The Body Canvas.

Happy fathers' day, gang! It's the first weekend of my magical weight-loss adventure and tomorrow will mark my first weekiversary! I've seen some teeny-tiny differences in my body already -- nothing major, of course, and I'm not weighing in until next Monday -- but there definitely little, heartening changes. My face has slimmed out a little from all the water I've been drinking and I dig it!

So I want tattoos. Correction: I want more tattoos. I have one on my ankle (a nice, safe place for a tattoo if you're a Fat Chick) and I want dozens more, but it's tough to plan for permanent body-art when you're living in a body you don't particularly want to live in.

Now that I'm thinking about it, my size has always had some hand in dictating the way I express myself. When I was 13, I cut my hair really short and was mistaken for a boy, credit carded by a girl who, when I turned around, exclaimed, "Oh shit, it's a girl!" Yowch. Ever since then, I've kept my hair as long as it'll grow before becoming ratty with split-ends.

But hey, there's a big difference between a 13-year-old in shapeless parachute pants and a baggy Powerman 5000 T-shirt and a 21-year-old in curve-hugging jeans and cleavagy camisoles. These days, I could probably pull off short hair without looking like my own twin brother, but I won't try. Pixie-cuts are a skinny person thing, my brain tells me. If Kelly Osborne weren't famous, she'd look like a boy. Or a lesbian.

This whole fear thing, fear of trying and failing to look how I want to look, being mistaken for something I'm not (see: boy, lesbian), is for the freaking birds, man. And why is it that I look at skinny people with short hair and don't automatically assume they're gay-slash-quasi-transvestites? It says something about me more than anything else. It says that despite my feminine wardrobe and the fact that I was only mistaken for a boy that one time, I still care far too much about what other people think of me.

This whole experience is already putting me out of my comfort zone -- I would never ever have been caught dead in shorts in public before, just for example -- that I can't help but be hopeful that by the time a year's gone by, I'll have a whole 'nother comfort zone to call my own. That excites me. It exhilarates me. It motivates me. Stand back, bitches. My body will be my masterpiece.

Now to turn it over to y'all: What do you guys think about tattoos? Body decoration or body defamation? (I think you guys can guess where I stand...)