A-ha! I knew it. Here.
I’m selling off my gym membership at a discount. And finally getting the cloth-drying line replaced with my skipping rope.
The linked article is quite verbose. The gist is that exercising won’t make you lose weight. Keep you in shape, do good to your heart, etc. is all fine. But if it is kilos you are looking to lose, look elsewhere – like, in your plate, dude. It is something we always knew, of course. But the myth-buster is also a prime example of, what I fondly refer to as, the Spectacle Paradox. (more of why that, later).
Think about it. You exercise apparently to lose weight. Exercise makes you hungry. So you eat more. And all that jazz about turning useless fat into valuable muscle, falls tummy-flat, because the calorie count that you burn during a workout is always going to be a fraction of what you’ll ultimately consume. By eating. Back-to-square-meal-one.
I wear glasses. The power is, umm, significant. So much so, that without them the world for me is like a cheap brochure – pixelated due to free low-res images downloaded from google. So, every morning, when I wake up, the first thing I look for are my glasses. (So that the toothbrush reaches the right cavity.) But then, in a routine-case of not having any fixed resting place for them, I have to scamper around for the search. And the only thing that comes to my mind during the trivial pursuit is: “I am looking for something. For which I should be wearing glasses. But I am looking for my glasses. Gaaah!”
And, following my unmatched aesthetic taste, I have chosen a thin-chassis, almost transparent frame. Which does a nice chameleon act against any background. Now add the pixelated-universe salt to this situation. Not pretty. Nutshell, looking for glasses without glasses, is what came to be called the SP.
Other example.
There’s metro work going on in the city. To build the darned thing, they obviously have to cut trees. Which makes every greenpeacemaker quiver in his organic pants. They drive their SUVs to the site, and do a Gandhi in the garden. “No cut tree. They good for air. Else we die.” Fair enough. But without the metro, “No good public transport. More people drive more car. That not good for air. Either.” There’s no balance possible here. No matter what route they plan, there will be collateral damage.
Seriously, Joseph Heller should have called it Drop 22. No catches here to win any matches.
The world around us is spawning with these Drops.
The company you work for isn’t getting good people. Why? Because it doesn’t have good clients. So get good clients. They won’t come. Why? Because you don’t have good people. Perfect.
You can only afford to buy that superbike, seemingly necessary to impress chicks, after you have passed the age of having either the inclination or the looks to impress anyone. Yeah, the wind in your grey hair doesn’t have the same sound.
When I write copy, to get out anything near decent out of my knuckles, I need calm solitude. Combined impossibly with a certain kind of panic that involves venom-spewing account management breathing down my neck; and a cross-leg crushing urge to go to the loo. Only then does it work. Or does it? I will be able to judge my quality, only after the stage of my judgement being of any importance, passes. Catch that if you can.
