Do You Even Lift?

I’m kinda at this point where I need to embrace some body positivity about myself, but also kind of want to start exercising again because it helps me stay sane and evens out the peaks and valleys of my emotional roller-coaster.

And it’s weird to phrase it this way, but if I get fit, it won’t be so much a warm embrace of fitness culture so much as hate-fucking it with a “yuck” face.  Which is a phrase or idea I’ve never liked, and I kind of hate to use it, but it’s the closest I can come to describing my sense of unease with the fitness industry.  There’s just something cult-ish and unbearably smug about fitness culture as a whole.

For one, there’s kind of this constant mind fuck around attitude that I understand is just an attempt to push me past my bullshit and do the thing, but still, the kind of single-minded zealousness people work themselves into around the gym is very off-putting, especially if you grew up in fundamentalism and are now currently allergic to anything remotely resembling it.  And I think there might be such a thing as fitness fundamentalists.  I can barely go to yoga, even though I like the basic experience of it, because they so rarely seem to be able to leave well enough alone without bringing in some new agey bullshit around the whole endeavor, especially the yoga gurus, who conveniently have a book I can buy.

The other thing that bothers me about “the fit” is this bizarre protestant/capitalist work ethic angle where if you put in the time and the work into shaping your body into something generally regarded as pleasing by modern tastes, you shall be rewarded, and indeed perhaps owed, a relationship with someone possessing a body of equal or better well-shaped pleasingness. On some level, I understand, this is just how humans mate, typically by selecting someone a lot like them, but …. still.  It just makes the whole thing seem so superficial and a little yucky. 

If the over-whelming takeaway message was, “we want you to be healthy and live a long, happy life” I might be able to swallow it better.  But, I don’t know, that’s just not the over-whelming message that seems to shine through the brightest.

Post-trip realization

I have no idea where i fit in the world anymore, nor the faintest idea what I'm doing.

I've basically found no place that makes sense to me since leaving my religion and I'm not going back.  My religion was structured and purpose-filled but dystopian in its fundamentaist authoritarianism. The secular world is freer, but chaos, with an anti-pathy to purpose beyond capitalism and self-interest.

 Who do you think you are to struggle with existential questions and doubt in any way other that alone, in quiet desperation?

So everyone scavenges for purpose and community as best they can.

I don't understand it.  I don't understand my place in it. I don't like the sense of helplessness that inspires.

I don't like how much I don't try to change things.

I'd walk the earth, but I don't know Kung Fu.

So there's that awkward fact about me.

Defining Adventure Down

I think I'm finally narrowing down my strong antipathy to "must love adventure" crowd on dating sites and, uh, almost everywhere else (I know this is a weird thing to obsess over, but here I am).  It comes down to a couple things for me.

First, it seems like a completely mindless capitulation to the current advertising push in all sectors. It's an adventure to buy a coke, it's an adventure to buy a car, it's an adventure to choose your brand, etc. Every ad now is that ubiquitous stadium anthem music dreck and free spirits waving their arms about while they buy shit they don't need. I understand our bland, consumer-driven lives might need some punch, this does not mean going to the mall is now an epic of homerian proportions. We don't have to accept "participating in the economy" as the definition of "adventure" just because the soulless and sad Don Draper wannabes tell us to.  For god's sake have some pride.

Second, it defines adventure away to mean everything and nothing.  Much like the Louis C.K.'s bit on "everything's amazing and nobody's happy.", once you use adventure to describe going to the mall with your friends, or going on an easy hike 30 min out of town, what' s left to describe reporting in a war zone?  Hacking your way through the amazonian jungle in search of new species?  Going to space in a rocket? If adventure is a glorified "leaving the house" then adventure is the definition of normalcy and tedium.

Third, has it really come to this?  Has modern life beaten us down so much that having the bravery to leave the house is now adventure-level status?  Do we need it to be such an epic to even summon the motivation? I'd like to think we can make it a norm again, and not the extraordinary act of extraordinary people. Like maybe it's possible to perform the basic responsibilities of adult life without creating a grossly inflated and narcissistic mythology around how wonderful and meaningful everything we do is simply by virtue of it being us that's doing it, you know? It's delusional, and it's the kind of delusion that only benefits advertisers who want everyone to share in the delusion that brand engagement and an obscene focus on brand preference is an important and meaningful part of life.  It isn't.  It never will be.

It's an adventure for a toddler to leave the house.  It's an adventure for an adult to leave the country, or in a few notable cases, the planet.  You don't like adventure, you just like leaving the house.