I am who I am. I am not fat but I am not skinny and therefore I am not pretty; I am smart but I am not brilliant and therefore I will not succeed.  My muscles are not the sweaty perfection of Anna Kournikova; I am just under the national average of 5'4", but I'm far less than the average weight of 150 that accompanies it so at least I’m not a failure in all respects. I talk to myself and I’m my own best audience.  I could read books from dawn to dusk and continue late into the night, tuck myself in to bed and wake up the next morning ready to do it all again.  I love poetry and peanut M&Ms [copyright].

I have a mother who thinks I should get A’s in four Advanced Placement Classes, stay away from chocolate and work out every day of the week in addition to playing a sport year-round.  I have a father who doesn’t really care what I do as long as I don’t get pregnant; they both love each other.  I have a younger brother who idolizes me, from the clothes I wear to the music in my CD player; he is a good kid and I love him.  When I come home from work, he runs up and hugs and me and asks how my day was, and I think he actually cares about the answer. He is thirteen years old, and we do not fight.

I have friends who make me feel stupid, friends who make me feel smart, friends who make me feel special and for that I am thankful.  I have never fought with my best friend of thirteen years about anything, be it guys or school or clothes or other friends.  I have a dog named Beanie who is almost fourteen years old, but he runs faster than I do and I am not a slow runner. Before Beanie we had a rabbit named Napoleon Bonaparte, but we called him Bony Bunny and this is ironic because he was actually very fat, perhaps fifteen pounds, though I cannot say for sure because I was very young when he died and everything seems bigger when you are small.
  

I am the angst-ridden product of a generation of diabetic-ally sugar-sweet "emo punk rock", diabolically trans-fattening fast food, and disgustingly obscene media coverage of everything from child-rapists to Jude Law's playtime with the nanny.  I hate the media but I love the 80s and boy do I love the 90s.  I love movies and music and being at home by myself.  I could live in flannel pants and tank tops, but I want to go to school in New England so this may be a problem.  I want to go to school in New England because it is a complete change from where I am now, I do not have to see my parents, and of course because the schools in the New England are generally pretty good.  I do not want an IVY League school because I am a not an IVY League student; I am good at everything, but I am not great at anything and only greatness is rewarded.

When I grow up.

When I grow up I want to be a secret agent like Jason Bourne from The Bourne Identity [copyright].  I want to fight the bad guys and win every time, against insurmountable odds and foreign police and I want to meet attractive guys with hott accents. I do not want to know the empirical formula of hydrocarbons that dissolve in CHCl3 at standard temperature with a molal freezing point depression of 4.68 *C/molal, or the area of the space underneath a parabola with the equations y-7=3(x-5/6) between the values of x = 3 and x = 8.  Why not?  Because I don’t care.  I hate chemistry and life sciences, I hate math and I hate English most of all because with English there is no black and white, there is no right and wrong and I like to be right beyond a shadow of doubt.

Even if no one finishes this… if they read the first sentence, skim the rest of the paragraph and skip the remainder, I will still be me because I am who I am.  End of story.