http://ping.fm/bnRal I <3 this image shared by the German Shepherd community on Facebook. I love it because of course I love animals. But it also fits in well with my last post.
Why is it acceptable to some of you to hate your brothers and sisters based on their size. Why do you feel it is okay to hurt the feelings of a person with a larger physique? You do not know that person's story. You do not know the reasons why they are the way they are. Hint: It ain't because they love KFC more than being thin and being considered "attractive" by modern societal standards.
There are a myriad of reasons why people are shaped the way they are. You don't know why a given person looks the way they do. And not being a stick figure does not necessarily make a person either "fat" or "unhealthy."
Even the "perfect people" in magazines do not actually look the way we see them looking. Don't believe me? Take a look at this. I guarantee, you will be shocked. It is a real eye-opener.
I do not care if you are thin or fat or somewhere in between. I will judge you on your actions, not your size or other aspects of your physical appearance. It is not that I am some sort of guru by any means, but I believe this would be a better world if we all do the same.
George Takei is awesome, but this joke isn't necessarily. It was on his Facebook page, which generally I recommend and love. And I love George, but I don't love size prejudice. Well, this is the comment that I left.
I heard about all the mean spirited comments regarding this photo and I have to say I am saddened. First of all, why all the hate towards people based on body size? We should judge each other on our actions, not on our appearance.
Secondly, what a boring world it would be if we all looked the same. Number 12 looks just like you. I'm not going to explain it. If you don't know what I mean, look it up.
Third, shaming never made anyone the way others think they should be. If it did, there would be no people with addictions, no fat people, no anorexic people, and everyone would be the same religion or lack thereof.
What gives some of you the right to believe that everyone "chooses" to be the size they are or have the appearance they have? I did not "choose" to be in an auto accident, one of the consequences of which was damage to my kidneys. I do not "choose" to have to walk with a cane. I do not "choose" to be the size I am, but it would hurt a lot less if there were fewer hateful people.
George, I love you and I don't think you are being hateful, but please think about it. You have never had issues with your weight. Size is not all about "sitting around stuffing your face constantly" or even not working out. There are healthy fat people and there are unhealthy thin ones. I wish I were a healthier fat one but due to my physical limitations I can't work out very much. And no, I do not eat constantly.
Please, people, think about the hate you spew. Is it really necessary?
I weigh 425 pounds. I am a human being. You may not find me beautiful, but it is not your right to behave hatefully towards me simply because you find me unattractive.
People dare to say that Amy Winehouse, who died today at the age of 27 from a drug overdose, was "a drain on the world" because she was a drug addict.
These people do not understand the power of addiction. It isn't fully understood in the medical community either. In some people, the satiation centers of the brain are triggered by certain substances, causing overwhelming cravings.
Amy was not able to gain control over these cravings. But this does not make her "a waste." She had a beautiful voice. She seemed like a nice person. She also seemed terribly lost in many ways. I am very sorry for her death, and for the difficulties she encountered in life.
I too have encountered people who have the audacity to tell me that I'm "a waste of space," a "drain on the world," even "bankrupting America." That I'm lazy and have no self-control.
Why?
Because I am a very large human being. I weigh 425 pounds. I usually walk with a cane, but when I am feeling particularly exhausted or having a significant amount of pain, I will use one of the scooters at the store, even though I *can* walk. I was in an accident eight years ago that left me with a spinal cord injury and impaired kidney function. Admissibly, a fair bit of my weight gain came from comfort eating once I could eat again. I was very depressed and simply did not give a shit about gaining weight. All I knew is that now I was in constant pain, incontinent of urine, and might have to be on dialysis for the rest of my life. The last thing I cared was staying skinny to please other people.
At this point I do not eat any more than other people. Some days I probably eat less. But nobody believes this because I am so big. I work out in a therapy pool. I can't do exercises that put a lot of strain on my joints. If a person can do high-impact, high-intensity workouts, good for them. I used to spend hours in the gym to keep myself below 200 pounds. Those days are gone forever.
So, it seems, is any chance of being left alone to live my life in peace. I would never go up to someone who was chain-smoking and tell them that their filthy habit was "costing me more money" or tha they should "just die." And I would never go up to a skinny person and tell them that their "anorexia" was going to end them up in the hospital and thus would "cost me more money." First of all, how do I know that they're anorexic? Maybe they are on chemotherapy. Maybe they have Marfan syndrome. Maybe they have some other disease. Or maybe they're just skinny. And how do I know what their eating habits are? I've known skinny people who can pack in more food at a buffet hour than I could think about eating in a day's worth of meals!
When I go to buffets, I tend to load up on salad, then have a good portion of meat for protein. But whose damn business is it if I decide I'd like a bit of macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes, or a dinner roll or two with that? If I weighed 125 pounds, no-one would be giving me the stink eye if I had twice the amount of food on my plate or if I was eating nothing but desserts. If you're fat you can be eating nothing but carrots and people will still assume that you're a glutton.
The bigger drain on the world comes from people who see the need to spew their hate and judgment everywhere.
