I hate you for making me fat and I hope you die a slow painful death

Last Saturday I came home from the gym and took my shirt off. I left my gym shorts and my cross trainers on and walked around my room topless. I felt incredibly masculine. I walked into the bathroom and stared at myself in front of the full-body mirror, my sagging man boobs and capacious tummy produced waves and ripples with every move that I made like the most amazing piece of Jell-O in the whole world. But I don’t care, I’m on an endorphin high; I still felt like I look like Adonis on a good hair day and I felt the urge to lift something. Maybe I could lift the refrigerator or the sofa. I could lift our dog whitey; maybe even lift both our dog and my brother Ryan for some sort of repeat performance.

Who am I kidding? I’m a fat son of a bitch. And I have boobs, how messed up is that?

I’ve observed this sort of thing happen before to people I know, and although I never thought that it could happen to me, I am now resigned to the fact that it’s a phase that all men go through. There simply comes a point in life when a man will, for the first time, come to terms that maybe, just maybe, he’s not a strikingly handsome demigod. This is especially true to people like me who haven’t ‘tested the waters’ as far as physically flirting with the opposite sex is concerned for quite awhile.

Prior to Saturday’s visit to the gym, I was in bitter denial. My perception of how I look at myself in the mirror has been severely distorted by a defense mechanism struggling to compensate for my obscenely low self esteem. To me, whenever I look in the mirror, I see a chiseled stallion capable of sexually pleasuring women for hours on end. I mean never mind the fact that I’ve spent more than a decade and a half consuming hundreds if not thousands of bottled or canned fermented malt/carbonated beverages, cutting a deal with Jesus to make chocolate syrup flow from the faucet instead of tap water in exchange for my soul (if you’re reading this I want my soul back, please), gobbling up several trillion assorted candies, insects, coins and everything else small enough to fit in my mouth.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, prior to Saturday, I had this remarkable ability to gaze longingly into the mirror and see an untiring sex machine instead of the multi-layered belly of a man that I have become; I know it’s something that I do on a psychological level but it makes me feel abso-fucking-lutely good.

Now that I’ve gotten rid of the thick veil of lies that I pulled over my own eyes for years, I realized that there is no use lamenting over the sorry physical state I have managed to get myself into. ‘No use crying over spilled milk’ the motto written beside the photograph of my then below 160lb self in my high school yearbook went. I can’t believe I was that smart back in high school too. I mean while everybody else put ‘Time is gold’, ‘honesty is the best policy’ or ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’ as their mottos, I managed to put six English words as mine. Beat that. Assholes.

I decided to channel all my efforts into something more productive than feeling sorry for myself; and what better way to do that than to arbitrarily blame all this fat clogging my arteries on a single person.

And yes I’m talking about you Mister San Pedro you asshole. Mister Steroid Mary, you sorry excuse for a High school P.E. teacher.

Admittedly, I was never good at sports. I didn’t care which team I was on or whether or not my team won as long as I passed the subject. I’m the type of person who didn’t give a rat’s ass about the rules or if they were followed. I was the basketball player who never looked at the scoreboard simply because I didn’t believe in keeping score. I mean if it were all up to me, I would declare both teams as winners which I saw as a good thing because then, there would be no losers which also means that there would be no athletic chain of dominance; a chain, if I might add, that I often find myself hankering at the bottom of.

I was the basketball player who cheated by shaving off the number of laps I make. I was the P.E. student who would rather fake leg cramps or a sprained ankle than participate in a game of Sipa; and I was the P.E. student who hides in a ditch next to a stinking gutter until the class is over and we could have our attendance checked.

But my disdain for any sort of athletic activity didn’t manifest itself until my junior year when we had to take up folk dance for an entire period. For some strange reason, guys outnumber girls with a ratio of 2:1 in our class and being that most Filipino folk dances require one to have a partner from the opposite sex; a lot of guys had other guys as partners.

Being the fat insecure kid I was, I got beaten by the Jocks and the other popular guys to all the girls in the class. Even Karen Simon who was heavier than me by at least a hundred pounds and had four breasts (two on her chest and two on her back) already had a partner. Although I’m pretty sure the entire experience wasn’t quite enjoyable for the guy, and he wouldn’t be able to sustain an erection for at least a month, at least he had a female dance partner. Me, on the other hand, am stuck with Felix Banzon who had sweaty palms.

Not that I didn’t try to ask a girl to dance with me mind you. In fact, I asked Karla Rivera to dance with me. Karla was the most beautiful girl in class and would end up being the prom queen. (And being gang raped while studying Biology in UST)

I don’t remember exactly how our conversation went but I’m pretty sure it went along these lines:

Me: “Hi Karla!�

Karla: “Go away! And take all your libag with you!�

Me: “That’s not nice.�

So Mister San Pedro with his infinite wisdom and sharp wit asks the guys to pair up.

 

Mr. San Pedro: “Okay guys who don’t have partners, pair up! Felix you can partner with Mike, he looks like a girl with his long beautiful hair don’t you think?�

Me: *blushing and tucking my hair behind my ears like an idiot amid the collective wooting of the class*

Mr. San Pedro: “He has long beautiful hair and boobs. Ugly Sagging ones. Kind of like the ones female mountain gorillas have.�

Me: “That’s not nice.�

Mister San Pedro, I know I’m getting paid at least three times more than you are now but that fact does little to quell my raging hatred towards you for inflicting a severe inferiority complex on me. I want you to know that I blame you for every molecule of cholesterol clogging my arteries; I blame you for all the nicotine lining my lungs. I blame you for the war in Iraq. I blame you for the atrocities perpetrated by the British (read: Spice Girls). I blame you for the bubonic plague. I blame my excessive masturbation on you and most of all; I blame you for making me fat and I hope you die a slow painful death.

I hope your car (if you have one, which I seriously doubt) gets struck by an airplane; A really huge-ass one like a 747 or something; you wouldn’t die, you’re seriously hurt but you’re still alive—until the airbag inflates and your head gets impaled on a protruding piece of metal kind of like how that dude died in Final Destination 2.