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| Strolling down the beach of Lake Huron over Labor Day weekend forced me to come to an inescapable conclusion: I, Alex Mattingly, am out of shape. I am not skinny, I am not fat, I am not wiry, I am not muscular. I am almost unrecognizable as a categorizable human body. My grandfather refers to me simply as "the thing that won't donate a kidney."
It wasn't always this way. I used to be fat. Being fat has many advantages, despite pop culture's stigma. The main one is that there really isn't any food beyond your appetite. A skinny person is forced to push away snacks and treats in order to retain their shape; if a fat one accepts such goodies it only furthers their goals.
So I was actually better off than I realized, for a while. Sure, I couldn't remove my shirt without jiggling like a bowl of jell-o balanced on an epileptic's head, but at least I pretty much knew where I was: Unattractiveville. It didn't help that I layered a healthy absence of melanin on top of all this. Despite their lies, women are not so unshallow as to find chubby albino's attractive.
About half-way through my sophomore year I suddenly lost quite a bit of weight. No one's sure why. I did start exercising a little, and I did go through a mild bout of depression (mainly over being repulsive to the opposite sex; ironic? Probably, but damned if I know how). Whatever it was, I found myself so much lighter I could hardly walk without launching myself through the air. It was as if I'd suddenly found myself on the moon, 1/8 my Earth weight.
What I had always taken for granted was that, somewhere under there, I had muscle. As it turns out I was wrong. I had been constructed entirely out of fat and tendon, and it was quickly becoming apparent that without fat to conceal it my tendon's were going to make it look as if my skeleton had been bound by electrical cable. I had to do something.
My instincts told me to buy a four pound dumbell, which I did and carried all the way out of the store before giving up on weight-lifting all together. Sitting in my room, staring at the ceiling, I realized I had one choice: to cover the tendons back up! Muscles be damned; what did I know about muscles? It was time to re-fattenize.
Which I did, semi-successfully. And since then it's been an uphill battle, trying to find a way to look buffer without stepping foot into a gym. I have in fact been known to open doors twice, just for the extra exercise. This is the kind of brain I'm stuck dealing with, while the rest of you run around getting sexy.
So today I propose a resolution: I will find a shape, and I will take on it's properties! Not with a gym. There must be some other way. But I will not rest until I discover how! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the next time I walk alongside the shores of Lake Huron, I shall no longer be referred to as "the thing", but shall be called "pale guy without his pants on." Because, gosh darn it, a guy would be a nice shape to be.
God bless America.
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**Alex Mattingly used to arm wrestle himself, having seen a cartoon in which it worked to build biceps. He now resorts to good ol' masturbation. | |
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