Look at infinity. Now back to me. I'm on a spaceship.
We tend to maintain a fairly chipper tone around here, with the occasional good-natured admonishment to engage in healthier behavior. We think it’s good to have fun when you’re doing healthy stuff, because it’s a heck of a lot easier to do something because you enjoy it first, and enjoy the benefits of it second. Mike loves doing stuff in his kitchen, which is why he’s got the fun recipes and his hand-made healthy lunches, which frequently make the office smell really freaking good. I get my fun from picking up and throwing around heavy things for its own sake, and seeing the numbers go up or down on my spreadsheets of doom.
However, this is not a particularly perky post, perhaps peppered and pockmarked perilously by pernicious pedagoguery. (I may be cranky, but I can still enjoy consonance and alliteration.)
So what is it that has my manties in a bunch?
This.
I debated with myself back and forth about even including that link, because it’s been aggravating me more or less constantly since I saw it the other day. It’s not just the image itself being called a WIN – I’d be a hypocrite if I said that, at one level, I didn’t find it slightly funny in the manner of a joke I make myself when I work out with other folks and challenge them to keep up.
“I don’t have to outrun the bear / zombie / velociraptor; I just have to outrun you.”
However, there’s a difference, I think. That distinction is what keeps a goodnatured, lightly-taunting exhortation to work harder and do better from being a disparaging and discouraging dismissal. Just like some folks’ bodies respond better to lots of cardio instead of heavy weights, so do some personalities get more engaged by a challenge than they do to an affirmation that “you can do it!”
Around these parts, we’re not necessarily the bunch of folks who were picked first in gym class, and maybe we were considered an easy out in kickball or whatever. We’ve put up with the marginalization and stereotypes, and despite the large strides towards positive acceptance geekdom has come in the last decade, there are still plenty of people who are all too willing to belittle and mock folks who may just be getting their feet under them when it comes to getting healthy. Simply scrolling down from that picture brings us ample evidence of that crappy attitude.
But, more than the simple offensiveness of the term “fatties” in the sign, there’s the institutional, inertial, ingrained antipathy that slithers to the surface in the comments. I know, I know, wading into the comment threads anywhere with a lot of traffic is tantamount to madness (or a perverse form of “asking for it”). However, rather than engage in a vigorous game of Whack-A-Troll (and, in all probability, being considered a troll myself, it was easier to just shake my head and seethe and know that, in all probability, I can outrun and outlift all the haters there.
And that means they will get eaten first. Bon appetit!
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Not to mention the fact that most of the aliens in the old 50′s movies had levitation rays. Run all you want, they’ll still get you.
At last! Someone who unsderatnds! Thanks for posting!