Desultory Thoughts

Maybe I was in a bad mood when I read Jody Genessy’s opinion column in the Deseret News this evening, or maybe I’m just fat and taking offense, but I think he went a little far in his attempts to be funny today. To his credit, he took a stab at himself on that very point when he listed “You spend way more time trying to be funny in a weight-loss column than you do exercising” as a way to know if you’re obese.

From the looks of his picture included with the column, Jody, like a lot of people these days, is a bit on the heavy side. So the article is obviously meant to be funny in the self-deprecating sense of the word. I’m a big fan of self-deprecating humor; if you can’t laugh at yourself, then who can you laugh at? But “self” is the keyword. He took it too far today by laboriously running down the list of all-too-common fat jokes. If he would have stuck to just a few, I wouldn’t be as critical (uptight) as I’m being. The ones I liked were was:

You won’t put a nickel in a slot machine because gambling is a vice, but you will put eight quarters in a vending machine at work for a bag of Doritos, a Snickers bar and a Diet Dr. Pepper.

That says quite a bit about the way a lot of us (including myself) take some commandments to heart, but completely ignore (or justify) breaking others. The Word of Wisdom is often focused on for the list of “don’ts”, but there are also many “dos” that are too often ignored.

I dream of one day being back to the best shape I’ve ever been in. One of the biggest things I can do to help myself out is to start eating right.

I donated blood tonight and one of the recommendations is that you drink a lot of water (and it specifically excludes pop), and I’ve yet to drink a single glass. But I have had a couple cans of pop.

I’m an idiot, no doubt about it. (How’s that for self-deprecating?)