I Have Never...

So I've been meaning to write a new post for weeks now, but Things Keep Happening and whatever I was going to say gets eclipsed by whatever else is in the headlines.  I have like three started and discarded posts just in the last month.  Maybe at some point I could get them together and publish them under Things I Might Have Said If They Had Still Been Relevant, or something like that, but I doubt that anybody would be interested.  Anyway, there is only one subject at the moment and it's about people with a skin color different than mine being murdered by police, in part because of an insidious, systemic racism that's been with us since essentially forever.  And what we can do about it.  Yes, even us pale folks.

I dunno about you, but when I was in school, we learned basically nothing about African-American history. Zero. Zilch.  Oh, we talked about slavery for about five minutes in the lead-up to spending three weeks on the Civil War, but it was like, "Yeah, there was slavery, and it was bad, and then we had the Civil War and after that there wasn't slavery anymore, so we're going to spend the next week talking about the Battle of Gettysburg."  I majored in English in college, at an allegedly liberal institution, and out of all the literature classes I had to take (and there were a lot), we got assigned exactly one book by an African-American author.  One.  Seriously, just one (and it was Beloved by Toni Morrison, and if you haven't read it yet, what's stopping you?), and when it came time for the final exam, there weren't any questions on it because we ran out of time to discuss it in class. (Sigh and eye roll here.) And forget the civil rights movement or the March on Washington or Martin Luther King.  None of that ever even got mentioned. "Anything that's less than fifty years ago isn't history, it's current events, and so we're not going to cover it in a history class," said a professor of mine.  I mean, I guess I could have pointed out that it's still going on, but that would have only proved his point.

So everything I know about African-American history, which is still not a lot, I learned as an adult.  The books I've read by black authors (most recently: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, and I could not. Put. It. Down.) I read as an adult.  And I'm not sure adult brains are the best, most fertile ground for learning essential truths about humanity, though I guess they are better than nothing. I'd like to think the schools are doing a better job with this stuff now than they were then. 

For the record, I grew up in Utah, and at the time, there were no black people in Utah.  Well, I'm sure there were, somewhere, but I didn't know any and nobody I knew knew any.  (I might add here that the Mormon Church didn't let black men into the priesthood between 1849 and 1978, and I was nine in 1978, so for the bulk of my childhood, African-American folks should be forgiven for suspecting that Utah might not be the friendliest place they could settle.  They would also be right.)  I made my first African-American friend when I was about eleven.   I find this both pathetic and sad. This is also part of the whole insidious systemic racism thing.  Just because all the segregation laws have been thrown out doesn't mean segregation doesn't still exist.

Also, there's this thing called white privilege.  That is, the things that white folks get because they are white that black folks don't get because they are black.  There's a lot to say here because it covers so many facets of life, but I'll try to hit some of the big ones:

• I have never, in an emergency room, been asked if I'm using illegal drugs, or for that matter, had a doctor accuse me of lying.
• I have never, in a workplace environment, had to hunt high and low for any colleagues that might look a little like me.
• I have never, when pulled over by the police (three times that I remember), worried that I might not make it home alive that night.
• I have never thought to take my small child on a walk with me so as to look less threatening and therefore less likely to be shot or have someone call the police on me.
• I've never been asked about my religion as I was about to board an airplane.
  
• I've never had a delivery service refuse to come to my neighborhood. 
• I've never felt like it was necessary to tell my kids how to survive an encounter with the police.  (Okay, I don't have any kids, but if I did, I would think it part of my job to teach them how to stay alive from day to day, and that's just not something I would think to bring up.)
• I have never been fired from a job or not hired for a job because I had the "wrong" first name or skin color.
• I have never had anyone tell me I need to leave a certain neighborhood by sunset.  And yes, for the record, I do live in Texas.

I mean, I could go on.  Lots of people have, and a lot more eloquently than me.  But the thing about racism generally is that it is so insidious.  It permeates every facet of life.  It's in our faces all the time, but most of the time we don't see it.  So what can we do about it?

