because i'm good enough, i'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me

.

so i'm talking to a friend the other day and he tells me his therapist has assigned him the task of doing affirmations between sessions--no doubt he expected me to laugh along with him about such touchy-feely, new age nonsense.


imagine his shock when instead i said, "don't scoff--affirmations work, and you should totally do them."


this stopped him for a minute, and then he slowly asked, in a voice dripping with sarcasm and disbelief, "and you, mr. cynical, would know this... how?"

 *     *     *     *     *

picture it:  silverlake, 2005

so i'm dating this guy and he's slim and hot and i'm not, and neither of us particularly cares until this happens, and then i'm all like, i gotta lose some weight.

understand:  i deal with food just like those overly made-up and perfectly-coiffed fat women who fill the audience on oprah:  i love sugar, i love salt, i crave carbs and fat, and i eat to fill the void.  i can generally handle a healthy regimen for about a week, and then i say fuck it and binge.

so knowing a diet's not gonna work, i'm forced to look for another way.  i find a website telling me affirmations would effortlessly make me thin; didn't believe it, but figure what can it hurt?  i find a pad of paper, grab a pen.


for an affirmation to take hold in your subconscious mind, the website tells me, it must be written in the present tense, as if the behavior change you're trying to effect has already happened.  i think for a minute, write

i am in total control of what i put in my mouth

and then laugh, because that statement couldn't be more completely and ridiculously untrue.  never fear, the website tells me--make it as out-there as you want; go for broke!

so i pick up my pen and add a couple dashes followed by another outrageous lie:

eating right comes easy to me

and then, just to make it completely surreal, i stick a big, fat exclamation point at the end.

now all you have to do, the website assures me, is write your affirmation 20 times each day, while repeating it to yourself with great enthusiasm.  and before you know it, you're on your way to a healthy new behavior!

yeah.

by about the third day, 20 times is too much for my lazy ass, so i cut it down to 10, and i'm barely mumbling the thing to myself as my pen moves across the paper, and between each repetition i pause and say, "this is such bullshit"--but in my own half-ass way, i persevere.

and even though i only spend about five minutes a day writing it, i find the phrase coming into my head at odd times throughout the day--i even make a dumb little song out of it when i run.

the thing about real-life change is, it's never like in movies or TV--there's no sudden, dramatic shift in music or lighting or camera angles to tell you something has happened. in my case, i just looked up one day a couple months after i started the affirmations and realized i'd gone through all the notches on my belt, and i'd need to grab an old one outta my drawer if i wanted to keep my pants up.

and then i thought back, tryin to recall the last time i'd had a coke or a donut or any of that other crap at work, and i honestly couldn't remember.  wow--eating right truly had come easy to me.

*     *     *     *     *

so how did this sweet story end?  well, (a) sam and i broke up (for the third or twelfth time, i don't remember which), and (b) around that time, i shitcanned the affirmations, figuring i had the eating problem licked once and for all.


within about a month, i'm guzzling coke and popping peanut m&m's again, and my "thin" belt is back in the drawer, too small once more.


which brings me to the other thing this experience taught me about real-life change: when the thing you couldn't believe would ever happen actually happens, how quickly you take it for granted.  the website told me i'd have to reinforce my new behavior with at least three months of daily affirmations--but once it was working, i couldn't be bothered anymore.


so, to my dubious friend, i say, "give it a shot--and when it starts to work, make sure you stick with it."


and to those dubious readers who still think i make this shit up,

i really don't.

a walk down memory lane

.



boy, this shot takes you back, doesn't it?  eight years of  "murderer!" and "nazi!" directed at the previous president, and nary a peep from the media or the leadership of the opposition as to how this sorta inflammatory, vitriolic hate-speech might, god forbid, incite violence against him.  guess since he was a nazi murderer and all, it was justified, right?

[for a truly breathtaking display of the whole panoply of non-inflammatory, non-vitriolic and totally civil "kill bush" images and words, click here--i promise it'll be as eye-opening for you as it was for me, because the media and lefty blogs sure as hell didn't evince any alarm or outrage over this shit (much less give it any coverage) when it was happening]

more recently, there was the way the media covered the discovery channel guy

y'know, the guy who strapped bombs around his body and took hostages.  an act of domestic terrorism?  nah--inconveniently, the guy was a non-white tree-hugger, and god knows the media won't tar any minority or any movement even remotely associated with the left with the "t" word.  were his wacko fantasies inflamed by all the hysterical "climate change" rhetoric we've all been marinating in for the last ten years?  never even brought up--crazed gunman, isolated incident.  case closed.

