Ever since I can remember, my cousin Moonwater and I have had a sort of “sibling rivalry”. When I moved in with Moonwater and her family when I was six, she was jealous of me since her mother always doted on me,I being the baby of the family. Moonwater’s friends always paid more attention to me since I was yabanci, a foreigner, and new in town. They admired my pale skin and when I mispronounced words,they thought it was comical. Like one time when I went with my aunt to Asilar Gunu:”Shot Day”, when the nurses went to rural areas to provide aid to the needy. When I got on the intercom I said Asiklar Gunu:”Lover’s Day”.

Whenever my aunt would get mad at Moonwater, she would use me as a model. “Look,your cousin reads so many books! Why don’t you ever read, instead of playing on the computer all the time?” or “Look at how your cousin finishes her plate. You need to eat more-look at you,all skin and bones!”

Let me reveal to you one important fact:my cousin Moonwater is five-foot-eight and a size six. I am just under five foot and a size twelve. Put us together, and you get Gandalf next to Frodo.

I guess you could say that once I hit puberty and my body began to change, the jealousy between Moonwater and me grew. Except now I was jealous of her. Moonwater got straight As throughout high school and graduated from the IB program. I dropped out of IB. Moonwater studies all the time, and is now in college with a major in genetic engineering. Every time my aunt calls our house, she tries to motivate me to study more(“Look, your cousin Moonwater has been studying for eight hours straight!”). She wears cool punk clothes,but then she looks good in pretty much anything she wears. It should be no surprise then that whenever we went to the pool,boys whistled at Moonwater and not at me. Even when I sucked my belly in,they never paid me any attention.

My mother says that boys don’t like skinny girls. Pretty much everyone I talk to says that boys find nothing more attractive than confidence. Why is it then that whenever Anne asked my dad how she looked, he’d tell her she looked chunky;that her clothes were too tight? When some people from a diet agency went to a fair at Anne’s gym, she was the first to sign up. Then, she’d talk on the phone for over an hour explaining her struggles with weight loss to the diet counselors, as if they actually cared. Anne tried the diet of protein shakes for a month, and was amazed at the results. Then, something remarkable happened: she gained back all the weight she lost. Now, she is considering going back on the diet because “It is healthier as drinking a protein shake keeps you from binge eating.” Better yet, Anne is trying to convince me to replace just one meal a day with a protein shake. So much from graduating from college Summa cum- laude.

I would rather eat hamburgers and be portly than drink wheatgrass shakes. If you are a cow, wheatgrass is fine. But as a person, I need meat. Simple as that. Moonwater used to eat french fries at Burger King, back when she was twelve and the chubbiest ballerina. I liked her better back then.