I remembered the date, and I just had to blog today. However, I have to go get my pizza. I'll be back later, maybe, if I remember. Briefly: today I helped out a friend's mother with some household odd-jobs (destroying drywall, plywood, un-finishing a basement), and drove to chantilly to check out a car for my sysadmin.
I must go.
I return.
I'm really tired, actually. I managed to save a few slices of pizza for tomorrow morning. I think I might go to bed, actually. Or at least leave the computer.
Nice clothes only draw attention to the fat. The best thing a fat person can hope for is to blend into the background as much as possible, because the first thing that comes to anyone's mind when encountering a fat person is 'THIS PERSON IS FAT.' their fatness defines who they are, and supersedes any other traits s/he might have. If the fat person wears fashionable, colorful clothing, then people will notice that fat person more, and consequently his/her fatness. They won't remark on the nice clothes after they've been distracted by the mounds of fat, but the nice clothes will draw the eye in initially. Fat people, if they want to avoid scrutiny of fatness, should employ solid-color t-shirts, nondescript haircuts, sneakers, white socks, and khaki shorts. The goal should be to become, as much as possible, a background image. This is the best hope for the fat person. Of course, the best thing is to simply stay inside, but if this isn't possible, the next best thing is to wear clothing that is as nondescript as possible. Anything to avoid drawing additional attention to one's self, because believe me, there will be already be attention on you.
People carry a contempt for the obese that exceeds any other contempt, even for other races, genders, or sexual orientations. This is, as far as I can think of, for two reasons. First of all, fat people are consuming more than their share of resources, and this produces resentment, if only on an unconscious level. But the most prevalent reason the obese are so utterly despised beyond any faggot, nigger or slut is that obesity is seen as a moral failing. The obese are seen as failing to exercise their free will in making the proper choice (not to be fat). Fat people are fat because they are lazy and weak, a laziness and weakness that obviously runs over into and causes failure in other life-areas such as their job, personal relationships and finances.
And I can accept this. I can accept that I am fat because I am lazy and weak. But 'laziness' and 'weakness' are traits, part of my neurological and psychological makeup. Ultimately, all events are traceable to circumstances that gave rise to them -- a cause, or causes. This is the structure of the universe, which is not open to debate.
Furthermore, if for some reason I was to lose weight and become slender and lovely, then this event would have been pre-ordained by all other existing structures of reality, and not because I suddenly mustered the 'will power.' every event had to have happened the way it did -- there is no such thing as probability. With the proper analytical tools, everything is 100% predictable, most easily closed systems.
For the most part, fat people are fat, thin people are thin, and that's the way it is. The vast majority of thin people aren't thin because of some herculean effort of will-power (the will to power?), but because they naturally fall into those patterns of consumption, exercise and metabolic rate that lead to slenderness. On the other hand, the obese aren't obese because they choose to be obese, but because particular sets of psychological and genetic circumstances cause overeating behavior and retention of body fat.
I won't argue determinism vs. Free will any more, because it's a dumb argument that is irrefutable on either side. I'll just mention that free will is an illusion, and leave it at that. If you disagree with me, you're a christian fanatic, an american capitalist, or both. Fuck off and die.
Anyway, fat people all know the disastrous consequences of their behavior: socially, health-wise, in terms of personal comfort, etc -- their lives are ruined, and they are all aware of this. Doesn't it stand to reason that if a fat person COULD become slender, s/he WOULD become slender?
Happy birthday, mom!
I got her a card and some flowers. She'll see them tomorrow, when she returns from minneapolis along with my aunt, who might be staying with us for an extended while.
I'm back, sort of. It was nice to take a break from the computer and join the real world for a week or so. My feet hurt a lot, since I haven't really been on them in about two years. I say 'sort of' because I'd like to work towards some kind of compromise between sitting in this chair during my waking hours and avoiding so much as touching a computer for fear of infection. One thing that I notice, unfortunately, is that my writing muscles have become sort of weak. I guess this is to be expected. I think I'll maybe check email/write in my blog every other day or so. That might be good. I have a rare opportunity here to use a computer as little as I want to -- most others are forced to use one every day. In a certain sense, everyone has the same job: click and roll the mouse and clack the keys on the keyboard.
