Varna’s Mind

The Complete Guide to Not Giving a F**k

Written by inoveryourhead

Ok, I have a confession to make.

I have spent almost my whole life– 31 years–  caring far too much about offending people, worrying if I’m cool enough for them, or asking myself if they are judging me.

I can’t take it anymore. It’s stupid, and it’s not good for my well being. It has made me a punching bag–  a flighty, nervous wuss. But worse than that, it has made me someone who doesn’t take a stand for anything. It has made me someone who stood in the middle, far too often, and not where I cared to stand, for fear of alienating others. No more. Not today.

Today, ladies and gentlemen, is different.

We’re going to talk about the cure. We’re going to talk about what’s necessary. We’re going to talk about the truth.

Do you wonder if someone is talking shit about you? Whether your friends will approve? Have you become conflict-avoidant? Spineless?

Well, it’s time you started not giving a fuck.

FACT NUMBER 1. People are judging you right now.

Yes, it’s really happening right at this moment. Some people don’t like you, and guess what? There’s nothing you can do about it. No amount of coercion, toadying, or pandering to their interests will help. In fact, the opposite is often true; the more you stand for something, the more they respect you, whether it’s grudgingly or not.

What people truly respect is when you draw the line and say “you will go no further.” They may not like this behaviour, but so what? These are people don’t like you anyway, why should you attempt to please people who don’t care for you in the first place?

Right. Then, there’s Internet trolls. That’s a whole other thing.

Regular people are fine– you don’t actually hear it when they’re talking behind your back. But on the web, you do see it, which changes the dynamic drastically. They have an impact because they know you have your vanity searches, etc. But the real problem with Internet haters is that they confirm your paranoid delusion that everyone out there secretly hates you.

Thankfully, that’s not actually true. So the first noble truth is that most people don’t even care that you’re alive. Embrace this, my friends, for it is true freedom. The world is vast and you are small, and therefore you may do as you wish and cast your thoughts of those who dislike it to the side.

FACT NUMBER 2. You don’t need everyone to like you.

This stuff is crazy, I know, but it’s cool, you’ll get used to it. Here’s the next thing: not only do most people not know that you exist, and some are judging you, but it totally does not matter even if they are.

How liberating this is may not even hit you yet, but it will. Check this out: when people don’t like you, nothing actually happens. The world does not end. You don’t feel them breathing down your neck. In fact, the more you ignore them and just go about your business, the better off you are.

You know when they say “the best revenge is a life well lived”? Well, this is true, but it isn’t the whole truth. A life well lived is great, yes, but it cannot happen while you are sweating about who your detractors are and what they think. What you have to do, what you have no choice but to do, is accept it and move on.

So not giving a fuck is actually a necessary precedent to create a good life for yourself. It can’t happen without it. That’s why you have to begin today.

FACT NUMBER 3. It’s your people that matter.

Ok, so you’ve adjusted to the fact that most people in the world are barely aware of your existence, and you’re also conscious of the fact that those who don’t like you are in the obscenely small minority and don’t actually matter. Awesome. Next you need to realize that the people who do care about you, and no one else, are those you need to focus on.

Relationships are weird. Once we’re in one (with family, a spouse, whatever), we promptly begin to take the other person for granted and move on to impressing strangers instead– say, our boss. Then, once we’ve impressed our boss, we start taking him for granted too, and so on, in an endless cycle of apathy. It’s like we always prefer to impress and charm the new than to work on what we already have.

But these people– your champions– they understand your quest or your cause. They make you feel good when you’re around them, make you laugh or make you feel like you can just be yourself. They make you feel relaxed or at ease. You’ve shared things with them. They’re important. Focus on them instead.

FACT NUMBER 4. Those who don’t give a fuck change the world. The rest do not.

So I’m reading this horrible book right now by Stephen King called the Long Walk. It’s a contest where people walk without sleeping or resting, and if they do stop, they are killed. (That’s actually every Stephen King book– “there’s a clown, but it kills!” “There’s a car, but it kills!” etc.)

I suspect this book is a metaphor for war, but it also captures perseverance very well. What it takes to move past anything is to simply realize that your obstacle is unimportant, and that it can be dismissed. This is true whether you’re running a marathon or trying to get to Mars.

If you dismiss the things that do not matter; if you remove those things from your mind and focus on what must be done; if you understand that your time is limited and decide to work now; only then will you be able to get to the finish line. Otherwise, you will be dissuaded into living a life you aren’t interested in.

Side note: You need to handle failure and obscurity better. You may be in a tough place right now where you feel lonely or like a loser. No worries, we’ve all been there. But it’s time for you to realize how common these things are, and that they’re experienced by even the most successful and happiest people in the world. Those people get past them, and you will too.

The eye is watching

You want to know something? This actually has nothing to do with anyone else. It has everything to do with you.

I had a discussion with Jonathan Fields the other week that was about the use of swearing (and “true voice”) on blogs. I watched him on a Skype video as we did this, and I could actually pinpoint the moment where he was about to say “fuck” but almost stopped himself. It was amazing. So I called him out on it. “You felt it just now, didn’t you?”

Everyone has an internetal eye. It always watching. It has been slowly constructed by society at large and by your friends and family, and it checks you for unacceptable behaviour. If you have had it around for long enough, you actually start to believe that the eye is you, and that you’re “being reasonable” or some other rationalization.

But the eye isn’t you at all. It is a prison, and you have justified its existence by obeying it. It’s strong because you let it be strong.

