I was not a very active child when I was young, and it showed through my weight. My mom and my brother wanted me to work out, so they kept scheduling these jogs around the entire neighborhood. And, like the lazy killjoy I was, I refused to run. So, two blocks away from our house, my mom and my brother pretended to go run ahead and abandon me.

There’s this small park in the neighborhood a block away from our house. It’s basically just a large square of green grass bordered on three sides by dirt paths and metal benches covered in dried bird poop. Our neighborhood was a giant slope, and our house was at the top. My brother and I, with friends, had a game where we’d take a scooter, go as fast as we could down the sidewalk, and then jump onto the patch of grass that some real estate idiot called a park.

When my mom and brother “left” me, I walked all the way to the top of the hill on the side where the park was located. Then I faced down the slope and started running. Once I reached the park, I launched my chubby eight-year-old body onto the park and tumbled across the grass like a runaway barrel.

Then I just laid there, unmoving. I was pretending that I hit my head and died. My mom and my brother came up to me a couple minutes later, when they realised that I wasn’t getting up. As soon as they came close enough, I jumped on them like it was Halloween and I was a person who didn’t know the definition of mercy.

The point of this story is: don’t make me work when I don’t want to.