Well, in a word, lots:

• Here's 75 things white people can do to for racial justice.
• Here are four steps we can take to fight racism.
• Here's a book we can read about why this is so hard for white people.
• Here's another book we can read, especially for folks in the legal field. 

But by far the biggest, most important thing we can do is to listen.  Be willing to let go of our preconceived notions about racism generally and white privilege in particular.  Be willing to listen to people who are actually affected day to day.  And work to change those things that we can change, depending on where we are and in what field and in what station of life.  I had to twist a few arms to get my book club to read The Underground Railroad, but I did it.  It is a small thing, but small ripples of air spilling off the Western Sahara can start swirling around the Canary Islands and eventually become hurricanes. 

Oh, and in case I haven't mentioned it yet, VOTE.  The whole ticket, not just against the Cheeto in Chief.  The small races for City Council and State Senate and who should be judge of what court have a lot more to do with people's day to day lives than what happens in Washington.  They're also the races where your vote really counts, because these are the races that are often won or lost by a handful of votes. And if you don't know who's running for what on your local ticket, this is a great time to find out.  You have five months.  Get busy. 

And The Quarantine Rolls On

Tomorrow is Joan's birthday and we've been celebrating all weekend.  Well, of course we've been celebrating all weekend.  The older you get the longer your birthday should last, and when it comes  to one of those big "zero" or "five" birthdays, the party should never end--at least until everyone's either passed out or gone home, the lead guitarist in the band has broken a string, the margarita machine is out of tequila and there's maybe only one bowl of chips left. This isn't a "zero" or a "five," but it's still a birthday, so of course there were presents and cake and a longish session of D&D.  (Yes, I've finally started playing D&D.  It only took me 50 years.  What's more, I've started looking online at nifty sets of dice I might like to own, which is a sure sign that you're hooked.)

Anyway, we didn't really have anybody over because quarantine.  We play D&D via Skype which, unlike Zoom, doesn't kick everybody off after 40 minutes.  That's good because our D&D sessions can last upward of five hours.  They'd go on later still if my circadian rhythm isn't still set for early morning, despite almost seven weeks now of not being able to go to the pool.  Yes, my chlorine content is at critical lows, but there's nothing I can do about it.  Even if we started swimming again tomorrow I couldn't go.  I can't be in a 2 1/2 meter wide lane with three or four other people all panting for breath from swimming 4 IMs in a row and expect to remain uninfected.  Seriously, I have asthma and Joan has underlying conditions, too, and if one of us brings this thing home, both of us are going to get very sick.  That. Can't. Happen.  I won't try to re-establish anything like a normal routine around here until the new case count is not only down, but dropping steadily for at least 2 weeks.  Right now it's doing the opposite, at least in Dallas County. And so the quarantine rolls on, no matter what Gov. Abbott has to say.

Fortunately, both of us are still employed, and more fortunately, neither of our bosses has said anything about either of us moving back to the office.  My boss is being pretty reasonable, and even if he wanted everybody back at the office tomorrow, I think I could present a fairly compelling case for continuing to work from home.  The Dallas Public Library, on the other hand, just furloughed slightly less than half of the total employees. (Not Joan, though.) The furlough lasts until August 1, but when the library reopens is up to the City Council, and that august body hasn't been terribly forthcoming with information.

It's been a lot like that movie Groundhog Day.  We wake up every morning at roughly the same time and do certain things in a certain order. By about 8:30 we're both sitting in the kitchen in front of our respective laptops.  Then it's law firm this and law firm that for the next nine or so hours, followed by the making of dinner and the cleaning of kitchen and maybe some programs on the All Paranormal, Tedious Reality and UFOs Channel, formerly known as the Travel Channel.  Or I come back here to my laptop and maybe write something.  Once in a while we leave the house to get groceries or prescription meds.  That's about it, though.  (I am extremely annoyed that the price of gas is so low and I haven't been able to buy gas because there's too much in the tank already.)  I have a temporary crown that's been needing its permanent coronation since mid-March. According to Joan, I also need my hearing checked. (Let's be honest here; does anyone out there who's actually had their hearing checked ever do it for any other reason than that their spouse insisted? If so, write to me.  I'm taking a poll.) I don't think I can get my hearing checked until this is all over.  And I don't know when this is going to be all over, and I don't think anyone else does, either.

