She selected photographs of herself that made her look the most thin. She had to squint at herself in the mirror, blur the edges, to find beauty in herself, and beauty was seen in the skinniness of the thighs, the waist, the calves, the ankles. She didn't like her breasts to look too large because it seemed to her to highlight the width of her shoulders. "Are you kidding me?" her boyfriend would say, and she would laugh. "You don't understand," she'd reply. She always wanted herself to be photographed from top to bottom -- "Get my feet in, too," she'd say -- but was always disappointed in the results. She would practice poses in the mirror, knee out, knee in, shoulders forward, back, to see what could be highlighted and hidden. When someone told her about a woman whose face had been mauled by a pet chimpanzee, she had asked "Was she pretty?" before she could keep herself in check. When a new woman was introduced on her favourite TV show, she wondered aloud why the character wasn't more attractive. "But I guess he isn't attractive," she says of a male lead. "It's so unfair, how men can be this and that, unjudged, carrying an extra fifteen pounds. Old newscasters are coveted, revered. Taken seriously. Who cares if he has a gut? But her, she has to be pretty." She scrolls through Pinterest, searches best jeans to hide fat thighs and is disappointed with the lack of results. "Ugh, they're all so thin, so perfect," she says to her boyfriend, then diverges onto a topic of a nuimage billboard she saw the other day. "It used some kind of funny twist of words on Merry Christmas, -- oh yes, Merry Christmas and a Happy New you, it said-- how offensive! A Christmas advertisement on getting your fat sucked from your butt," she laughs. "How ridiculous. Whatever happened to charity. Christmas really is dead. Something that used to celebrate the birth of baby Jesus is now a means for indulgence of the most selfish nature. What has this world come to? I can't imagine supporting a business like that." She shakes her head, switching to Facebook now. "Ah, the real world," she continues, turning the laptop so that he can see."Check it out: skinny Sal ain't so skinny no more." She laughs.