IS THE SCALE MY HOLY GRAIL?

I don't know who the artist is. I bought this years ago and it hangs on my wall.

There have been points in my life where, should I have died in a traffic accident and somebody had to clean up my effects, they would have thought that I was a member of the Nicole Richie Fan Club. Not at all; yet, why the photos of her on my fridge and in my datebook? An examination would reveal that they tended to originate in articles of the genre "Deadly Diets Revealed". You've all seen the stories as you line up to pay for your gas or groceries. You know the magazines I'm talking about.

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Once upon a time, people had missions. Some would crusade in search of the Holy Grail. Many others set forth in rickety boats filled with rats on a voyage that took months. Think of a ship that had no indoor plumbing and people were stacked atop each other like cordwood. They had dreams of a better life and of freedom from persecution. They were driven by hope and guided by the North or Polar Star. So, what has my guiding light been reduced to at times? A scale. Numbers on a pair of jeans.

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I know the thinking is illogical and wrong but my mind still goes there at times. It goes there a lot.

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When we focus on achieving the wrong goals there is a price to pay at some point. The last two decades had an emphasis on the accumulation of goods and wealth. As a consequence the entire world economy is now collapsing. People like us are losing their homes and joining the ranks of the unemployed. The emphasis on the superficiality of looks is driving people into relationships that can not withstand the arrival of the newest, shiny model on the market. So much for "til death us do part and in sickness and in health." Replace that with "until some hot looking nanny comes along." Girls will select friends based not on their merits but on their genes.

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I think this craziness has just made a lot of people give up on their weight. The ideal is so unrealistic that people fall into the all or nothing thinking pattern and start to compulsively overeat. After all, the images we look at aren't of real people. They are altered creations which do not even bear any real resemblance at times to their human counterpart. Our view of food is so skewed that it gets to the point where it has nothing to do with the satisfaction of fulfilling actual hunger or enjoyment of the fare. The food is junk. It's empty, fast food that's crammed in there to satisfy some other unfulfilled need.

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And I guess it's that void that we have to fill with something meaningful. Not procedures which leave us freakish in an attempt to find eternal youth or hitting one spinning class after another so that we look like the hamster on the proverbial wheel.

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I want food to mean sitting down with a friend in a nice restaurant and freely enjoying the taste, the ambience and the company. I want my life to have made a difference to at least one other person or creature. I want to one day be free of the caloric encyclopedia in my head which remembers everything yet cannot remember my mother's birthday. And damn it, I want to take Nicole Richie off my fridge like I really and truly mean it!