Thich Nhat Hanh

The Cheese Grates It: My Resolution to Minimize Body-Shaming Psychic Attacks

Per my resolution to minimize the amount of toxic, ignorant, psychic attacks negatively impacting my life, I kicked the radio station which had been my primary choice to the curb following an onslaught of weight loss surgery ads and the afternoon DJ making the inane remark that "exercising makes you feel thinner. This is especially true for women." 

I now have the radio in the Forester permanently tuned to the publicly funded jazz station. I have satellite radio in the Fusion, which tends to be on one of the 70's or 80's stations or the Underground Garage. They don't blather on and on about bullshit calculated to offend and shame people with non-optimal appearances: bigger people, older people, women who aren't conventionally attractive.

 It's a huge relief to be able to do my job and have some music to keep me from dying of boredom without some stupid advertisement or idiot remark from one of the DJ's raising my blood pressure multiple times during my shift. I've thought about writing a letter to the radio station, but I doubt it would do any good.  

I hope one day we will have a world where a radio station playing such toxic advertising would be flooded by emails rebuking them. 

People deserve to live their lives without being constantly reminded that they are seen as undesirable thanks to the constant brainwashing by mega-corporations hell-bent on taking their money.

Advertising is usually a form of attack rather than an informative medium.

It's time to stop kowtowing to the Frankenstein monster which was in no small part created by behaviorist John B. Watson. Watson was a bit of a shit in any case. He was unscrupulous in his experimentation on vulnerable subjects. 

We need to learn to think for ourselves rather than allowing advertisers to mold our beliefs.

~The Cheese Hath Grated It~

Happy Makar Sankrant

"Makar Sankrant is a Hindu festival that celebrates the sun's journey into the northern hemisphere, a period which is considered to be highly auspicious. There is a wide variation in the celebration of Makar Sankranti thoughout India, in particular the name. Celebrations in different Indian regions In Gujarat and Maharashtra, Makar Sankranti is a festival of the young and the old. Colourful kites are flown all around. In Punjab, Makar Sankranti is called Lohri. December and January are the coldest months of the year in Punjab and huge bonfires are lit on the eve of Sankranti. Sweets, sugarcane and rice are thrown on the bonfires and friends and relatives gather together. In Uttar Pradesh, this period is celebrated as Kicheri. It is considered important to have a bath on this day and masses of people can be seen bathing in the Sangam at Prayagraj where the rivers Ganga, Jamuna and Saraswathi flow together. In Southern India it's the harvest festival Pongal and lasts for 3 days. On the first day, rice boiled with milk is offered to the Rain God. On the second day, it is offered to the the Sun God and on the third day, the family cattle are given a bath and dressed with flowers, bells and colours, to honour them for their hard work in the fields."

Text courtesy of the BBC's religions page. 

Compassion is Not Weakness

The Cheese Grates It Poetically: The Vile Truth

Abandoned House

Image obtained from wallpaperfo.com

Content warnings for profanity and gloomy, pissed-off poetry
If you have a problem with either of those, don't read this and then bitch about it
Anyway, I didn't write it for you

The Vile Truth

It's time to write a poem all about me

To tell a truth which will set no-one free

I won't deny, it will be bleak 

If sweetness you want, somewhere else you should seek

For I speak only the vile truth

***

I graduated high school back in 1983

Into a world which despises people like me

I was never spry or slick 

Nobody wanted to be my sidekick

I was one of the forgotten people

***

Let's get the eating disorder aside first

For although it's bad, it isn't the worst

In a world which treats thinner people like they walk on water 

My sin was being the chunky-thighed, chipmunk-faced daughter

A plump, unloved candle with two charred ends

***

Starve until you get thin then binge when you can no longer stand it

Same sorry story, I'm so done with this shit

To spy on celebrities and watch their weight with disdain

This society has a lot of reasons to be ashamed

A dose of fetish in a shallow, judgmental world

***

Why don't you sprinkle on a little more self-righteous hate

When I look at you, what I see isn't that great
You tap-dance a sleazy staccato while you whistle a disdainful tune
Sing "I'm prettier than my brother" as you sashay across the room
Attractive on the outside, but filled with a soul-scathing darkness 

