[367] Fatty Fatty Mo Matty

I keep reading about fat women.

Overwhelmingly, it seems like there is this push in the media or in the “independent blogger sphere” to start advocating for this kind of utopia. It's a magical place where people aren't made fun of. It's where you can be comfortable in your own skin. It's this loud drum beat of “respect” for people who are “different” from you. Apparently, being part of the moral aware elite is a place where we all just carry on like there isn't this giant insidious part of our natures that isn't an all-inclusive loving hippie.

I kinda hate everything. It's why I joke endlessly. If I can't laugh, I'm just going to be angry. I don't really care what the atrocity is, what the taboo's about, or how you feel about it. If I was making a joke, hopefully you got it, hopefully it won't be held over my head for as long as you're capable of holding a grudge. I think it insanely more wise to “write off” what I say as insensitive or maybe naive and go about your day, instead of trying to cut out this place for “the other” as if we don't conceive of it as the other.

Fat is easy. I have “fat” friends. Whatever it's supposed to mean. As if bodies don't have different shapes and sizes and as if I've cataloged everyone and decided upon a mean unto which I'm to judge them abnormally far away from. You know what's the least interesting thing about them? HOW FUCKING FAT THEY ARE! It means nothing to me. We're not trying to outrun a predator. If they're fat, if they feel bad about it, if they think I have something to say about it. IT MEANS DICK.

I'm semi-obsessed with the idea that I don't get “too fat.” This provokes me to play frisbee with people who will outrun me the rest of my life. This makes me spend half my food money on green leafy things that websites tell me will help me live longer. This makes me spend money on a gym membership that I fairly consistently try to go to. If and when you are doing less than those things, maybe you just don't give a fuck that you're fat. Maybe if/when someone is making a joke or “marginalizing your being,” you kind of asked for it.

Regardless of what you think about the people experiencing fatness, it's universally understood as not the ideal health wise. Whether it's the amount of stress on your body is caused, the kinds of diseases it disposes you to, or the general perception of the public being “not interested,” it's in the same vein of “stereotypes exist for a reason.” It's not out and out because you hate fat people or what they represent that provokes jokes or a “lesser” stature as far as what society is to perceive. Even fucking kid cartoons like Wall-E make an example of how “fat is bad” in the midst of a robot love story!

But I think this speaks to something bigger. The idea that we shouldn't point out or ridicule or be able to talk about what's “different.” Yes, different to you. No one is taking on the whole of humanity's perspective.

I think, if you can do it like a comedian, if you can do it like me, then you should be saying to yourself “who the fuck cares?” I don't actively discriminate or try to make people feel bad because of who they are. Do you think that's going to stop me from making the race, fat, or sexuality joke? Fuck no. I don't think it's more respectful or politically correct to pretend these differences don't exist or don't make you feel a certain way. How you come to the table relating the kind of feelings you have upon engaging with those differences makes all the difference in the world.

To me, it boils down to blaming people for how they actually feel. Instead of digging out what they think about their feelings, or what they can be made to uncover about the roots of those feelings, we take an instance and paint a picture. Like, who gives a fuck if Donald Sterling is racist? Especially if he's racist in his living room! I don't want an old guy who's easily assumed to be racist already have to kiss my ass because of how he thinks about black people. We don't get anywhere in our demonizing of him. We're, in a sense, trying to blame him for “all racism” as if it exists solely within the confines of old white men. It's disrespectful and ignorant of the real “problem.” I'd probably call it more “the nature of the human condition” before I offer it up as something that can be “fixed” or "punished."

My perspective is from the “top” of the food chain. No one is making fat jokes about me. No one is profiling me. I'm not ridiculed and kicked from my house because of who I like sexually. I'm not broke or from a group who's been historically oppressed. But you know what I did have? A bully. I had a totally fucking cunt of a mom who didn't just make fun of or give me shit because of something superficial. I got her every day carrying out her own insecurities on my childlike psyche in ways that continue today in how she influences my brother.

What's my excuse? Why can't I blame her and explain that I'm the victim and I should be able to explain how meaningful and loud I should be about my experiences growing up? I'm a fucking adult! I'm not a fucking bitch! I make decisions and have the capacity to recognize my feelings. You're picked on now? You think you have a better or worse idea of how to escape it or get over it than a child? And even if you manage to find enough gumption to figure your shit out, you think it's ever going away? Might it be wise to approach the problem from a way that respects the idea that there will always be bullies? You'll always be different. It doesn't matter whether you're a fat fuck or gay or whatever.

I hate “random” bitching and cries for help. Imagine we live in a world where most people don't give a fuck about you. And even the one's that do, can only do it to a fairly superficial extent. Stop pretending we're all going to one day hold hands and chant hymns of love. Stop thinking that someone's going to look out for you in a way that you're not capable of looking out for yourself. It wasn't so long ago that we had no objective means by which to judge anything. Do you think the evidence we have so far speaks in favor of being a sad whiny bitch about yourself or place in the world? As if we even need the numbers! Get the fuck over it.

