October 1, 2010
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Falling Behind
It may be wrong to discriminate, but I have never known any fat people who eat healthy. I know skinny people who eat junk but it rarely works in reverse. Fat families aren't fat because of genes; it's because bad eating habits are passed down through the generations.
Why do people eat junk? I could say it's because they're uneducated, but the resources are there for anyone who's looking. Education is not an authoritarian imposition; it's your own responsibility. You can't educate those who won't educate themselves. The Internet is jam packed with information for the willing to learn, and through some of it will contradict, any dummy will know the basic principles of eat your veggies, drink your water, sleep enough and exercise.
I don't mind as much when my Ultimate friends go to McDonalds because you do stupid things when you're young and when you haven't yet had a kidney failure (although that doesn't stop some people). Us suburban kids have been spoiled enough to have had everything given to us - why shoudln't we take our health for granted as well?
But CMNS 235 lecture is different. Dr Cross is short and smiley and not so intelligent as to overwhelm her chubby, grandma-like adorableness (she's about the same age as my mom). And it's hard to take her talk about the evils of corporate, conglomerate media seriously when she downs a Diet Coke at the same time, every week at lecture. My high school physics teacher was the same. He was as round as Santa Claus and he had the facial hair for it too. Both teachers are some of the nicest you could get, but somehow these brillant people with Masters and PhDs must fool themselves into thinking that their obesity can't be affected by their consumption of Coke, especially if the word "Diet" comes before it.
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Ever since my tomatoes and some others across the Lower Mainland (info from a local gardener network on Facebook) have died before fruiting due to changing climate conditions, I've been especially worried about how environmental degredation will inevitably make it impossible for me to stay healthy. I used to think that local farming could potentially sustain us once Monsanto succeeds in taking over world food production. It never occured to me that by then the weather could be so far whacked that it wouldn't be possible to grow things anymore.
Lately I've just been letting everything go. I've given up on trying to be gwai for my parents - I just don't get any return. This pessimism probably has a lot to do with my simultaneous giving up on the state of the planet. Throwing in the towel isn't as easy as it looks. I think it's far easier to stay in your momentum by smiling and by pretending that all your work is going somewhere, especially when you want it to so badly.
It isn't easy to live without hope, but it's hard to keep moving forward without it. And I do intend to keep moving, not because it'll make a difference, but because we have to. Optimism is something I need to find again.
Comments (2)
if somehow the world lost all its crops for just one year - that'd be all she wrote. the human story, we tend to look at it like a two dimensional painting when we step back and take the usual perspective. but it's really a single thread. one year of snip...and it's gone.
letting go means being able to grasp new things.