Tonight, Spaghetti Warehouse
The waitress rounds the corner after we've all finished our meals (and I'm still picking dejectedly at little pieces of withered lettuce). She spots my middle-most brother's meal (what eighteen minutes earlier had been a fifteen-layer lasagna). Then, "Wow, don't tell me that little boy right here ate the entire thing!"

My dad responds heartily, "Yep, he sure did. You couldn't tell by looking at him, but he sure polished it off!"

"I know! It's always the little skinny ones. They can eat you out of a house, and then they sure shoot up without an ounce of weight on them!"

Crunch, I bitterly bite into my sourdough croûtons and force out a lopsided, half-hearted smile.

I haven't eaten since three o'clock, but at that moment my jeans (up quite a few sizes from last year) feel too tight. Self-consciously I play with the straw in my water, poking at the ice cubes and lemon slices.




--A fifteen-layer lasagna is liable to have hundreds, if not thousands, of calories (Fazoli's six-layer one has approximately six-hundred and thirty of the little devils).

David -- the aforementioned brother -- eats this literal crap much junk a good eighty-percent of the time, and he's thin as a stick and in excellent health.

I meticulously count every calorie just to maintain an above-average weight. Even when I was at my thinnest -- a glorious one-hundred-and-fourteen-point-six pounds in January 2009 -- I still had bags of fat hanging from my stomach, arms and cheeks. It wasn't entirely noticeable, though, and so I could pass as having an "acceptable figure".

Look at me now, though, a former-beauty completely wasted, with an astonishing one-hundred-fifty-two pounds that bulges and sags and puffs. A one-hundred-fifty-two pounds that weighs down my feet as I walk and I run, that throttles and and slowly suffocates my self-esteem.



--And so I sit with these heavy thoughts on my mind, picking at the withered greens and sorry-excuse for a three-ounce chicken fillet, crunching on my croûtons that I normally would not eat and looking at myself in stride with my siblings: two twigs and a bloated whale.




Well, I guess there's only one thing to do from here on out: Suck in that stomach and suck it up.

And what does that mean? Well, I suppose it means that while my family is watching "Kung-Fu Panda", I'll resign myself to the basement in order to work on lonely, mindless reps of weights.

(Objectively, it's quite disgusting how selfish and shallow -- not to mention fucking bipolar -- I can be.)

Daniel Miller is at the head of a “Republic of Texas” movement to secede from the Union. However, Texas is not the only state that has tossed around this idea – it has been considered by more than a dozen states. In addition to these threats of secession, there have been many movements to get around federal laws and regulations, such as the “Firearms Freedom Act”. Those who advocate secession stress that they desire a “peaceful departure”. Vermont, one of these states considering a break from the United States, claims that “[Our people] would not only survive, we would thrive.”

Bullshit.

This isn’t an enlightened movement – this is absurd defiance. Perhaps the people so dissatisfied with the federal government forget that their opinions greatly influence who will become president – the Electoral College will generally put their vote with the popular vote. Perhaps those dissatisfied with the federal government forget that the voter turnout is ridiculously low – so perhaps if more of these citizens who feel “justified” in revolting had voted, there would be a different president. The reason many states want to secede is because they are not happen with how Washington is governing the country, and they don’t want to pay taxes – so instead of getting their issues on the policy agenda and working towards a positive change, they are going to run away from the issue at hand like little children. In any case, taxes are necessary and are going to be paid whether one resides in the United States or an obnoxious little “republic”. Things are rough right now in the United States, and that is precisely why it is now more than ever that we need to band together.

Grow up – be a part of the solution, not a part of the problem.