loneliness

Tonight I watched the movie Management, and the entire time watching it I kept getting this overwhelming sense of loneliness. I don't know if it was because I was tired or because all of the characters in the show were lonely to begin with. I do know that it put me in a thoughtful state.

So I updated my facebook page, sort of puttered around for a little while, and thought about things.

I'm doing the weight watchers diet right now. I'm not doing it to be healthy. My family has been heavy for generations, and we all live to be about 85, except my grampa who, curiously, was pretty skinny. He died in his 70s of a heart attack.

No, health is a pretty low concern of mine. Instead, I'm doing it because I completely understood that movie. I am alone. I am lonely.

That's a funny thing to say, and it would be a funny thing, I would think, to hear, if you knew me. I don't come off as lonely. I have over 500 facebook friends, and of those, I honestly do have quite a few real ones. I have a very close, very tight knit family. I'm not even really afraid of anyone these days, not even REALLY pretty girls!

Nevertheless, I sat down, I watched this movie, and I came face to face with the fact that I am a painfully lonely individual, who's decided to try to lose weight using weight watchers because he's now 29 and he's only had about 1 and 1/2 girlfriends and literally no prospects for any future ones.

Look at this. In my very first post that wasn't a test post I wrote, "In an effort to stop taking myself so seriously (I'm sure that happens), I've decided to create a blog specifically for talking about nothing, cracking wise, and kicking ass."

That's what I wrote. Of course, I TITLED my damned site "how to get babes without even trying." So what do you believe? That I wanted to make a few jokes, or that I wanted to spend inordinate amounts of time talking about my inevitably failed attempts at getting babes? Or, I guess, both.

That's really what weight watchers is. It isn't something for people who want to be healthy, because NO ONE WANTS TO BE HEALTHY. You don't wake up and think, "Hey, starting today, I'd like to be healthy, and I'd like to do so by losing a lot of weight!"

No, you wake up. You look at yourself in the mirror, and you think, "This is why I am lonely." And so you step on the scale, and now you can put a number on your loneliness.

And then you go out, and you learn control. You learn that hunger is a good thing and feeling full is bad. You learn that seeing the outlines of bones in your skin is wonderful. You control. You lose weight. You get to your ideal weight. You weigh yourself, and you go to bed.

Then you wake up, you look in the mirror, and you realize that the past few days/months/years haven't worked. You did everything you were supposed to do, but the promise hasn't happened.

You look in the mirror at your body, and you struggle with the fact that science says you are perfect, but you know that you are not. Because you are still lonely.

So maybe science made a mistake. Maybe you need to lose more weight. Maybe an ideal weight for most people isn't the right weight for you.

What a sad, sad world this is, where our primary hope for an end to the indomitable loneliness has nothing to do with our smiles or our hugs. Where we get up and we even think that the mirror holds the key to the end of our misery.

A funny thing about populist movements is that they are very good at identifying problems, but extremely bad at identifying solutions that work. In that sense, this post is absolutely worthless. I know (and I'm guessing most everyone else knows) what the problem is.

Thing is, just knowing about a problem isn't a solution. And I have no real stomach to bother searching one out. If you want to get babes, this isn't the way. I don't know what the way is, but this isn't it.

So instead I'll just say that I did pretty well on my weight watchers points today, and I'm gonna go to sleep now, as lonely as I was when I woke up and as alone as I've been in a long, long time.

But fuck it. Just because I'm lonely doesn't mean I can't tell jokes tomorrow. It doesn't mean I can't smile or give out an uncomfortably large number of hugs. It just means that, when I'm done giving out all those hugs, I get to go home and hug only my pillow goodnight.