One thing I'm reasonably sure is going to happen: The number of coronavirus cases is going to start shooting up again, and maybe get a lot higher than it is right now, because a lot of states, like Texas, are "reopening" way before it's safe to do so.  If enough people get sick and emergency rooms and ICUs start running close to capacity, we're all likely to be ordered right back into "sheltering in place", only for a longer period of time this time.  Figure another sixteen weeks or so, just based on how long it typically takes an epidemic to peter out. And there won't be a vaccine for another year yet, and they don't know who's going to be able to get it once there is one.  And let's just add to the pile of uncertainty by stating that there's no evidence that getting the coronavirus means you're immune from getting it again.  There are multiple strains of it now, and it's possible you can get strain A even if you've already had strain B.  Kind of like the common cold or plain old flu.

Se we may be here, with our respective laptops, for quite a while.  This is the first time I've had office mates that purr.  The commute is awesome, except that one part of the hallway where the traffic always piles up.  And I don't get in trouble for calling my wife during work hours because she's, uh, sitting right here. I don't have to be anyplace after work.  I don't have to color my hair or style it.  I don't have to wear makeup or sunscreen.  I don't have to get up at four dark thirty to go to the pool, though it's such an ingrained habit I usually wake up then anyway. And I'm quarantined with people I like, including two that have fur.  So silver lining, sort of.  We have been incredibly lucky.  There are so many ways that this could be worse.

Which brings me back to something Buddha said; "Your problem is that you think you have time."  A little while before this all happened, it occurred to me that I was sort of treating my days like they came one by one out of an inexhaustible well.  That everything would continue rolling along just like it had and nothing would change.  But everything changes.  Things change.  People change. Haircuts change.  So accept and embrace what is, and let it go when it's time to move on, or something like that.  Probably Buddha said it better.

A Buddhist Takes On Bigfoot

I don't know about you guys. but our household is as prepared for the Coronavirus as one can hope to get without getting into fights with strangers over 24-packs of Charmin.  We created a Plague Box (actually, it's two boxes) filled with canned goods, most of which we already had, and pasta, oatmeal, chocolate and other essentials (chocolate is, of course, an essential).  We've ordered an extra bag of cat food and litter, extra laundry soap and extra other essential cleaning products.  We're not going full-on survivalist about this, though.  I'm shunning water purifiers, firearms and other things that take up space and wouldn't really help anyway.  We have books galore, Netflix and of course a treadmill. And we're both working from home.  So we should emerge from quarantine rested, well-read and possibly even buff. Except for prescription drugs, which is a problem.

Nearly every CDC bulletin has been letting us know that we should have two extra weeks of prescription drugs in our arsenal.  That's nice, but the insurance companies only let you pick up a new prescription when the old one runs out, give or take about three days.  In my case, I couldn't get extra refills even if the insurance companies wanted to help, seeing as I have Controlled Substances in my pill box.  So unless both the insurance companies and the DEA are willing to play ball, I will spend my two weeks in quarantine going bananas.  I can't imagine that would be safe for my three housemates (one with two feet and two with four feet, for a total of ten feet) but that's where we are.  Oh, and because they're made in China, I may run out of them even if we don't get quarantined. There simply May Not Be Any, which has actually happened before. Ask me about calling 4-5 pharmacies before I found one that had extra stock. That was fun.  I can hardly wait to do it again.

So because there's nothing I can do about any of that, and things that you have no control over have people fighting with strangers over 24-packs of Charmin (sorry, but it's a really compelling little video), let's talk about something else.

Let's talk about Bigfoot.

Yes, I'm talking Sasquatch, or Yeti, or Yowie, or anyway, the guy who scares hell out of Boy Scouts and makes grown men with trail cams look like fools.  I don't know about you, but I've become way too fond of the Travel Channel lately.  Especially on Saturday night, when we have back to back These Woods Are Haunted, Haunted Hospitals, the Dead Files and Ghost Loop.  Which have very little to do with travel, by the way, and I'm wondering if the Travel Channel should just rename itself the Supernatural and Gruesome Reality Show Exploitation Channel and get it overwith.

