Deliberate Stupidity.

Some life advice said by Eleanor Roosevelt goes something like, "Do something that scares you every day." For the naturally cautious, it's an admirable sentiment. I've been about as diligent keeping to it as those people who write in their myspace profiles, live every day like its your last -- dance like no-one is watching. My short attention span and few opportunities to scare myself in safe, controllable nibbles tend to limit the resolution to the very occasional, metaphysical risk-taking.

If ego balances upon the pillars of one's conceits, mine is a birdhouse on a single post. I need to be smart. Smarter than you. If you're smarter, I'll assure myself I'm wiser. The average of my IQ and EQ beats yours. Equally, I can't look the fool. Dignity, or my personal version of it, is paramount.

That's why I don't dance. I fell in love with "Footloose" for about six months when 8 or 9. Not once was I inspired to dance.

My dancing isn't funny, not as a William Hung blithe dork parody, or even squirmy funny like David Brent. My dancing is painful to watch because I'm not enjoying it, and I'm painfully aware I'm painful awful. If I wanted to do something scary every day, I'd dance. It'd be as hard as it would be pointless.

I think the middle ground for a naturally safe person like myself (ie, coward) is to alter the words Mrs Roosevelt a little. For those of us without family wealth, unfamous and without a reputation to protect. "Do something stupid every day." Or even better, "Risk embarrassment every day." If the purpose of taking deliberate risk is to pick away at a general state of inhibition, then do something stupid is a good start. Then move up to something embarrassing. Then something scary.

I think the subtext of "something scary" for a fatty like me, most frightening is embarrassment. If I can take that first step and allow myself to look stupid every day, I become better liked. My constant intellectual flexing is like a guy with 20 inch biceps running around the room, challenging everybody to arm wrestle. Nobody likes that guy.

So maybe I start to enjoy being stupid. More people like me. More people like me, I feel free to do more stupid, embarrassing things. By now I'm not scared of looking stupid. Pretty soon I'm not scared of embarrassment. Maybe one day I won't be afraid to get on the dance floor, bust a move. Probably not.

Everybody's Famous!

I'm sitting on a couch at Bimbo Deluxe, pushing my brain through the ringer, hoping to squeeze on drop of mana from a brain which today has the verve of a dust bunny. I'm trying to write on this couch, flanked at right angles (mercifully facing away) by two more couches. Two couples take either couch within the space of a minute. As though I'm in a Bjork music video nightmare, these two couple take out cameras, huddle, and make the thing go flash. When you see them on MySpace or Fabebook, I'm the amoeba in the background on a mac.

I imagine when a young girlie posts those first photos of herself on MySpace, Bebo (or whatever), she imagines all the cool guys and girls around the world who will be looking at her, wondering what she's really like as a person. They call them social media now, but really, social media websites share more in common with the hotted-up V8 cars that used to drive circuits around my old home town of Moe. A MySpace page is the new vehicle kids use to show off, be the centre of attention. Like with cars, there's still a dick measuring contest. The number of friends replaced engine block cubic inches. There's still eye souring festoonments, bad music that supposedly tells you everything about me, cranked loud, and public conversations between idiots.

Then there's the photo gallery. Photos with friends tell people you have friends. It's important to tell the world there's people that like you -- enough to spend 5 seconds posing with you. Lots of photos with lots of people = lots of friends. Lots of photos with lots of attractive, cool friends = my friends are good looking, therefore I am cooler, better looking by association.

There's two reasons someone like me doesn't collect friends or post photos. One, I'm not a teenager anymore. Anybody my age with a often used MySpace profile is like that pathetic old guy at a club, wearing fashion he's fifteen years too old for, hoping to pick off a drunk 18 year old from the herd. Same goes for Facebook, really, when you think about it. Conversations on either are about as sophisticated at drunk pub blather, the music too loud to follow a topic further than two sentences, way too busy looking at tits.

Two: I don't photograph well. I tried online dating for a while. I now have great respect for the lighting and angles of those glamour photographers who do mid-morning TV advertorials. How do they take any photos of all those fat house fraus and for them to come out half decent? I must have taken a hundred shots, experimented with as many lighting sources and positions, until my numerous chins went away.

Online dating photo tips: beware of the photo shot from above, subject looking up. And ask how long ago the photo was taken. Watch Super Size Me. A girl can get down a lot of happy meals in a month.

It's not discrimination if...

it's justified.

Vilify a black guy for his skin:
a) is it changeable? No.
b) could it have been avoided? No.
c) is it harming him or anyone else? No.
d) is it actually bad? No.

Vilify a fat guy for his fat:
a) is it changeable? Yes.
b) could it have been avoided? Yes.
c) is it harming him or anyone else? Yes.
d) is it actually bad? Yes.

Should you say something? Maybe.

Loved ones want to protect those they love. The family of the grossly obese will cocoon their dangerously overweight son, tend to him. Support is promised if ever action is taken, but in the eternal meantime, they tend to him. And even should those loved ones speak the horrible truth, and say to this fat man he must change, those words carry no threat -- for no matter what, his loved ones will tend to him.

It's the opinions of strangers that matter; an acquaintance not a lifelong friend. One unloving truth spoken earnestly will carry the endorsements of years of unkind eyes, and can excoriate the tenuous veil of denial that perpetrates such hopeless flagellation.

Bad Habits are People.

I recently worked for a largish company, almost corporation sized. I did an OK job there, and for my first year I worked ridiculously hard. My bosses worked hard. The company did well.

Then there was a change of management. They seemed to be obviously quite unintelligent people, incurious, and definitely not hard workers in the coal miner sense of the term. What I'd later learn was they were smart, just not in a way I had been experienced with. Their intelligence was the ability to control their own job. They'd delegate all work to get done by others then presented back in form they could perform a 2 minute spit and polish and presented as their own. They define to their own managers what good job performance looks like, and make sure these are results that could be achieved without them bothering to turn up. Those targets are presented to their own managers in a format they could present to their managers. These targets are sold as almost impossible. If we come close, we've all done an amazing job. The CEO then tells the board the same, these targets are impossibly ambitious. If we get there, we've done an amazing job.

It's not hard to guess what happens. At the end of the financial year, beyond all expectations, the company has exceeded the targets. The management hits the town for strippers and mutual fellacio.

The other intelligence these managers have is to sniff out anybody who might threaten contamination of their safe biodome of bullshit. If it's a entry level employee, when the bullshit perpetrators are promoted ahead of them, they'll leave by natural attrition. Same goes for the lower management. As long as everybody plays along, stays on message, then nobody asks questions. Sometimes a competent manager is mistakenly recruited. When the competent manager attempts to effect change but finds all management content to believe the bullshit which has fattened them for years without effort, why would they listen? Either the competent manager leaves or learns to go along.

Meanwhile, back on the company floor, things are a complete mess. Nothing changes. And the dysfunction which has always existed will always exist. Waste continues, man hours paid to a zillion employees who serve no practical purpose, and opportunities are wasted because nobody is allowed to chase them.

I think back and all the difficulties and excuses I made to not lose weight was self fulfilling bullshit. Arguements of the fattened establishment.

Real change requires removal of bullshit. And usually the source of bullshit is people. If you surround yourself with nothing but the truth, sooner or later things must change