[365] Swing Swing Swing

I suppose one way to say it is that I'm after “the drum beat” of culture. If we think of a university setting. Even with thousands of kids from all walks of life, whether you join a rally, run a naked mile, quietly do your homework, or network your way into a lucrative future, the underlying pulse, purpose, and utility of a university is to set kids up to “do better.” It's the place to learn academically and hopefully about your roles socially or in the realm of personal responsibility.

Now, arguably, what the modern university has become given the costs associated, the little reason to think you'll find work when you're done, and the corporatization of once essential public rights and goods, the needle has moved away from that underlying logic and expectation, but for the analogy, pretend we graduated before the mid/late 70s.

If you're constantly looking for culture, it feels natural to gravitate towards big institutions. “Corporate culture” is certainly a thing that ranges from open plan utopia-esc tech firms to Dilbert hellscapes. But you still manage to see hundreds or thousands of people plugged into a system where they start to act and think alike, to varying degrees, about the nature of their work and their role in it.

Religious institutions tend to have straight forward enough agendas. Those that want to quietly worship or believe in something garner their small flocks and maybe never step onto the world stage beyond a bake sale or charity event for a sick member. On the other hand, huge swaths of tea-baggers and evangelicals actively shut down women's health clinics in every spot but one city in the entire state of Texas...

But I only pick these to try an contrast the Bigger Conception of culture I'm after. I want the Human Drum Beat. I want, to as best as I can measure, the actual likelihood or possibility of getting the future I'm after. I know there are millions of people that I would describe as “bat shit.” But, I don't know for sure there aren't millions + 1 who could stand in opposition and “win.” More importantly, win in a way that sustains objectively positive and life-affirming changes beyond the whims of the bat-shitters.

Eventually, most retreat to the realm of anecdotes. I have as much a “Bloomington friend group culture” as much as I have a conception of “most people my age I've engaged with culture.” They both provoke me to say something about what I think the world would look like maybe 30 years from now if this is the level of circumstance and discourse I'm generally presented with. If my disposition is any clue, it's not simply less than reassuring, it's almost explicitly the opposite of what I think needs to happen in order for things to change for the better.

I've stated previously things to the effect of “I don't have hope” or “If I have hope, it's in the endless void of information and potential I have no real way to quantify yet.” What's notable about these statements is that they aren't deliberately trying to avoid snippets of positivity and potential I see every day. They come from staring into the void. They come from the struggle of trying to rip out of people something more resembling what I want.

Immediately I want to say, “It's not about what you want.” But if it's not about what I want, then who's it up to? I can draw a pretty clear line from many things I didn't want that I nonetheless have to live out the consequences of. I think my reflexive response is a symptom of the sickness of our current invisible culture. So then, it seems more appropriate, if not obvious once it's pointed out, of course it's about what I want. Perhaps, in a very important sense, that's all it's about.

So then I become intrigued by what other people want. Surely, I can't hope to achieve what I want without assessing their variables and seeing if there is a mutually beneficial plan or path of least resistance to getting there.

And here is where I run into the difficult music of the current drum beat. All I think I'm hearing is “main-tain, main-tain, main-tain.” You need to keep doing what you're doing to keep the bills paid. You need to buckle down and power through school. You need to keep certain discussions off the table because the sliver of happiness or expectation you've cut out of life is paramount. On the surface, this seems so taken-for-granted as not a problem, it's almost flatly ridiculous to even point out. So why do I think it's exactly the reason we're going to lose the game?

People want to “be happy,” no? I'm to call their happiness wrong? It's my place to pretend I know what's best for someone else? My advice, my perch, my street cred in the realm of thinking and bitching truly accounts of the nuance of all human behavior?

I'm going to skip over unpacking all that. It's simply the typical gut-reaction or classic kinds of responses when you talk of overhauling a system. For those who can't see through the superficiality in asking such questions, run along and play.

While I don't try to go out of my way to be an emotional bitch, when I do feel things they tend to swing rather dramatically. I'm still really confused about nights where I'm having an amazing time only to, in the last ten minutes, feel like I need to hit things and write something angry. My initial speculation is about how I tend to think of “the game.” Part of the reason I tend/ed to run so selfishly is that things become extremely simple. But what happens when you invite complications?

Say I wanted kids. What planet am I leaving them? What lesson about “politics” do I hope they get to fall asleep with at night? How soon do I want them to learn that “things just are this way” as if they would “just be” had I not made a decision to bring them into the world? The advice can't be, “hunker down and ride it out. I brought you here so you could feel desperate and cut off from your fellow man. I thought, when the world starts to burn, you'd get a kick out of how high the flames really got.”

