{"id":1695,"date":"2016-06-21T08:11:17","date_gmt":"2016-06-21T15:11:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/?p=1695"},"modified":"2016-06-21T08:11:17","modified_gmt":"2016-06-21T15:11:17","slug":"do-these-pants-make-me-personality-look-fat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2016\/06\/21\/do-these-pants-make-me-personality-look-fat\/","title":{"rendered":"Do These Pants Make Me Personality Look Fat?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A friend posted some pictures on Facebook and she looked like she had lost some weight.<\/span><\/p>\n

At first I wanted to make a comment. \u201cHave you lost weight? You look great!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Then it occurred to me that this friend looked pretty great before, too. Most of my friends look pretty great. Most people look pretty great. Sometimes people get sick, or are going through something, and don\u2019t look so great, but at those times, looks don\u2019t matter.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then I realized, for the most part, looks never matter. This friend, in a particular, has a heart of gold and is one of my favorite people.<\/span><\/p>\n

But then I thought, well, all you\u2019re trying to do is make her feel good. You just want to compliment her so she knows you noticed the hard work she (maybe) put into staying healthy.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"nice-personality-weight-scale\"<\/a>Because physical appearance is a socially acceptable topic for comment. Sending someone a comment that says \u201cHey, just wanted to mention that I saw your swimming-suit pictures and was reminded what a truly wonderful personality you have,\u201d is not only borderline creepy, it has connotations of saying a person is unattractive, ironically!<\/span><\/p>\n

Then, of course, I decided to say nothing, because who cares if a 44-year-old man thinks someone lost a few pounds?<\/span><\/p>\n

And after that I got sort of mad that we live in a world where this much thought and anxiety goes into a stupid picture on some stupid social media site.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then I had a beer and watched you-tube videos of babies playing with puppies, and felt lots better.<\/span><\/p>\n

What I learned from all of this is that while may I have been socialized to evaluate people by their looks, I still have the choice to articulate that evaluation or not. And that\u2019s where my power lies, that choice. Next time I see that friend, instead of mentioning her weight, I\u2019ll ask her what she\u2019s been up to. I\u2019ll lead the conversation towards exercise or food choices or whatever. I\u2019ll let her say as much or as little as she wants. I\u2019ll tell her I am inspired by her dedication and hard work.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then we\u2019ll have some beers and I\u2019ll show her those you-tube videos.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A friend posted some pictures on Facebook and she looked like she had lost some weight. At first I wanted to make a comment. \u201cHave you lost weight? You look great!\u201d Then it occurred to me that this friend looked pretty great before, too. Most of my friends look pretty great. Most people look pretty … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Do These Pants Make Me Personality Look Fat?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p24y52-rl","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1695"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1695\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1701,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1695\/revisions\/1701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}