I was mildly disappointed by how few emails I received during my week-long sabbatical. But, I suppose, this isn't a big deal. I really enjoyed having my friends in town for james's wedding, and now that they're gone, it's sort of empty and quiet. I called serena and alpesh today, and pesh came over along with his dog. In fact, I hadn't planned to return to the computer until either tomorrow or the day after, but I was lonely, and wanted to log on to SDF to check the bulletin board and chat in the chatroom a bit. Both were sort of unfulfilling.
I realize now that I probably should have mentioned on my blog that I would be taking a week-long break from the computer, just for style considerations. I did discover a few things:
Computers are fun, and I do some worthwhile things on them (write, read, interact with people). But I was definitely getting to the point where I was just using it for the sake of using it. Every other day for email and blogging really does sound reasonable. I wouldn't mind leaving AIM up and running all the time if it didn't flash at me in the taskbar when messages are sent to me. I tried to fix this with regedit, but was unsuccessful. I'm lead to believe that perhaps trillian allows the user to control the number of times a new message flashes at you, but trillian doesn't allow for groovy profiles. Compromise is the nature of life.
My sikh neighbors are pounding on some tabla or something and yowling in punjabi; it's mildly distracting. Perhaps I should combat it with some fuzak.
I have a few theories and ideas that I jotted down in my day planner over the course of the past week for latter bloggage, so here goes.
Above: the younger barbara bush (right) rather strikingly resembles air force amy of moonlight bunnyranch fame (left), at least facially. I noticed this during the republican convention, and made a note of it.
Just as the republican party line asserts, the democratic party really doesn't have a positive message. This is one of the big selling points of the republican party. To be conservative is to believe that everything is fine (which it very well may be for the wealthy and the white), and that nothing needs to be changed. Or, that everything isn't fine, but the reason for this is that liberals have fouled up the natural order of things and that we need to regress to an older state of affairs. Whether or not everything is fine depends on who you happen to be, and what your situation is. Everything is fine for donald trump, and donald trump works hard to convince the middle class that they're fine too, so that the order that enabled donald trump to climb to the top of the heap isn't disturbed by people who think they might be getting the short end of the stick.
Historical revisionism is a manifestation of the postmodern mind-set -- that what we consider objective truth, reality and history is dependent on texts that fall apart under structuralist and post-structuralist analysis. This is problematic for politically charged issues like holocaust revisionism. But truthfully, the holocaust might have 'happened,' or it might not have -- if we're going to accept textual subjectivity as underpinning our linguistic realities in the framework of postmodern epistemology, then we have to apply this approach to everything, including the holocaust.
What is postmodernism? I'd say that it was, as I inferred in the above paragraph, the inherent uncertainty of textual knowledge, and by extension, all knowledge and truth. It's sometimes problematic that postmodernism, structuralism, post-structuralism and deconstructionism came out of literary criticism -- words do not a reality make (even though words do a memory make, maybe, which is why postmodernism fits so readily into approaches to history). So, there's a sort of nihilistic 'impossibly or knowledge' dimension to it all. But that's not everything -- po-mo is also big on inherent contradictions and logical paradoxes. If something doesn't make sense, or somehow confounds logic, or is grossly out of context, then it might be described as postmodern. For example, a junked car sitting in someone's living room: tres postmodern, non? I guess postmodernism is much like the offspring of dada and epistemological nihilism (as opposed to ethical nihilism). Anyway, that's all I got.
Speaking of ethical nihilism, I was reading a bit of c.s. Lewis the other day, and he's a very lucid, pragmatic, friendly writer -- he reminds me in a lot of ways of noam chomsky, except with a pipe, slippers and twinkly eye. Anyway, I'm less convinced than I was that there isn't such a thing as an 'absolute human morality.' it's possible that I just have my semantics confused, though. I still don't believe in good and evil, but I think maybe there are some universal human values that everyone adopts, individually or in a society, just so they can properly survive. People need food and shelter, and these necessities demand some mutual cooperation and standards of behavior. Presto! A morality is born out of biological necessity. Good and evil seem superfluous, and even counterproductive to such a survival-based 'morality' (or whatever you want to call what humans do in order to make sure they stay fed and warm). So, nietzsche's moral relativism (if I was understanding that correctly, and not oversimplifying, which I'm wont to do) is now followed by a big question mark, which is, of course, the postmodern way to go about things. Q.e.d.
That is all. I'm going to seek out some food. I guess I'll log back in the day after tomorrow, maybe, depending on how I feel about things, and blog again.