Look at “climate skeptics” aka ignorant deadly cancers to society, if you want to see what happens when you Maintain at the expense of everything else. These are people that can't be persuaded to read a thermometer, or that ice melts. As you'll learn over and over again, they're “happy” to believe in their god, their “facts,” and carry on promoting their ideas because, after all, in their not-so-humble opinion, “it just doesn't seem right to them.”

Less dramatically, I think about the level and nature of conversation or discourse. When you maintain what you like to talk about, and nothing else. There are as many consequences of that waiting for you psychologically, financially, or otherwise as well. It's not the planet running out of oxygen, but I always, somehow, can find people who eventually notice it's getting harder and harder to breath about something.

I think it's increasingly unreasonable to assume, unsustainable, unacceptable to pursue, and unlikely to be achieved “what it is you want to do” at the expense of something larger. I recently heard something to the effect of, “show a man that he's part of something more, and he'll realize he's capable of anything.” I don't get the sense that people do things in service to the larger picture. Or if they're trying, it's not sufficient. I think there's great utility in even burdening yourself with things you don't yet know how to fix as opposed to “not caring” or “moving on.” It's like stepping in shit and then leisurely strolling through your house pretending not to notice the smell.

And here's the next point of “hope from ignorance.” In one on one conversations, sure, you get people who have read a lot. You get people with a cause. They use their anecdotes or their classes and have this motivation to step out there and change something for the better. It's where the most insidious facts about their effort lie. A burning building isn't quelled one bucket of water at a time. You need a fire hose, or ten. Sometimes, you have to let it burn out and build a new structure. The fire cares not about your good intentions, your personal resolve, moral certitude, or stress-reducing novel philosophical take on fires. It's just going to burn.

[366] Trying Too Hard

If there was a symbol for irony, I'd probably get it tattooed. (I googled it, there is...)

I'm lucky to have a personality and thought pattern that is bred from trying. Because not only are habits learned, but you can learn from your habits. Writing is a fairly significant pattern I adopted when I realized “sitting and thinking” alone wasn't doing me any good. What's interesting, even when it's in small doses, is the range of responses to it.

It's important, for this blog anyway, to lead with “I first write to help me think.” This means sometimes I say things in ridiculously abstract ways. Sometimes I have some theme on my mind that closely resembles a talk I just had or after I've contemplated some friends' life. It's generally not appropriate to air everyone's dirty laundry or to arrest my focus with arbitrary judgments I may have about the situation at hand. Even and especially if it would “help” me sound clearer.

Understandably, the facebook crowd has had more occasions to hear me write, bitch, explore, and ramble more than most. You already have something of a context for maybe a religion blog or thoughts on how friend groups and dynamics change. I'm not sure what to conceive of the weight that may play into how “understood” any one piece is.

I've lately been posting to reddit as well. Here, you get to be “scrutinized” by every teenager, internet troll, and wise old janitor...if you submitted your post at the right time and don't get down-voted to oblivion immediately. Of the different responses I've gotten, the one that confuses me the most is “you sure seem to use a lot of words to say an awful lot of nothing...what is your point?”

I hesitate to immediately believe I was writing for “no point” if only to qualify what I said above. I also think it fairly impossible to not take even a single sentence and maybe put it in quotes and say something like “what does this mean, or why did you phrase something this way” before you present the idea that I basically had nothing to say. I suppose I'm sensitive to this kind of criticism because it's not really criticism. It's simply how we out of hand throw away what someone else has said.

I choke on irony not only because I say things like “I'm looking for feedback” and get the oddest, dullest, least helpful kind you can imagine. I also say things like “I'm looking for a conversation” and get the oddest, dullest, and least helpful people as the most eager to come to the table. Now, I'd be easily convinced that maybe I just speak in arbitrary and unhelpful ways were in not for, essentially my small facebook friend crowd. Not in how you respond to blogs, because that's not so much people's style, but when we manage that in person digression thing.

The problem is in knowing how to fix some of the problems. I talk context. I can't get the old vibe I had at parties without the kinds of things I could only fit into a house. Also, I need a house. I talk about changing the nature and purpose of conversation. I don't yet have the data to make it look and sound like what I want it to. I understand there's a marketing problem in how I relate my “relative solutions” to things. So I explore how I would potentially talk about those things to the average Joe who literally doesn't give a fuck about me or care to understand where I'm coming from.

It's not always an argument. It's not like writing chapters in a book. And it's definitely not for people who aren't adept at sussing things out or willing to pursue clarification. I understand what I'm asking for and how I've chosen potentially less than wise avenues to get there, but if it weren't for the array of feedback I've gotten over the years, I wouldn't know that there's room to get meaningful reactions and conversations regardless. Or in keeping with another theme, in spite of the ignorant assholes.