saraewood.com

While reading the recent Salon article Stop Lying to Yourself. You love Dennis Kucinich, I soon realized I HAD been lying to myself.

I really really want to like Obama. I really really don’t want Hillary to get the nomination.

In this desperation, I have chosen to ignore Kucinich despite the fact all of these on-line wizard thingies tell me he is the candidate for me. Part of it might be because I never know how to spell his name. It might also be because the last two election cycles have left me gun shy. No one I like ever gets elected, no matter how much I want them to, how much money (not alot) I send their campaigns, how hot their wife is (Kucinich has the hottest spouse of all the candidates by a long shot), how much political commentary I read, how much of the debates I watch or how often I reload the image of the map of the USA on election night.

But this time, maybe it can be different? Probably not, but a girl can dream, right? So, as of now, I am vowing to look into Kucinich a little more closely. Plus, he does a flawless Donald Duck. Reason enough alone to vote for him.

I am prejudiced. I think by admitting it it might help me change my unconscious reaction. I don’t know why, but I don’t like fat people. And I don’t mean people who are just chubby or think they need to lose a few. I fall in that category too. I mean the really fat ones.

It is not that I don’t like them, but I often judge them before I have a chance to decide. Once I get to know them I normally like them, as I like most people, but I definitely have a prejudice against fatness.

I confirmed this awhile back with some high-falootin’ Harvard project that created a web based-prejudice detector. This test told me, for example, that I have no prejudice for either white or black people, but that I have a significant prejudice against fat ones.

There are quite a number of fat people (really fat) in my own extended family. And I know that often people can’t help it. I just happen to have the genetic make-up, which allows me to eat whatever I want whenever I want. While writing this from the Phoenix airport, I ate a bag of Doritos and a greasy Pizza Hut personal pizza and plan to eat the two cookies I have in my bag. Today when leaving a conference that was sending us off with a boxed lunch, I packed away two, because I can’t resist (and I still ate the Doritos and pizza a few hours later).

I am, in the truest sense of the word, a complete glutton. I would never deign to buy fat free anything, I think diets are stupid and I exercise far far less than I’d like to. SO what gives? How can I not like fat people?

But I don’t. On the flight here to Phoenix from Kansas City I had to share my seat with a woman who had the armrest up so that she could share half my seat. While I didn’t expect her to say anything like “I’m sorry I’m taking up your chair” I would have expected a “hello” or “how are you?” from the person who would have her butt cheek pressed up against me for the 3 hour duration. Simple manners is surely to blame, instead I felt that “ism” in me blaming it on her fatness. Completely unfair.

I also know that a lot of people are just like me. Fat people are teased as kids, not given jobs they deserve as adults. I know obesity is now considered an “epidemic” and a lot of it is socio-economic. Being from the South, I have seen this first hand; poor families eating KFC nightly. Partly because they don’t know any better. The lawsuit brought against McDonalds by the obese 16-year old a few years back? Yeah, I believe she didn’t know it was bad for her.

I know all of these things. So why am I a fatist? I have no idea.