***

Perhaps you should pay more attention to the shadows in the cellar
Of your own soul, and not that of the other fellow
Watch your back is something I learned long ago
Men who tell me I'm pretty have a hand they won't show
Predators have left me with a heart made of frozen filaments

***

 I funnel my sorrowfulness into my writing though I don't believe
That anything of worth in this life I will achieve
She ran away from everything that hurt her, even herself
I have nothing to brag on, not fame, wealth, or health
My struggles inescapable: a mind without doors

***

 If the deities think there are different things I should do
I want to hear it from them, not you
I don't know if I believe in magic any more
But perhaps one day the fairies will settle the score
I can't help but hope for the wrath of the dryads

***

On this shallow world
Which destroys those
Who are not deemed beautiful
In a very narrow way
Which judges people on looks rather than 
On the way they treat others

~Cie~

Notes:

Yes, I'm angry.

No, I don't want your suggestions on how I can finally become thin, beautiful, and find Prince Charming.

I want a world where we don't judge people on their physique or their perceived beauty, and Prince Charming would be just one more pain in the ass whose needs I had to attend to.

I don't pull punches with my poetry. 

I don't write about sweetness and light.

To me, poetry is hyperbolic.

It isn't a process of trying to make myself into one of the shiny happy people instead of an icky, dark, depressive thing.

It is simply me expressing thoughts that are not appropriate dinner conversation.

I am nearly 53 years old and I have a lot of health problems plus I live with a brain that has been trying to kill me for my entire life. 

To break that down into a diagnosis that people who need an explanation for everything can understand, I have three major mental illnesses and I do not respond well to medication. I live with this shit. I accept this shit. But that doesn't mean I necessarily like it. Whatever potential I had was stolen from me by mental illness and more so by a society which has disdain for people like me, make no mistake.

As to my body, I discovered health at every size and size acceptance when I was 45. If I had discovered these critical concepts years ago, I might not have tried to starve myself into an arbitrary "acceptable" size. I might not have wasted hours a day at the gym instead of spending time with my son in his early years, all in the quest of achieving a "perfect" body so someone might "love" me. My overexercising (orthorexia) contributed to a lot of the musculoskeletal problems I now have. I couldn't exercise like that anymore even if I wanted to. 

Further, these behaviors never made me thin. I do not have the kind of body that will be thin regardless of how much I starve or overexercise it. Unless I become terminally ill as my great-grandmother did (acute myelogenous leukemia took her from 300 pounds to 95 pounds in the space of a year and then she died--but, hey, she cut a svelte figure in her casket!) I will never be thin. Fuck it. If this is a problem for you, than you're the one with the problem. You shouldn't be judging people based on their body type.

I'm diabetic, so I have to be careful about what I eat. My go-to snack is seasoned Kale. My treat is five of those little "fun size" candy bars: two sugar-free and three regular. I drink unsweetened nut milk, which is 45 calories per cup. Do I think this makes me some kind of saint? Fuck no! It actually pisses me the hell off to have to mind what I eat to this degree, and, in fact, I find discussions of diet and exercise boring as fuck. Who the fuck cares what you eat or how much you exercise? I certainly don't, it's none of my damn business. I only mention it because my point is I eat a very restrictive diet and I'm still fat. A person's body type is much more complex than "calories in, calories out."

I have to inject insulin because I have a zombie pancreas. I also have to take thyroid medication, because I have a zombie thyroid. My PCOS is pretty well resolved thanks to menopause. However, my pituitary is whack in some sort of unspecified way. I have a crappy, third-rate endocrine system. My crappy, third-rate endocrine system insures that in a world where thinness is next to godliness, I will always be fat. I honestly don't care about that. It just pisses me off that so many people do care about it, and, further, that they think it is their right to care about it.

