Undeterred by fact or logic, it continues to speak

Do you sometimes find your lips moving quicker than your brain has time to process? Well, if you have, you’re a victim of this disease. If you haven’t, you’re just as much a victim. And a liar. And most likely fat.

Now, I say fat because the lot of you reading this are most likely, and for the moment, people I personally know. People I’ve possibly encountered over the course of say, the year or so. Over an e-conversation with a friend just a day ago, we’d run into a terrible realization concerning the state of the nation’s physical well-being, and to put it simply, we’ve all gone fat.

Both of us came to agree that we’ve seen too large a number of people we’ve known from before, turn incredibly portly over the last couple of years. And considering that we’re still in our mid 20’s, the aforementioned must have taken place sometime during our college years.

Horizontally blessed, said friend had personally encountered no such thing. He’s one of the lucky ones I guess. The fatties have even come up with a name for this; they call him “High metabolic rate”.

I on the other hand was a real person, much like most other Malaysians, not so blessed; McDonald’s lunches were synonymous with a McDeluxe waist; vague exercise routines resulted in a similarly vague sex life. Such were the cards most chubs were dealt.

At this point, I can think of at least six different literary directions I could choose to continue; how fat the Malaysian public is becoming, how our recent horizontal waist exploits may be a sign of the end of an economic recession and what have you. But all this only sees me once again getting sucked into that same vacuum that compelled me to tell this girl I met on FaceSter that I worked for NASA, but only on freelance, because the Russians like to keep their best assets to themselves.

What I would rather have been on about sometime before I called everyone fat, is the capacity for man to speak before knowing what’s best said.

Like when you’re asked how your day was at the end of it, do you just go with the “Oh, it was alright” option? Or does your mind stop to think of all the things that happened in the day, then consciously deciding to answer with the specifics of how you were in heated debate with a colleague over the possibility of Robert Pattinson’s hair surviving a family of pygmy marmosets.

Not that it’s a bad thing to go with the automated response, but such is the state of our, or least my, intellect. Why is it that we do this? What first suggested that the rest of us should trace these steps? Is it a vicious cycle? How do stop it? How can we prevent the next person from calling someone else fat, thus possibly emotionally scaring said fatty for life, leaving him or her a spasm in his right eye every time he or she looks his or herself in the mirror?

Which is something I find myself doing battle with most these days. When to speak, when to laugh, when to shrug off silly comments. And I’m not talking about simple mannerisms, but just above that. The bit that makes you, you. The bit that defines your character. Are you the alpha? Or the joker? Or the background man?

Well, sucky bit is that I can answer none of the above posed questions. Instead, I’ve taken it upon myself to be about 30% more conscious of the things I say or do. That will in turn hopefully result in 30% more people I run in to get to look themselves in the mirror without so much as an eye-twitch. 30% more people have the confidence to look a girl in the eye and say, ‘Damn right, I’m worth your time’. 30% more people learn that they too can be like this 30% more of the time, and in turn result in their own 30%s.

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