Advice? and Tek is too funny!

I have often thought that we should maybe come on this board and link to any particularly "interesting" Main Board posts so that we could ALL go and post our sage wisdom and advise that we have gleaned through our post-op time. But the BEST part of the entire thread is that now I know WHY Dx writes the way he does, and how it feels to do it, too. Jan

Hi Jan, Nice to see you, seems like I haven't seen you around in a while. Hope all is well with you. Did it feel good to post that way?

All is MORE than OK with me!! I got notification this week from my company that I earned a new 30" flat screen TV by Dell based on my sales. Good news, huh? The really good news is that I'm giving it away to someone less fortunate than me and it feels SOOOOOOOO GOOD!!!!! I guess I've just been lurking more than posting without realizing it. I know I've been here on a daily basis, but just haven't had much to say, which is actually very unusual for me! HA! As far as the posting style goes, to me it feels disjointed and like I'm stuttering or something. I much prefer to just do the whole stream of consciousness typing thing and break for paragraphs only. But to each his own! Jan

How my name was brought up is a puzzle. I have not tried to hide my frustration w/ the MB. But I finally got enough grip on myself to not respond to the non-sentient lives that are played out on a daily basis. Responding there makes about as much sense as yelling at your television. I am convinced that many of the people we see over on the main board are simply ill-equipped to lose weight by any means, even WLS. There lives are simply so disordered that nothing they can do will bring about the intended effect for more than fleeting moment. At least with Brigadoon, we had a good story. The primary problem I see is that many of these people live reactive lives. The react to every situation in which they find themselves. The problem is two-fold: reactive and every. Reactions can be good but more often than not, they are not in out best interests. When we touch something hot, we react by pulling back. But if you think about it, you are not really responding; you are simply moving your hand in response to stimuli. Lives lived like this are an endless sequence of out-of-control jerking movements, all dictated by this external stimulus or another. When that comes into the eating world, it is a disaster. They eat because something outside of themselves makes them do it. Someone celebrated, so they ate. Grandma died, they ate. They cede control over to something beyond themselves. Its not there fault: the devil made me do it. But the greater problem is that they never stop to think, reflect, and consider; they only react. This characteristic is not conducive to successful WLS post-op living. The other problem is every. You may recall my crusade against faux-urgent posts. It is not the mindless chatter of a frustrated old philologist. Rather, it is pleading for proportionality. If a person thinks everything is urgent, maybe their hair is really on fire. In a professional environment, if I were to be give a list of tasks, asked to prioritize them, and returned a list where everything was high-priority, I would be sent back to do my job. Everything can't be of the highest priority, plain and simple. Would you not agree that a sense of proportion is important to successful post-op living. Yet many of these people can not or choose not to stop and make that step. The reason they can't is because the only react to things (see above) I stay away from the MB because I see accidents just waiting to happen. Strike that, they are not accidents. They are the predictable wrecks that are outcomes of a sequence of events. WLS will devastate these peoples lives. It might make them thinner for a while, but midnight is surely coming and their disordered lives will begin to encroach and finally engulf them again. Then they will blame their surgeon for their failure. They will blame those folks who were not supportive enough. They will blame someone else. But in the dark night of their soul, in a flickering moment of self-reflection they will be confronted with the fact that they experienced the most powerful weapon that can be used to confront obesity and failed. All that remains is despair. They would have been better served to not have had WLS. Trying to tell them what you see makes about as much sense as yelling at your TV. You change nothing and end up looking like a fool. Its what I've been attempting to describe when I talk about 'candidates for success." Flame away! Nowhere Man/PH/Jay