Somewhere around my fifteenth year, I sat at the kitchen table one evening, doing my homework and eating a frozen piece of banana cake. My mother entered the room and looked from the cake to me.

“What?” I asked her.

“It’s not that you’re fat, darling,” she explained, “You’re just…flabby.”

My mother is generally oblivious to anything I do, say, wear or inhale, so she is constantly endangering her heart’s health by noticing my tattoos, piercings and the like up to 12 months after their advent.

Last night she picked me up from the airport and immediately exclaimed, “Annik! You’ve shrunk!”

Pleased that she had noticed my new sleek figure, I proceeded to explain my recently tweaked workout regime and how I have been hauling arse out of bed at 5:30am every morning to exercise, but it has obviously been worth it because now I am thinner and hot.

“No,” she interrupted, “I think you’ve gotten shorter. Are you slouching even more than usual?”

I once dated what I thought was a smart guy. On our fourth (and final) date, we were out having drinks when I made a joke about being a supermodel.

“Oh my god!” he snorted, “That’s hilarious! I mean, you’re gorgeous, but you could never be a supermodel!”

I know that, cocknose.

When I was nineteen, I shared a house in West Ryde with a twenty-six year old tradesman. This meant that 80% of the fridge space was taken up by beer and the TV could always be heard from halfway down the street, but apart from that, he was an acceptable housemate.

When summer began, my housemate’s co-workers started coming over regularly to work on their cars in our large backyard. Undeterred, I continued my strict sun-bathing regime and spent every afternoon lying on the trampoline in a bikini. Gradually, I gained the attention of one of these guys, and once I knew I had it in the bag, I told my housemate to hand over my phone number.

“Why would you want to date him?” my friends asked, “He’s a tradie.”
“Don’t be so judgmental,” I scolded, “Just because he breaks stuff for a living doesn’t mean he isn’t intelligent, charming and interesting.”

A week later, I received the following text message:

Hey, how rya? Do ya wanna go out 1 nite dis week n grab sum food n shit?

I sunbaked in the front yard after that.