You don't know Amy Winehouse. You don't know what drove her to addictive behavior. You don't know how it felt to be her, to live with the shame and the pain she must have felt. So don't judge her.
And you don't know me. You don't know why I'm fat. You don't know what my eating habits are. You don't know what medications I may be on or what physical reasons I may have for being the size I am. You don't know why I'm riding one of those scooters to do my shopping or to get down the street.
So stuff your judgments where the sun don't shine. Because they belong with the rest of your shit.
This Kenneth Tong douchebag must go! http://ping.fm/4xWGG Imagine promoting a dangerous disease. This hateful asshole does: anorexia.
This is what I said to Twitter:
Please delete this offensive individual, @mrkennethtong. He is not only speaking ill of large and heavyset women but is promoting anorexic behavior in vulnerable young girls. Anorexia is a dangerous and often deadly eating disorder. To allow him to continue this shocking behavior unchecked would be unconscionable.
So, Opal happened upon a photoshop array of pictures with the title "What if celebrities were fat?" The responsibilities from the peanut gallery were predictably inane, making me think that if the Earth were smacked by an asteroid, it would be for the best.
Here is a sampling of the stupidity:
dis pic actualie caused me 2 scream a little wen i saw it!!! DISGUSTING!
Opal says: the fact that you can't spell to save your pathetic life is disgusting, shit for brains. If a thought attempted to enter your head, it would die in that wasteland.
OMG.... she looks realy Mexican like she ate too many bean borritos.... this picture looks so real !!!!!!!! LOL- so Jessica u do not gain any wight or u will realy wish u were not Mexican..... jajajaja
Opal says: That's right, people, do not eat any "borritos," they will make you gain wight, and you will look like a Mexican. And if you gain wight you will wish you weren't Mexican. WTF? So, I guess if you're any other race and gain wight you'll be cool with it? And what the hell is wight anyway?
And...gasp...what is this? A spark of light in the darkness? Indeed it is! I love you, Ameya, whoever you are!
Wow, the most offensive thing i've seen all week. Besides what a stupid idea this is, the fact that many of them, even heavily photoshopped are actually just normal looking and not "fat" at all, shows how much you all don't care about these related issues. But, it's just a little photoshop, right? No young women will look at those pictures and notice they look like them and are being made fun of & hate themselves (or do drastic things about it), right?!
Mmhm.
(also, on a shallower note, it's REALLY BAD photo shopping.
And another bit of light in the darkness. Goddess bless you, Autumn Brianna Barnett
look people really need to stop making fun of and making a mockery of fat people it just not right!!!!! you know what heres my opinion BOTH fat AND skinny people are equally amazingly beautiful and just because you a little larger than other people doesnt mean your 'fat' you people are just compleatly sick and just because your 'fat' doesnt mean you dont have feelings if somebody made a mockery of you like this wouldnt you be upset?!?!?! you people truely disgust me.I'm twelve years old and I have enough brains to relize how harsh this is and its WRONG surely you adults should relize it to!!!!!!you should all take a good look at yourselves in the mirror!!!this is a horribly wrong thing to do!!!plus just because your 'fat doesnt mean your unhealthy!!!!!!!!!!These people are just as equally beautiful as you COULD be if youd stop making a mockery of others!!!!!!Im leaving off to say GET A LIFE AND GET A HEART!!!!!!
Here are my (Opal's) thoughts. I may not be a Rhodes scholar, but they are comparatively genius.
How about if we change the title of this article to SO WHAT if they were fat. Most of the commenters are damn idiots. Look at a person's character, not their size. This society is shallow and too obsessed with weight. No wonder so many people (mostly girls) have eating disorders.
It's Friday night, and as you will soon see, nobody parties like me! Yes, I'm here taking care of my 92 year old client, Mrs. M, for the night. There's food in the fridge, and, hallelujiah, Mrs. M's very cool computer geek grandson fixed the speakers on the computer so I can listen to music while I'm here. Sitting in front of the TV at night tends to put me to sleep. The old speakers would crackle and then one would go out, then the other would come back on and the first would go out. It was extremely annoying. I guess "fixed the speakers" is not exactly correct. He cannibalized the speakers from an old computer and tweaked the settings so they'd work on this one. Recession innovation at its finest! Mrs. M is deaf as a post, so it doesn't bother her that I have music or the TV on, and her daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter live in the basement. I just have to check on her every 2-3 hours. Sort of like having a baby. Sadly, some of us revert to an infantile state in our twilight years. For me, the idea of that happening is pretty terrifying. Mrs. M is end-stage Alzheimer's. She's nonverbal. She isn't hostile--she really doesn't respond much at all. I wonder how much she's even aware of. It's sad that some caregivers take advantage of frail people like this to use them as a punching bag. Sometimes it seems to me that employers, whether a facility or an agency, are more concerned with checking people's pee to see if they've smoked a little grass than they are with checking backgrounds to see if they're employing someone potentially violent.