By far my favorite of these supernatural themed shows is Supernatural Caught on Camera, where people send their alleged ghost videos, their UFO sightings and their blurry, grainy cell phone shots of Bigfoot to be examined by experts and commented on by supposed supernatural Experts who get interviewed in front of a nice blue screen that usually has geometric shapes portrayed behind them, for reasons I'm unclear on.  And some of this stuff is actually pretty convincing. The office chairs captured rolling around by themselves by the after hours security camera, for example.  The gurneys traveling around in the hospital video.  And of course who could forget the Saudi Arabian guy in the abandoned beach house, scaring hell out of himself while looking for djinn (and possibly finding one).

And then there are the Bigfoot videos.  Usually these are accidental; a couple is riding upriver on a pair of ATVs and filming themselves, and they happen to film a big hairy thing crossing the river in front of them.  T'aint a bear. T'aint a wolf walkin' upright.  T'aint a human being and it sure t'aint a guy in an ape suit because they don't make them ape suits that big.  Surely this is proof that Bigfoot is real, right? Surely 9,000 trail cams can't be wrong?

Well, I'm of two minds about this, actually.  For one thing, if there really are hairy woods apes that have managed to evade detection by modern humans for all this time, their days are numbered. Homo Sapiens have managed to reach almost every part of the planet now, and in our wake is mass extinction through disease, habitat destruction and, well, greed.  The hairy woods apes don't stand a chance.  Sooner or later some trigger-happy Second Amendment rights activist is going to shoot one, and then we'll know.  Or maybe the same trigger-happy Second Amendment rights activist will disappear, prompting a massive manhunt that finally ends when the local sheriffs find the activist and a Bigfoot in the honeyoon suite of a local Holiday Inn.   Seriously, I would give Bigfoot about ten more years, if he's real.  And we should find out one way or another before they go extinct, but there are no guarantees.

However, if he's not real, I think I may have an explanation for the recurrent sightings, and it starts long, long ago, when we had just become homo sapiens.  For a long time there, we shared the planet with Neanderthals and homo synovius and homo florensis and a couple of other animals that were like us, but were not us.  At the time, we had no civilization, no crops, no writing, no sense of how big the world was. We were just bands of hunter-gatherers, probably never more than 30 or so individuals. We ran into other bands from time to time, and we probably ran into those-who-were-like-us-but-were-not-us from time to time, too, but for the most part, it was Just Us and our 30 or so friends and family members.

We didn't have written language then and maybe not much of a spoken one either, but scientists are pretty sure we did communicate, even if just through gesture, because we obviously hunted and ate pretty big animals that would have been impossible for one guy to take down acting alone.  We had to be able to organize and break ourselves up into groups in order to do this big-game hunting thing (I mean hell, we didn't even have rifles; just spears and primitive bows and arrows.)  If we communicated, that means we also told stories around the campfire at night.  The stories we told then were probably not much different than the stories we tell now; good guy, bad guy, both fighting over something each wants, the good guy winning in the end (but not without some cost, like a bad injury or something), and the bad guy vowing to come back and fight another day.  I mean, we're creative, and we've come up with at least two or three more plots since then, but our stories tend to follow the same patterns.  And what had to be the hottest tale told around the campfire in those days was The Time I Was In The Woods And I Ran Into Some Others Who Were Like Us But Were Not Us.

In those days, we were pretty small guys.  The average male was maybe 5'4 and the average female proportionally smaller.  The average Neanderthal, on the other hand, was huge. Easily six feet or taller, very broad through the chest and shoulders, and hairy.  Much hairier than homo sapiens.  A big scary hairy guy with a spear (yes, Neanderthals also had spears) in the woods was not something you wanted to run into when you were a little homo sapiens.  It made for a great campfire story, though, if you happened to survive it.

