How To Stop Feeling Fat

1. Stop adjusting your pants.

2. Stop adjusting your shirt.

3. Stop tightening your muscles.

4. Stop sucking in your gut.

IT WORKS.

Also,


5. Look at Renaissance paintings of women.

Like this one:

And this one: 

And this one: 

Stupidity and Scrupulosity

Hello!

We interrupt this program (this being whatever it was you were doing hitherto) for a brief harangue on what Lemony Snicket might call "The Anxious Clown." 

 The Anxious Clown, as you may know, is the name of a restaurant in A Series of Unfortunate Events: Book the Third: The Wide Window, but it's also a good way to describe the juxtaposing characteristics that I'm trying to portray in the absurd bits of writing I call My Book. I outline these characteristics now in an effort to align the synapses in my alleged brain and to try to discover more about the people I'm trying to bring to life. 

My three protagonists whom I'm going to refer to as G, M, and C are different, but they share two underlying characteristics: each possesses his own brands of (1) stupidity and (2) scrupulosity, traits that humans generally do not want to have, but I'm a writer, and my object is to make the little people in my brain as miserable as possible until the story comes to a satisfying conclusion. 

Since G is the primary protagonist whose point of view overlooks the majority of the story in my head, I'll start with her. G is not stupid in the classical sense as an airhead or a bumbling idiot, but in the sense that she tends to over-analyze the circumstances in front of her, which clouds her vision. This kind of stupidity goes hand-in-hand with her particular form of scrupulosity, which I'm going to call Social Scrupulosity. This kind of anxiety causes the sufferer (G) to worry constantly that everything she says or does has a negative effect on the rest of mankind. I say it goes hand-in-hand with Over-Analysis because I believe Over-Analysis is caused (at least partly) by Social Scrupulosity. G's brains imagine every possible outcome (all bad) of The Way She Acts because she's afraid that one of these outcomes could have struck her compatriots on the face, and now it is her moral duty to make up for it. 

M has a more obvious kind of stupidity in the sense that he's Legitimately Stupid. The Gilligan kind of stupid. His brand of scrupulosity is meant to save him from his stupidity. I don't know what you would call it (whoever you are), but for the purposes of this post I'm going to call it Religious Scrupulosity. M knows very very deep down that he's an idiot, and so he compensates for his stupidity by basing his morals on The Rules. If he follows The Rules, there's no need for him to do any subjective analysis or to use his personal (bad) judgment on What To Do In A Situation. If the authorities forbid or endorse certain actions or behaviors, then so does M. Unlike G, M doesn't suffer from his brand of scrupulosity until the outline in my head I call Book 3. 

[Note: I'd like to clarify that I'm not opposed to religion in the slightest and that in this specific and complicated instance then it would have been better for M to rely on his guts instead of what PG Wodehouse would call Scripture Knowledge.]

C, I think, has the best kind of stupidity and the worst kind of scrupulosity. His stupidity, unlike M's, is not real stupidity, but mere Absent-Mindedness. In fact, Absent-Mindedness, as a species, can be mistaken for either stupidity or wisdom, but in C's case it's invariably mistaken for the former. Unlike G and M, C doesn't suffer from his stupidity in the least, but it is for that reason that his stupidity is used to give him relief from his scrupulosity. C's brand of scrupulosity is difficult to sum-up in just a word or two, but I think it can be done by calling it Existential Scrupulosity. Put simply, C feels unworthy of being listed under the heading "Human Being." He hasn't done anything particularly wrong, but due to some glitch in his brain, his mere existence in of itself is wrong, which makes him wrong, which makes everything he does wrong, no matter what it is. If he ends up in Hell, then the flaw in the universe is corrected, and if he ends up in Heaven, it must be by some clerical error. C therefore uses his Absent-Mindedness as an escape and is subsequently perceived by his fellows as one of Nature's idiots. 

I don't know why I'm explaining this. 

Actually, I do; I just momentarily forgot. 

To resume: I've found that my purpose in writing down the story I've accidentally thought up is to watch my imaginary friends and kindred spirits give their scrupulosities the middle finger and learn to embrace their little stupidities. My hope is that G will stop apologizing and M will begin to trust his own conscience and C will live and not feel guilty for it. I find stories of success against self-remonstration inspiring, but they're sometimes hard to come by and I needed one more. 

I say that like the story's a good thing, but in reality it's kind of a load of bull****. It's really bad. I've been re-reading bits of it trying to make it better and I've had to stop and reel about eight times per minute. 

Actually, it's not that bad. It's only sort of bad, but then it's sort of good occasionally, so I think I'll finish it. 

Quotes for Scrupulous Humans

"And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good."  ------John Steinbeck

"No man knows how bad he is until he tries very hard to be good." --------C.S. Lewis

"It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people don't want apologies, and the wrong sort take advantage of them." ---------P.G. Wodehouse

"Dear Sirs: Regarding your article, 'What's Wrong With the World?' I am. Yours truly, G.K. Chesterton." ---------G.K. Chesterton

"I am an evil man-cub, and my stomach is sad in me." ---------Rudyard Kipling

"There is no hurry. We shall get there one day." -------A.A. Milne

"There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin." ----------Flannery O'Connor

"My daddy used to tell me not to chew on something that was eating you." ------Cormac McCarthy

"What I say is, if a man really likes potatoes, he must be a pretty decent sort of fellow." ------P.G. Wodehouse