and before him, there was the inconveniently-muslim US army major nidal hasan

you remember him--mowed down 13 people at fort hood whilst screaming allahu akbar!,  but we were hastily assured by the media and the obama justice department that, rather than an act of domestic terrorism, this was merely an isolated incident involving a disturbed individual who couldn't possibly have been moved to violence by the inflammatory, vitriolic, jihadist hate-speech spouted by the extremist factions of his religion.  case closed.

so, knowing all this, anybody wanna hazard a guess as to why--within 30 minutes of determining nothing more than that the tucson shooter was a young, white male--the democrats, the mainstream media and every idiot liberal blogger on the interwebs were shrieking to the world that this was clearly an act of domestic terrorism inspired by the inflammatory, vitriolic hate-speech spewed by the tea party and the anti-illegal immigrationistas?

actually, never mind--i'll tell you why:  they desperately need a new timothy mcveigh to kill the fledgling grassroots limited-government movement with guilt by association, and they won't rest until they have a square peg they can jam into their round hole.

thing that kills me is, even as the truth has emerged about jared lee loughner--that, like so many assassins, he was a twisted loner whose politics, if any, had little to do with his murderous fixation on a public figure--far as the media and the left are concerned, it's still all dumbass sarah palin's fault for putting crosshairs on a goddam map.

*     *     *     *     *

it wasn't 9/11 that hurt us as a nation [yeah, it was bad, but in the overall scheme of horrific things that happen to nations, it wasn't that bad].  no, it was our hysterical over-reaction to 9/11 that truly hurt us--cursed us with the PATRIOT act, homeland security,  the ruinous wars in iraq and afghanistan. 

i.e., because the right effectively exploited our fear, we willingly traded our freedoms and our treasure for the illusion of safety.

today? an isolated shooting in arizona is being exploited by the left in order to serve the same ends.  at issue: the ability to regulate what you can see, say and hear, and whether or not you can own a gun--all, of course, in order to keep you "safe".

me?  i'll keep what's left of my freedoms and take my chances with the jared lee loughners of the world--i can only hope the majority of americans still feel the same.

yeah, but would i want her as a mother?

.

i have always been awed by women like amy chua.  at 48, this ivy-league magna cum laude graduate has managed to become a full professor at the top law school in the country, write two critically-acclaimed books on geopolitics, maintain a home and husband and raise two "perfect" children--all while remaining thin and gorgeous.

the true magnitude of this accomplishment only became clear when the lengths to which she went to ensure the perfection of said children was revealed last week in a wall street journal excerpt from her new book--i mean, when you dedicate yourself to the full-time task of making your kids' lives a living hell, how could you possibly have time for all that other shit?

well, she pulls it off--the article, modestly titled why chinese mothers are superior, is a must-read for not only you, my four readers, but every half-assed parent in america whose precious high-school graduate can't find his own ass with both hands.
 
there are so many pull quotes i hardly know where to start, but here are my favorites:

Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:

• attend a sleepover

• have a playdate

• be in a school play

• complain about not being in a school play

• watch TV or play computer games

• choose their own extracurricular activities

• get any grade less than an A

• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama

• play any instrument other than the piano or violin

• not play the piano or violin.

sounds bleak, huh?  yeah, i thought so, too.  but wait, there's more:

If a Chinese child gets a B—which would never happen—there would first be a screaming, hair-tearing explosion. The devastated Chinese mother would then get dozens, maybe hundreds of practice tests and work through them with her child for as long as it takes to get the grade up to an A.

wow.  how much more antithetical to the ethos of today's typical american parent--whose fear of their childrens' wrath seemingly overrides any prediliction for strictness on their part--could that be?

What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences.

but what about damage to the child's precious self-esteem?

Western parents are concerned about their children's psyches. Chinese parents aren't. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently.

and finally, the money quote (for me, anyway):

[M]any Chinese secretly believe that they care more about their children and are willing to sacrifice much more for them than Westerners, who seem perfectly content to let their children turn out badly.

and that really is the bottom line.

the stereotype has always been that the asians produce scholastically-excellent conformists, whereas the american educational system produces the sort of creative individualists who made this country great.

yeah, keep telling yourselves that, america--maybe if you repeat it often enough, it'll still be true.

if ms. chua's (and, by extension, her culture's) child-rearing methods seem extreme to you (and even to me)?  well, they probably are.  but i bet your grandparents wouldn't have thought so.

seriously, read the article--it is a tour de force of irony, self-awareness and hard truth.