Now, let's think about this for a second.  Big hairy scary guys in the woods. Is that sounding at all like something we see blurry, grainy photos of now? Something like us that is not us? I propose, and I could be wrong, that when we see something in the woods and we don't know what it is (or a picture of something that we don't know what is), our brains go back in time to the stories around the campfire.  We still tell the same stories today about strange creatures in the woods, though we call them fairy tales and think they're for children.  (Thanks, Brothers Grimm.)

And so we see Bigfoot.  Or maybe we remember him, through some kind of collective unconscious memory.

That is, if he's not real.

(Incidentally, homo florensis, were only about three feet tall.  You know those stories about fairies and pixies and elves? Well, there really were little people at one point.  And we modern humans probably encountered them, at least occasionally.  There are stories on Sumatran islands about these little guys stealing food and animals and, in at least one instance, a human baby, and the elders who were questioned by scientists about these things said they happened "so many lives of men ago," which translated into roughly the 1700s. So Captain Cook feasibly could have seen or even met a homo florensis.  Imagine.) 

Anyway, stay safe, everybody, and if you encounter a Bigfoot, try to get decent video.  Thanks!

Mini-Post: The State Of Things

Hello all.  I have a Real Blog Post good to launch in a couple of days here but I just wanted to update everybody on the state of things.  Right now Joan and I are fine.  Neither of us are sick.  We are both essential personnel at our respective jobs, so although buildings are closed and people aren't coming in, we're still working (more so in Jen's case, because a lot of people were laid off and several more are sick and can't come in for two weeks per their docs.) We had to change our hours so that now I'm at work at 7:30 in the morning but that's okay; it means I get home while it's still light out.  I am incredibly not happy that the pools are closed, but I'm managing, Lake Ray Hubbard will warm up soon and in the meantime we have a treadmill in the house that is getting lots of use.  There are no OA or meditation group meetings in person, but both groups are meeting online or over the phone. The cats are okay, if puzzled at the change in our hours (daylight savings time is also hard on cats, which is another reason to remove this stupid arcane ritual from our state and national laws in the era of electric lights.)

That said, I hope you all are fine too.  Please do what the CDC says and don't listen to Donald.  Wash hands, stay home if you can, order groceries to be delivered.  Spend the time reading books you've always wanted to read (you can get those online or from your local library, which is still checking out e-books even though it's closed--just try it), doing those home repair jobs you couldn't get to before and spending time with friends and family members, whether in person or over the phone or online.  Bear in mind that these days will end, things will go back to some semblance of normal, and we'll all be the better for having had this experience.  There's historical precedent; after the waves of the Black Death that killed half of Europe, food was plentiful for the first time ever, peasants could demand reasonable wages for their labor, and a burst of creativity in thought, religion and art, a/k/a the Renaissance, got started.  

Hopefully we will realize now how interconnected we all are, that we all need to take care of each other, and that universal health care is no longer a luxury we can't afford but a necessity for life, however we pay for it (because with health care, it really is pay now or pay later).  If you can afford it, give money to groups that are trying to make this happen.  If you need something--money, groceries, therapy, someone to help you with the kids--reach out to other people and let them know.  Not only is there no shame in needing help, you'll bless someone else by letting them help you.  What goes around comes back around.  And that's really all I've got to say at this time.  Everybody stay safe.  Cheers!

The Coronavirus Flu

Hello all.  Sorry for the long pause between nifty guest post and actual content. There was a lot going on, including but not limited to the thing that's being called the "novel coronavirus."  Novel means new, of course, but there's really nothing new about coronaviruses; they've been around forever.  The only thing new is that they can apparently jump the species barrier now, which is fine if you're a bat or a sloth or something and have been dealing with coronaviruses since the dawn of recorded time, but deucedly inconvenient if you're a human being.   And in between actual good ideas (quarantining people for 14 days, restricting the movement of possible infected persons), there are plenty of really bad ideas being deployed in the spread of this thing. 

