The Wake

While as far as I can tell there is no shortage of shortages (I’m here all night, folks) in this country, I am much more concerned with the qualities we seem to lack as a society than how much oil we’ve sucked out of the corpses of so much endangered Alaskan wildlife.

There’s a shortage on truth out there, my fine-feathered friends. No one is honest with anyone else anymore. Not just bad lies like, “I’m not cheating on you,” or “Cut the blue wire or we all die,” but white lies too. I personally have gone entire weeks with food in my teeth and no one has told me. Some argue that I should floss more, while I often retort that they should shut the hell up. But I digress.

When you tell your friend that his essay isn’t the biggest piece of shit you’ve ever read, it’s not doing him any favors. His professor isn’t going to be as nice, and when he gets it back with “This is the biggest piece of shit I’ve ever read!” written in bold, red pen he’s not going to trust you anymore. There is a link between this behavior and a common trend to completely deny any and all compliments. This is often infuriating, as you’re just trying to tell the douche bag that he has a cool backpack, but he won’t even let you finish your sentence until after you’ve broken out the chloroform. Who can blame these confidence-lacking wretches? When you’re constantly being told things that you know aren’t true, you stop believing people on the whole.

I’m not saying that you have to tell your roommates that their zits looks like fetuses in fetu, but you also shouldn’t tell them they’re barely noticeable. When they wander into public, their false sense of security isn’t going to hide any blemishes from the world. This example is relatively innocuous, unless the modeling agents who would have otherwise discovered them instead screams in horror at the unborn twins sticking out of the side of their faces because you were a coward. There are, however, much more detrimental effects from our impulsive niceties.

We live in a society where everyone, every single person, is infatuated with his or her own appearance. There’s nothing weird or uncommon about this, everyone is just on high alert these days because we have such a visually driven, sexually centered culture. It can really damage people, but you can only blame so much of it on America’s Next Top Model. Tyra Banks may be both a horrible entertainer and a snappy dresser, but she is not the sole root of all evil in the world. A lot of the blame comes from everyday interactions.

If I’m your portly friend, and I say something negative about myself, and you rebut with, “You are not fat, you are beautiful,” between pained grimaces and repressed heaves, you aren’t doing me any good. Again, you shouldn’t agree wholeheartedly, brand me Shamu and try to feed me a wayward sea lion, but you also shouldn’t tell me I’m the hottest piece of ass to hit Minnesota since your uncle Jack drunkenly sat on the grill at your family barbecue. Firstly because no one cares about your family barbecue stories, damn it, and secondly because you are giving me just as unrealistic a body image as the advertisements for Abercrombie are.

Eating disorders are caused by an unrealistic perception of your own body. When you are told one minute that you’re a stick by your best friend, then immediately called obese by pop culture, you are being mentally torn apart. This inconsistency is just as damaging as constant negativity—not to mention just plain embarrassing after your coaching convinced me to wear daisy dukes to my next social engagement. Those poor people had to deal with at least twenty five percent of my ass cheeks at that awards banquet for the world’s smartest magazine writers and guess whose fault it is.

In situations like those, the best thing to do is go with a gentle truth. Maybe I am fat. If I am and I don’t want to be, I need to know it so I can do something about it. Maybe I need to be told an even bigger truth instead of the convenient lie; that maybe looks aren’t as important as I think they are. Maybe it’s unflattering that I’m more focused on my waist line rather than trying to be a good person. Maybe I should worry more about the snakes slaughtering their way through the aisles past flight attendants paralyzed with fear and venom toward my seat instead of my thighs.

So let’s all make a promise here today, folks. Let’s all promise that we’re going to try and stop looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. Most people call me a pessimist for wanting this, and they are wrong. I may be a bitter, lifeless husk of a hunky, available columnist, but my views on lying to others and ourselves don’t make me so. Accepting the way things are allows for improvement and a better future, which is essentially the soul of optimism. You can’t pull yourself out of the waist-deep shit we’re all mucking through if everyone thinks the water in the kiddy pool is just a little thicker today. First we have to acknowledge that somehow we stumbled our way into a sewage pipe. And it is fucking gross down here.