Here is your TL:DR takeaway:

Quit judging other people for their looks or based on what you think they "should" have accomplished in their lives. You probably don't know what battles they're fighting or how much impact your words have. If blaming and shaming worked, we would have no addicts, no fat people, and no-one would be mentally ill or struggling for even the most meager of "success." Try a measure of kindness instead.

~The Cheese Hath Grated It~

 Prompt List

The Daily Post
Funnel

Daily Text Prompt:
I want to hear it from them, not you

Hourly Writing Prompts:
Sorrowfulness

Mindlovemisery's Menagerie 

Prompts Blog:
I'm prettier than my brother
 

 We Write At Dawn:
Watch your back

WNQ-Writers:
She ran away from everything that hurt her, even herself 

Word and Phrase List

binge

deny

sidekick

sin

slick 

sprinkle

spy

staccato

thinner

watch

water

whistle

funnel
sorrowfulness 
I'm prettier than my brother
I want to hear it from them, not you
Watch your back

The Vile Truth

Shadows in the Cellar

Frozen Filaments

Inescapable: A Mind without Doors

Soul Scathing Darkness

Wrath of the Dryads

A Dose of Fetish

The Forgotten People

Charred Ends

1983

The Cheese Grates It: I Just Can't Even With This Shit

Yep, this isn’t gross, disrespectful, or fetishizing at all.
Not like it totally ignores a person’s illness and suffering. Forget that. They looked sexy when they posed for a picture 50 years ago.
Yes, this shit actually is a problem. It isn’t cute or funny. It’s entitlement.
Let me break it down a little.

Here’s David Bowie. He was so very talented. He was kind and gentle. Yes, he was attractive. Shockingly, it is possible to find people attractive while still respecting them and not fetishizing them. This kind of becomes even more important when the person is no longer of this world.
David Bowie died of cancer early in 2016. But by all means, let’s fetishize and objectify him. Because that’s hawt.

Here’s a picture of a young David Cassidy with his brother, Shaun.
David Cassidy was very attractive.
He was also much more troubled than most people realized.
He developed dementia in his later years. This isn’t what killed him directly, although it eventually would have. He died from multiple organ failure. His last words to his daughter were “so much wasted time.”
That’s really fucking sad.
But, by all means, do continue to objectify him. Because your masturbation fantasy is far more important than showing respect for the dead, and it surely is not possible to find someone attractive without fetishizing them.

Malcolm Young wasn’t conventionally attractive, but there are certainly plenty of entitled individuals who see fit to fetishize him, even though his illness and decline were beyond tragic. For the past ten years, his brain was literally deteriorating, and, at the end, he didn’t even recognize the people who meant the most to him, such as his children and his siblings.
But, by all means, objectify the fuck out of him, because one time, nearly forty years ago, there was a picture of him that looked like this.

Don’t forget to fetishize his grieving brother too, even though he’s still alive. It isn’t like he’s a human being or anything. He’s there as fodder for your fantasy.

Since the grossness wouldn’t be complete if you weren’t fetishizing the entire family, here’s a picture of a youthful George Young back in the 1960′s. George died back in October. He was a really talented musician and producer. But who cares about that? He was sexy in his youth!

As an added bonus, you can fetishize Alex Young too. He died in 1998 from lung cancer. Suffering and death, that’s so hot. Particularly since it’s completely impossible to find people attractive without objectifying them.
The reason I find this sort of thinking atrocious is because it is rife with entitlement (my desires above everything else) while completely lacking empathy. It isn’t cute. It isn’t funny. It isn’t edgy. It’s perverse.
When I say “perverse,” I don’t mean sexually kinky. I mean it deviates from right thinking. By right thinking, I mean having an attitude of compassion towards others. Seeing others as objects to be ogled and utterly ignoring their struggles is sociopathic. It takes only your own desires into account. People become things. A world in which people are seen as things is an ugly world.
The Cheese Hath Grated It

Pax Vobiscum

Pax Vobiscum