Like quarantining people on a cruise ship, for example.  Bad idea.  The internal air system on a cruise ship is designed to move everything around, as opposed to an isolation ward in an actual hospital that sucks air from outside under a negative pressure containment system, so you have lots of people potentially infecting each other all over the ship.  (Check out the film "Outbreak" if you want to see how this works.)  Plus, they gave the crew members nothing by way of protective equipment, which meant they were getting exposed to this virus every time  they knocked on someone's cabin door.  Which they did a lot, apparently. 

So, okay, that was a bad idea.  Another bad idea:  Treating everybody Asian as though they might potentially have the coronavirus.  People, please check your big ugly xenophobia at the door on this one, okay?  Your Asian next-door neighbor who was born in Milwaukee and grew up in Detroit and has never left the country is a lot less  likely to have the coronavirus than your white across-the-street neighbor who just got back from a business trip in South Korea.  And the racist element of this thing gets even uglier when you consider that there's been an outbreak in Italy, and nowhere are people avoiding Italian restaurants or treating  white people with Roman noses like they have the plague.  And nobody's said anything about canceling all flights to Italy, though, she says with a reluctant sigh, it's probably on somebody's agenda.

Besides, it turns out that the coronavirus is actually not all that dangerous.  Oh, you don't want it, but your odds of dying of it really aren't that good. Most people who get it feel like they have a bad cold for a few days.  You can die of it, but most of the people who die of it are the people who typically die during an epidemic.  The very old, the very young, people with compromised immune systems.   How do they treat it? Rest, lots of fluids, cough syrup.  Since this thing is getting around (it's ridiculously easy to spread a virus anymore, and with this one it turns out you can be asymptomatic for possibly a couple of weeks before you get sick, which means you don't trip fever detectors in airports), we might want to all invest in an extra bottle or two of Robitussin. But that's it.  That's all I'm doing.  That and keeping an eye on the headlines. 

Speaking of dangerous viruses, Joan caught a cold a couple of weeks ago and stayed home from work.  I went to work as usual, and by the time I came home, Joan was feverish and having trouble breathing.  We called the nurse-on-call provided by her health insurance company.  She asked us a bunch of questions, and after getting our answers, told me to take Joan to urgent care, pronto.

So I packed her up and took her to urgent care. This was not easy, because she was in her jammies and didn't want to go out.  But, I talked her into a coat and some shoes and we headed for the only urgent care around that was open at 8:00 on a Friday night.  They poked and prodded and asked questions and took a chest X-ray.  When the chest X-ray came back, the nurse in charge told Joan they weren't equipped to handle her at urgent care and I'd need to take her to the ER. 

So off to the ER we went.  The ER was mobbed with people hacking and coughing and sneezing (really, is there any place better than an ER waiting room to get some horrible disease?).  But they took Joan back right away.  We got a little room in the corner someplace, and watched some Godawful sitcoms for about the next five hours.  This handsome young guy in a white coat came in a couple of times and made various pronouncements, the last of which was, "I'm going to admit you."  And at something like 2:30 in the morning, they wheeled her into a room on a long ward on the fourth floor.  I got to go home at that point, and deal with a massive craving for breakfast cereal. Why breakfast cereal? I have no idea, but I was hungry and that seemed like the food to get.  Maybe it's the human equivalent of cat kibble in that it requires no imagination whatsoever to prepare. 

So Joan was in the hospital for five days.  She got better. She got worse.  She got better.  She got worse.  Some specialist in infectious disease came in to see her.  Some Regular Doc came in to see her too. They told her at least three times that they were going to discharge her today before her fever suddenly spiked again and deep-sixed that idea. An occupational therapist took her for a walk.  (I'd have been jealous, but she said he didn't actually hold her hand.)

While all that was going on, I was going to work and going to the hospital and then going home very late at night.  Every time I went into her room, I had to put on one of those cute little masks like you see in coronavirus videos.  There was a little box of them attached to her door.  And get this.  When you looked up and down this long ward that she was on, every single door had a little box of masks attached to it.  I mean, it was Upper Respiratory Infection Central around there. 

