Tag Archives: scrawny

Cross-Legged

Cross-legged: (adj) having the legs crossed

The greatest gift that Mother Nature and Father God can impart to you is a weakness.

Without a weakness, you begin to believe you’re self-sufficient and don’t need help from any outside source. On top of that, you might just create deceitful interpretations of the truth when its proven that you are not “all that and a bag of chips.”

A weakness gives you the ability to know where to start working every single morning.

A weakness warns you that too much confidence is blustering wind with no lightning or rain.

A weakness makes you more compassionate to other people who happen to share a “soft spot” in their abilities—just like you.

A weakness is what makes you strong.

I do not know whether I was born fat, possess a fat gene—or if I’m just caught in the middle of some metabolic paradox.

But my obesity has created a weakness in my life.

Some people may consider it a weakness of my own making, or perhaps one created by my parents “making out.”

It doesn’t make any difference. I’ve had to base my journey on working around my girth—beginning at my birth.

Therefore, I can tell when one ounce leaves and seven pounds arrive to comfort my body over the loss.

I know when I’m on a good spin and when my health is being spun.

I don’t need a mirror to observe the “battle of the bulge.”

For you see, one of the ways I have always been able to tell whether I am beginning to move toward a more normal weight or traveling into the morbid regions of obesity is:

The simple action of crossing my legs.

Now, at this point every fat person in America reading this will howl with laughter, and every skinny-ass individual will turn and look quizzically at another scrawny person as if to say, “What does he mean?”

For when you’re fat, your thighs have grown a fondness for each other and are accustomed to being close. If you think about it, crossing your legs demands that these thighs develop autonomy. Also, your joints—which are essential for convincing one leg to go above the other—are sometimes jammed up with fat globules, which makes the process of crossing one’s legs quite athletic, if not painful.

Therefore, during times of weight loss, I have celebrated my victory with a leg-crossing—occasionally only able to maneuver the “wish bone variety,” where the right foot rests upon the left knee. But a few times, I was actually able to have the legs completely crossed—where the right knee appeared to be humping the left one.

When this has happened I have actually teared up—mostly because it was such a blessing to do such a simple thing.

But partially because being foreign to me, it was as uncomfortable as hell.

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Beelzebub

Beelzebub: (n) another name for the devil.Dictionary B

“Marty did it.”

When I was twelve years old, it was the favorite phrase of my friends and myself.

Marty was a scrawny, bespectacled, weak-willed, sweet farm boy who really didn’t have any power and only gained importance to us when we did something stupid, were trying to escape responsibility, and used him to displace our guilt.

You know what was interesting? It worked–because Marty didn’t really defend himself.

The teachers began to believe that he was the problem child, and even sent him to the guidance counselor for correction.

Marty was so desperate for attention that he somewhat enjoyed the accusations because it gave him identity.

I deeply regret that I was never able to apologize to Marty for making him become the sin-eater for all of our pranks.

After a while, I grew out of it.

I came to the conclusion that if I was going to become a functioning human being I needed to take responsibility for my own actions instead of using Marty as my excuse for iniquity.

Such is the case with Beelzebub.

The Old Devil gets blamed for everything except for those natural disasters we want to lay on God.

Beelzebub absorbs the attention and builds a false kingdom of power around his alleged misdeeds.

When we are childish in our spirituality, we yearn for Beelzebub to step in and take the blame for our shortcomings.

Matter of fact, this may be the sign of truly discovering God: the day you wake up and accept the ramifications of your deeds as your own doing instead of searching the terrain for a devilish accomplice.

Somewhere along the line, one has to conclude that we are known by our own fruits.

It is not Beelzebub that bedevils us.

It is our own lust that draws us away.

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Anti-hero

dictionary with letter A

Anti-hero (n): a central character in a story, movie, or drama who lacks conventional heroic attributes.

Is it an oxymoron or just redundant?

For after all, there are no true heroes who fit the criteria we normally assess to such an honor.

  • All heroes come from nowhere just in the nick of time.
  • They cannot be manufactured–though we have hammered away.
  • They cannot be educated, though classes continue to be held.
  • They cannot be ordained, though religious institutions anoint at will.
  • And they are not born heroes.

One of the greatest misconceptions in our culture is the notion that people are born any particular way. We are all birthed with the need to be born again–emotionally, spiritually, mentally and physically–or else to be cast in the role of being mere understudies of our parents’ stage work.

No one would expect a scrawny attorney from Illinois to be the central figure for the emancipation of the black race and the maintaining of the union of our country.

No one could ever have anticipated that a young man who struggled with math would later convince us that E does equal MC squared.

Could anyone have foreseen that a gentleman of great promise who was struck with polio and was confined to a wheelchair would be elected president four times, guiding us through a national depression and a world war?

Looking at a string of poets, musicians, authors, statesmen, inventors and liberators, there is not one of them who was naturally inclined to greatness.

It is those we preen to be heroes who disappoint us and those who we have cursed to obscurity who end up astounding us.

After all, could anyone have thought that a refugee to Egypt, who grew up in a village of less than five hundred people, the son of a carpenter, would be proclaimed the light of the world?

 

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Alfalfa

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

Alfalfa: (n) a legume with clover-like leaves and bluish flowers, native to southwestern Asia; it is widely grown for fodder.

It’s really quite amazing.

I will never be able to consider alfalfa a legume grown for fodder. Instead, the fodder of alfalfa, to me, is a scrawny white boy with painted-on freckles, black hair parted in the middle, with a huge cow-lick sticking up in the back.

Yes, I’m talking about the young man who was the hero, sometime-villain, and always dopey foil of every ill-conceived plan from the cartoon, The Little Rascals.

Recently, during a particularly satisfying episode of channel-surfing, I stumbled on one of these grainy black-and-white productions done in the 1930’s and 40’s. I decided to watch.

It surprised me that as a young kid I would have been drawn to this adventure series. First of all, we don’t need to discuss how television negatively affects children today, when back then we sat them down in front of the box to watch The Little Rascals.

They were a nasty and cantankerous group of children, who did their best to perform evil pranks on their adversaries and promoted the bigotry of the day with a wide-eyed, purposely dumbed-down black child named Buckwheat.

Alfalfa was especially annoying to me. But I realized he was the exact representation of what makes America so mediocre.

  • He wasn’t as attractive as he thought he was.
  • He wasn’t the leader he thought he was.
  • He wasn’t as successful as he thought he was.
  • And just like so many of these musical shows on TV today, he couldn’t sing as well as he thought he could.

I kept waiting for something redeemable to come out of the escapade–some sort of Aesop moral which a young child could take away from the television set and proudly say, “There. I learned something positive today.”

It just wasn’t there.

Matter of fact, if some of the deeds of The Little Rascals were taken to juvenile court, they would definitely be spending some time behind bars, eating chicken pot pies.

So the word “alfalfa” is perhaps ruined for me forever because it represents a bratty, snotty, untalented young boy who thinks too highly of himself.

So please forgive me for failing to recognize the agricultural possibilities. Yes, I guess alfalfa is supposed to be a legume.

But on The Little Rascals … he was a fruitcake.