Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Unconventional thoughts on conventional wisdom

As any regular reader of this blog well knows I am no fan of Conventional Wisdom. It's too pat for starters, I hate it 'cause it's a herd mentality fossilized over time and it nudges at you because you know it's bullshit. Just to get the ball rolling here these are five plucked merely at random:

Rejection is not personal - The hell it is. If the woman is perfectly available and you are too and she says no then there's just something about YOU buddy. Could be your bank account, might be your one eyebrow but it's Something. Chances are she'll never tell you but keep digging.

You need 3 square meals a day - Not unless you're digging ditches. In fact it's that third meal that's packing on the pounds, I believe we've covered this at length at this blog but we like to err on the side of eating a little too much because of all the media coverage of anorexia which statisticwise is rather rare. A subset of this is that Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, since when? I suspect it's just to sell product. Usually I grab a doughnut or a buttered roll with my coffee and get going, don't have time.

Time heals all wounds - Partial wisdom at best, open to debate. Many times the wound is a dull ache after all these years but it can come back, that's why we have Scotch. All the survivors of 9/11, they'd beg to differ. I don't get my wisdom from a Hallmark card anyway.

Paranoia is a bad thing - Couple times I suspected they were talking about me at work, turns out I was right. A little paranoia keeps you safe but use it sparingly. Overtrusting is not a virtue believe you me especially when you consider that 1 out of X number of people in the general population is keeping it psycho. BTW stop talking about me.

Watch your health - This is a philosophical thing. Nothing wrong with watching your health up to a point but at what point do we cease enjoying the things Life has to offer? Sure sometimes I'll opt for the apple, another staple of conventional wisdom but many times I'll go for the Suzy Q because it's there. BTW they're making them smaller.

Just a partial list, the merest tip of the iceberg. What's your thing or have you too drunk deep of the Propaganda?

8 comments:

  1. You need to be married for your relationship to have meaning and have children to live a fulfilling life.

    What a canard.

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  2. & on this note esp. in the workforce people who procreate feel their lives are more important than yours so they usually get their way with the new schedule and you don't. Let's say they don't want to work nights it works like this: he has a young daughter but also a wife to look after her so it's not that she'll be all home alone but he'll do a song and dance anyway about how he wants to be home with her and so he gets his way and you get the shit end of the stick as usual. Stuff like that and one woman'll come in late everyday 'cause she has a son and that's ok but don't you come in late. Somebody passes before their time and they leave behind (list of people) but what do you leave behind? your dog maybe and your DVD collection? such a meaningless life.

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  3. I've always been a contrarian Z. Not simply for the sake of being one; I just want to be me.

    Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky tacky...

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  4. Cultural anthropologists often claim that 'conventional wisdom'
    is the summation of human experience over time; bad to kill
    folks, incest is taboo, cooperation is good, etc. Like
    a cultural imbed. IMO, this likely served us humans over eons well.
    But being on the point of the tech explosion, time and the learning
    curve are now more compressed; what
    was wisdom yesterday becomes passe
    today. So we observe frustration,
    anger...or lassitude, ennui.
    ..are they really making Suzi-Qs
    smaller??

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  5. Yes they probably are making Suzi-Qs smaller. When inflation starts to take root the sizes get smaller in a futile attempt to masquerade the fact that prices are rising.

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  6. Oh hell do I agree that if you don't have kids, at work you're a second class citizen. I get that shit all the time. "I NEED this week off because (kid) has school off" ...and? You take 100x more vacation time than I do anyway. STFU. I put in for it first.

    Now about breakfast. Personally I have always felt it really is the most important meal for a couple reasons, one because your body has been fasting all night and needs a kick to restart the metabolism etc and also because it's the meal you have the most time to burn off. You will hear from a lot of very different sources (Ayurveda, Benjamin Franklin, 7th Day Adventists spring to mind) that one should eat a very big breakfast, a medium lunch and a small supper. I have always been a huge fan of breakfast but generally not breakfast foods; I love soup for breakfast and sometimes in the summer I will have salad as part of my breakfast. I eat grits and all that (with cheese thank you) and who doesn't love a bagel loaded with cream cheese? but most days I'm eating some kind of soup, maybe some rice or pasta, maybe something leftover, guacamole is always good, the other day I had a bean and cheese chimichanga. So for me it's not so much about the breakfast foods as it is I just like the meal itself.

    I do agree with you that the average American eats like they're going out to plow the field by hand when they're just sitting behind the desk. And I agree that this is a big part of the problem so many people have with weight. Some of it is conditioned, I know in our house you HAD to eat EVERYTHING and it did not matter what it was or whether you liked it. (We also never had 'sugar cereal', Poptarts, Spaghettios, Koolaid or basically any food that hadn't been around since my parents were kids. No 'fun' kid-oriented foods in our house-unless you count oatmeal cookies and Coke, both of which were only there because my father loved them.) Now probably some of their attitudes came from growing up during the wars, and their parents' attitude towards food came from the Depression (my mom will tell you about picking dandelion greens in the park for supper), and to some degree these things do affect the way you see food. Plus there's just that huge emotional thing that's all tied in with food and that I can't explain at all.

    Anyway the Buddhists will tell you that two meals a day (and nothing after 12 noon) is wholly sufficient and I guess for some people it is. I'm down with the six-to-eight-mini-meals plan because when I eat that way I feel best. I do try to make eating the right things my priority (salad, yogurt, lots of cheese, good protein choices) and then if I want some junk later I have it. But that's what's working for me and it does take planning, a good set of tupperware and a HUGE lunchbox so it's not something I think everyone would be happy with.

    As far as watching one's health, I'm all for some prevention, screenings and stuff. And basically not being an idiot. And just taking care of yourself as best you can. Number one 'watching your health' rule: WASH YOUR HANDS. It's that simple.

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  7. I'm not against breakfast I just never have the time so I'm out the door. Hard-boiled eggs come in real handy at times like this. In the rare event I do have the time I always do a lite breakfast. Used to do the sausage links, the eggs, the toast, the hot cakes, the worx but that's what got me in trouble in the first place. Even when I was dieting I ate better than the Buddhists. Guy at work thin as a fencepost and he eats real sparingly all day like he's on some permanent lifetime diet when he can actually gain a few and they talk about me! I kinda reverse things and want my dinner to be the bigger meal of the day, gives me something to look forward to later. What do you think of the detox teas out there? BTW got my kinkeliba tea in Poughkeepsie the other day with my friend and that stuff rocks!

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  8. But BB I began questioning Conventional Wisdom a long time ago when a woman said no to me and the usual line was don't take it personal. You think about it and you know it's as Marlon Brando says in Last Tango in Paris a steaming pile of horseshit. So after that I began questioning more and more things and once I felt that I didn't have to have three square meals a day, only ate when I was hungry and my body told me to, then I started to shed the pounds. Time heals all wounds, I like so many others here watched the day's events on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and if anything the opposite is the case. Ah the list goes on and on and I just question things more. We're here to debunk conventional wisdom and I haven't even gotten to why political moderation is such an overrated virtue imo.

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