The hospital finally sent Joan home after five days.  That's a long time to be in the hospital if you're not too sick to care.  She missed a week of work.  Recovery has been slow but steady.  And what caused all this havoc? The flu.  The common, ordinary, comes-around-every-winter flu.  So if you're worried about getting the coronavirus, GET YOUR FLU SHOT.   And if you're not worried about getting the coronavirus, GET YOUR FLU SHOT ANYWAY.  Any chance you have to avoid being in the hospital for a week is a good  chance to take. As it happened, Joan had her flu shot, but she got it anyway, which is just Bad Luck as far as the docs were concerned. But seriously. Get your flu shot.  Wash your hands a lot. Stay home if you don't feel well.  And don't get all panicky if somebody accidentally sneezes on you.  There's a statistically significant likelihood that you're going to be fine. 

Guest Post! 4 Things You Should Never Say To A Fat Person At the Gym

Hello all! Today I have a brilliant guest post from Regan Chastain.  Check out her work here.  Thank you, Regan, for letting me repost this!   

4 Things You Should Never Say To A Fat Person At The Gym

Posted on January 8, 2020by Ragen Chastain

It’s New Years, which means tons of people joining (or going back) to the gym. Of course, fitness, by any definition, is never an obligation or barometer of worthiness (running a marathon and watching a Netflix marathon are morally equivalent activitiest!) But there’s nothing wrong with people choosing to go to the gym. Unfortunately for fat people, it can also mean people sharing their thoughts (and I use the term loosely) about us and our workouts.

In addition to the fact that people of all sizes just want to be left TF alone when we’re at the gym, there’s the issue that people choose to visit their stereotypes on fat people who are just trying to work out. Below is a list of some of the things you should never, ever say to a fat person at the gym:

“Good for you for starting a workout program!”

You don’t know anything about this person’s workout history. If you’re assuming they are starting a workout program because they are fat, you’re operating from weight bias. If you are assuming they are starting a workout program because you’ve never seen them before, you’re operating out of idiocy. You don’t know if that person has been working out at another gym before this or, for that matter, if they are starting a workout “program” or just here for a one-off workout, if they are a beginner because they’re switching activities as part of a lifetime of fitness activities. You don’t know, so don’t guess, and certainly resist the urge to turn your guesses into speech.

“Keep going and you’re going to lose that weight!”

I mean…just…ugh. Don’t do this. You have no way of knowing if weight loss is even a goal of the person you’re talking to (and, regardless, they can’t be expected to lose weight long-term regardless since almost everyone who attempts weight loss loses weight short term but gains it all back longterm.) Basically, you’re saying “Hi stranger, I want you to know that I think your body is wrong, but believe that with continued attendance at the gym you’ll become more of what I think you should be.” Just don’t.

"I’ve seen you here a lot, you’re doing great"

Ok Creepy McCreeperson, take two steps back. Maybe instead of monitoring other people’s gym attendance (and then making sure they know you are doing it,) you just focus on your own workout, ok pumpkin?

"You won’t lose weight doing that!"

I have heard this while doing cardio, strength building, and flexibility work. So good news, people understand that weight loss is highly unlikely. Bad news, I was never trying to lose weight, nor was I soliciting the opinions of randos at the gym. So annoying.

Don’t say these things, don’t say anything that is these-things-adjacent.

Before I wrap this up, I want to address the inevitable objections:

But some people might be helped by my seriously questionable behavior!

Maybe, but the potential for harm overrides any potential for helping. Also, you’re not the fat person whisperer, and there’s no “encouraged a fatty” merit badge to be earned, so pipe down and return to your own workout.

But surely there are exceptions to this rule!

There absolutely are. If someone says “please make assumptions about my workout history, assume that I’m trying to lose weight, monitor my presence at the gym, and give me unsolicited workout advice” then knock yourself out. Otherwise, it’s a no.

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Ragen Chastain | January 8, 2020 at 12:29 pm | Categories: Uncategorized | URL: https://wp.me/p51r4x-2si

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Merry Christmas, Everybody!

We got up. We opened presents. The living room is a wreck.

The cats got new toys. They are happy.

Grayson with his new scratching toy.

Artemis with her new brush and catnip mousie.

Time for the humans to kick back and read some new books.

Cheers and Happy New Year!