I tend to listen to fairly mellow music when I'm here anyway. Even if Mrs. M is fairly well deaf, I like to have a calm vibe going. Maybe that sounds lame and new age to some of you, but that's what I feel is right. And if it works for me, that's what I'm going to roll with. For a while after my accident my cynicism took over and I was pretty much an atheist, but that didn't work for me any more than the dogma of the church did. It left me feeling empty and angry. So I decided to look into Buddhism and at this point I'm an agnostic with a Buddhist philosophy who believes there's something more than just being alive or being dead and rotting, but I'm not entirely sure what it is.
At any rate I sometimes think that Mrs. M's house is haunted. I feel a presence besides me and her daughter or her granddaughter and great-granddaughter. I'm pretty sure the spirits, if there are spirits, are Mrs. M's late husband and her late parents, all of whom died in this house. I think they're hanging around watching over her, possibly. It isn't scary but sometimes I'll feel something that makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. So if anyone was to ask me, "Opal, do you believe in ghosts?" I'd have to say, yes, I pretty much do, since I spend weekends with several of them. I'd like to try setting up a tape recorder to see if I can get an EVP sometime.
Mrs. M's husband died 40 years ago from heart failure. He was only 51, which is pretty sad. Her father was in his 90's when he died and her mother was 89. She inherited the house from them.
I wish I'd have a house to leave my kids, but I don't think that's ever going to happen. Most of the time I figure I'm lucky to have a roof over my head. Anyway, beggars can't be choosers. I've had a 3 bedroom apartment in the basement of a private home for 11 years, since my divorce. My kids are both in college now. My daughter comes back at holidays. She's still in-state but about 300 miles away. My son still lives here as he's going to school in town. It's not fancy and we aren't too keen on the tendency for spiders and such to get in, but the house owner is cool, she lets me have my cats.
I tend not to write much about myself online because I figure nobody really wants to hear about my boring life or my health problems. But I'm also pretty sure that nobody reads this lame-o blog, so I guess I should feel free to write what I want.
What I should be writing is my novel for NaNoWriMo so I'm going to get to that now. It's a lot more interesting than I am!
Oh yes, and I should do Mrs. M's laundry. Her daughter won't be too happy with me if I leave her mom without any clean clothes!
As RuPaul says, if you can't love yourself, how the hell you gonna love someone else? Also, if you can't learn to love yourself at whatever size, no amount of weight loss is going to be a miracle cure for the self hate. I have lived with self hate for years. I'm straight, so that was one battle I didn't have to fight. (It's ridiculous that sexual orientation has to be a battle for anybody.) But I have struggled with mental illness for as long as I can remember, and I am physically handicapped after an accident 7 years ago that left me with a spinal cord injury. At 44 I am incontinent of urine and have to wear Depends. I walk with a cane. My kidneys were injured and I do have to have dialysis although I am luckier than a lot of people as the kidneys still do function to a degree. Plus I am morbidly obese. Admissibly this is muchly my own fault as after the accident I became severely depressed and just didn't care about anything, particularly myself. I sat around watching TV and eating and wishing I'd die. At this point it is hard to lose the weight that I put on because I cannot exercise strenuously. I have radically changed my eating habits but I cannot live on Slim Fast (bleah!) So I am still morbidly obese. Here's a shocker for the "so concerned about your health" crowd--especially those that have the audacity to lecture someone they really don't even know! Fat people--get ready for it--KNOW THEY'RE FAT! We might even know that our weight is in the unhealthy range. We don't need to hear it from you. I always struggled with my weight. I was bulimic in my teens. If anyone ever told me that I would be morbidly obese I would have killed myself, because I did not have any love for myself, even when I was tiny--110 pounds--and still thought I was fat. I would give a lot to lose 100 or more pounds, but I no longer say I would give anything. Because there are things in this world a lot more important than being skinny. Such as being alive and being with people who love you and are really there for you no matter your size. You are a great writer, Emily. Thank you for making my day today.
Interesting! "What makes women extremely happy? from "Women Want More" by Michael J. Silverstein & Kate Sayre 1. Pets - 42% 2. Sex - 27% 3. Food - 19% 4. Shopping - 5% ...5. The economy - 2%
Here is my response:
Food would be above sex for me. Hell, even shopping would be above sex, and I don't like to shop. The only thing that would be below sex is the economy, but as far as I'm concerned, having a bout of intestinal flu would be better than the economy at this point. A good hardy laugh is even above food, though, and trust me, I like to eat!
A young boy enters a barber shop and the barber whispers to his customer, "This is the dumbest kid in the world. Watch while I prove it to you." The barber puts a dollar bill in one hand and two quarters in the other, then calls the boy over and asks, "Which do you want, son?"
The boy takes the quarters and leaves.
"What did I tell you?" said the barber. "That kid never learns!"
Later, when the customer leaves, he sees the same young boy coming out of the ice cream store.
"Hey, son! May I ask you a question? Why did you take the quarters instead of the dollar bill?"
The boy licked his cone and replied, "Because the day I take the dollar, the game is over!" :)
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