Untotaled: Stepping 12 (February 14, 1965)–Valen-kind’s Day … May 3, 2014

Jonathots Daily Blog

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Her name was Jody. (Actually it still is.)

She sat in front of me during Social Studies.

No one liked Jody. She committed the three grave sins of early “teendom”: she was a little larger, she was very quiet and therefore assumed stupid, and she copped an attitude if you made fun of her.

And they did. Make fun of her, that is.

Rumors about Jody spread through our classroom daily with the proficiency of a team of reporters on the New York Times. One of the more repetitive and prevalent accusations was that Jody smelled bad. Matter of fact, one of the guys thought it was hilarious to put a can of air freshener on her desk before she arrived at school. When she knocked it off and threw it on the ground in anger, the whole classroom burst into laughter.

I never noticed that she smelled. Matter of fact, I’m pretty sure she didn’t.

When our teacher, during the “season of love,” thought it was clever or even cute, to encourage us to send a Valentine to one or more of our fellow-students as a throw-back to our childhood days, I objected. I thought it was beneath our status of being graduates of elementary school.

Yet I was out-shouted by the rest of the class so the plan was set in motion.

I decided that my way of rebelling against this childish practice would be to send a “Valen-kind” card to someone nobody else would think to include. Obviously, Jody came to mind.

So retrieving my construction paper, crayons and round-tipped scissors, I temporarily digressed to the mind-set of a third-grader and produced a card for Jody from me. It said the following:

“Happy Valen-Kind’s Day, Jody. I just wanted to let you know you’re not so bad and I don’t think you stink.”

I signed it and placed it on her desk on February 14th, as the teacher had requested. Unfortunately, my friends arrived before Jody did, found the card on her desk, read it and started to make fun of me incessantly.

When Jody arrived and she read the card, she came toward me to give me a hug, and being alarmed, I pulled back (I assume with a bit of revulsion). She was offended, but it didn’t keep her from following me around for the next week-and-a-half with gooey eyes, thinking that I had the hots for her.

(Even though I was just trying to be kind, I think I overdid it a little bit. I don’t know.)

Eventually, I had to sit her down and tell her that what I was trying to do was let her know that she was okay and just one of us–not that I was looking for a girlfriend.

She was a little disappointed, but I think, relieved.

By the way, the three main bozos who made fun of her ended up, after graduation, spending most of the time under the carriage of cars–changing mufflers.

• Jody went to college.
• She blossomed.
• She ran across people who didn’t know about her “body odor” and accepted her.
• She went on to become an anchor on the local news in our community.

It’s interesting how things work. Rarely are we able to maintain the status that we felt we possessed when we were in our teens.

Because there’s one thing for certain: Jody could clean up, take a bath and become a new person.

But unkindness sticks to you like mud.

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A Great Reward … February 16, 2013

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She stomps around the room, panting and huffing, with fire in her eyes, screaming a tirade of disapproval to a collection of hand-selected American fatties, who haplessly receive her critical words, having no way of escape. She is muscular, slightly emaciated and totally bewildered by why these misfit souls can’t exercise their way to trimness and beauty.

“What’s wrong with you?” she bellows from the depths of her self-righteousness.

***

I looked forward to it every day.

When kindergarten was over, if I had been a good boy, my mother would drive me down to the Dairy Delight in Delaware, Ohio, and buy me two chicken sandwiches and a root beer freeze. It was so delicious–so reassuring. Sometimes during the morning hours, it was all I could think about while I organized my crayons and cut circles out of construction paper.

It was my reward–proof that I had done well. And I learned it excellently.

Like millions and millions of other people in this country, I was teased, taunted and tantalized with the reward of eateries and treats, to accentuate the possibility of my good grades and fruitful behavior.

“That’s right, Tommy. If you’re a good boy in the grocery store, Mommy will buy you a candy bar.”

As painful as it is for Tommy to maintain the vigil of purity, the prospect of a soft Milky Way candy bar melting in his mouth sustains him through the rigors of restraint.

“If you’re good, Jane, on the way back from dance class, we’ll stop and get ice cream at Baskin Robbins.”

Jane is willing to tolerate the ridiculous contortions of her instructor’s demands for the prospect of Rocky Road with a squirt of whipped cream.

It is the practice of this country to reward its children with naughty little pieces of caloric destruction when they have achieved success–and then we wonder why we grow up to be a nation full of bloated bodies, if not egos.

So some of these rewarded children discover they have slower metabolisms, or they even develop addictions to their rewards and treats, growing fatter than their neighbors. Then we wonder what’s wrong with them. What turmoil is churning in their souls which cause them to destroy their bodies with the poison of food?

We are absolutely insane. We have a First Lady who proclaims the excellence of good eating, while simultaneously living in a nation where food–dripping with grease, fat, sugar and salt–is touted as a confirmation of our prowess and pleasure.

If we actually are going to be healthier, we have to develop a better reward system. I know it torments me to this day. When I finish a show, I want my two chicken sandwiches and my root beer freeze from the Dairy Delight. “Jonathan has been a good boy.” I have colored within the lines. I put down the toilet seat so the little girls wouldn’t fall in at kindergarten. Where’s my treat?

Until we address this problem, we will manufacture a hypocrisy which is not only befuddling to the masses, but also offers little alternative for ever achieving a trimmed-down solution.

I don’t care what you do with your children, but food–especially those terrible morsels of treachery–can no longer be dangled as rewards for good performance.

How about developing “house bucks”–little dollar bills you print–as the reward for excellent work, which can be traded in for favors, opportunities and the ability to make decisions. In other words, you collect 25 house bucks and you get to select all the TV shows for one night. 50 gives you the chance to choose the dinner, as long as it includes all the necessary food groups. 100 house bucks–you get a bicycle, so you can ride around and exercise instead of sit around and eat fat.

Whatever our decision, we cannot punish our adult population, which is growing obese, because as children they were taught that they were good boys and girls, and confirmed to be so by chomping on caramel and cream.

When you remove the hypocrisy, what remains is your reality. As long as you’re not afraid of it, you gain power. We need to understand that food is not a reward–it is nourishment. The true reward in life is the opportunity to decide for yourself what you’re going to do … and to find a way to have fun doing it.

The producers of jonathots would humbly request a yearly subscription donation of $10 for this wonderful, inspirational opportunity