jogged, stimulated, and moved every bit of my psychotic hatred out of my mind and into the wind.
What she said to me and the way in which she said it ...
"The one you hate ... Anastasia"
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