But the secret, the part that’s amazing, is that it can’t do anything to stop you, even if it wanted to. It’s an eye. It can only watch. The rest of you is free to act as you wish.

How to get back your self-respect in five easy steps

STEP 1. Do things that you consider embarrassing.

My girlfriend and I have been breaking in Vibram Fivefingers in preparation for the massive walk we are doing. Have you ever seen these shoes? They’re amazing for you knees and give you no blisters, but they are the ugliest thing imaginable. Yesterday, I wore them with a sweet bowtie I put on for Easter. I looked like a crazy person.

As I said at the beginning of this post, I am deeply aware and can become quite upset by people’s judgment– I think a lot of people are, but don’t admit it. But as I walked by people in my techno-clown outfit, not a single person looked at me. Nobody cared, and it slowly dawned on me that even if people did look at me weird, they just walked by. Later, they would forget about me entirely.

You must try this. Find your internal filters and break them, one at a time. Notice how society, like an ocean, smoothes over the waves you make, until what you do gets eliminated, or becomes the status quo. Work with this.

STEP 2. Accept, or deal with, awkwardness.

It’s widely known that interviewers get their best material by being quiet and allowing silence to force words out of a politician or celebrity.

You may be uncomfortable with silence. I know I still am. But I have been working on it and have to say that it is a much more serene state to be in than trying to cover it up with random babbling just to fill up the air. This is one type of awkwardness, a kind that you should feel comfortable about and learn to live with.

Another kind of social awkwardness is this in-between space where you might have done something wrong or been wronged, but don’t say anything. I’ve been given a few harsh lessons in my time and come away realizing that the freedom that comes from talking about an uncomfortable truth is better than the comfort of avoiding that talk altogether.

Someone told me recently that the Clintons’ method for earning respect in politics is this: if someone pushes you, push back twice as hard. This is much better than awkwardness. It’s clear, it’s not passive aggressive, and you know where you stand. Start doing this immediately.

STEP 3. Refuse boundaries.

The video above was taken in 1970, right when the Front de Libération du Québec had killed Premier Pierre Laporte and put his body in the trunk of a car. Trudeau’s “Just watch me” is one of the most famous phrases in Canadian political history. The journalists are trying to trap him into choosing on-camera between a safety/police-state and civil liberties/freedom but Trudeau refuses their boxes.

The Liberal Party of Canada no longer has any balls, but for us, there’s still hope. Walk where you want to walk. Don’t accept false choices. Don’t let people dictate how you should live your life. Definitely don’t listen to the eye.

STEP 4. Tell the truth.

You don’t need to be an asshole, but the world does not need another conflict-avoidant, evasive person. No one wants another individual who steps in line with everyone else. The status quo is doing fine without you, so it’s up to you to call bullshit if you see it.

Don’t mind-read either. Telling the truth means seeing the truth, not adding your own layer of sugar coating or suspected emotion on top of it.

STEP 5. Begin your new life.

This step can’t happen without the others, but once you’ve gotten here, you can safely begin to explore a whole new world– one where anything you do is fine as long as it isn’t seriously hurting anyone else. Wanna explore old abandoned buildings? No problem, as long as you’re ready to live with the consequences. Feel like hanging from hooks or get whipped by a dominatrix? Go ahead, but be safe about it.

Once you begin on this path, you start to discover that practically everyone is capable of understanding the weird things that you do. In fact, it makes you interesting and worth paying attention to, further feeding into your plans of world domination, should you have any.

But none of this fun can happen without you recognizing, and walking past, the eye. Doing this is a powerful act of control which builds momentum and makes you strong.

Take back your self respect. Do it today– try it right now. Wear something ugly. Do something stupid. Tell someone the truth.

It doesn’t fucking matter.

Bonus:Cats..

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It’s a familiar problem for many women, as standard sizing has never been very standard, ever since custom clothing gave way to ready-to-wear.

So, baffled women carry armfuls of the same garment in different sizes into the dressing room. They order several sizes of the same shirt online, just to get the right fit.

Now, a handful of companies are tackling the problem of sizes that are unreliable. Some are pushing more informative labels. Some are designing multiple versions of a garment to fit different body shapes. And one is offering full-body scans at shopping malls, telling a shopper what sizes she should try among the various brands.

“For the consumer to go out and navigate which one do I match with is a huge challenge, and causes frustration and returns,” said Tanya Shaw, an entrepreneur working on a fit system. “So many women tie their self-esteem to the size on the tag.”

As the American population has grown more diverse, sizes have become even less reliable. Over the years, many brands have changed measurements so that a woman who previously wore a 12 can now wear a 10 or an 8, a practice known as “vanity sizing.”

In men’s clothes, the dimensions are usually stated in inches; women’s clothing involves more guesswork.

Take a woman with a 27-inch waist. In Marc Jacobs’s high-end line, she is between an 8 and a 10. At Chico’s, she is a triple 0. And that does not consider whether the garment fits in the hips and bust. (Let’s not get into length; there is a reason most neighborhood dry cleaners also offer tailoring.)

Ms. Shaw, the entrepreneur, is chief executive of a company called MyBestFit that addresses the problem. It is setting up kiosks in malls to offer a free 20-second full-body scan — a lot like the airport, minus the pat-down alternative that T.S.A. agents offer.

Lauren VanBrackle, 20, a student in Philadelphia, tried MyBestFit when she was shopping last weekend.

“I can be anywhere from a 0 at Ann Taylor to a 6 at American Eagle,” she said. “It obviously makes it difficult to shop.” This time, the scanner suggested that at American Eagle, she should try a 4 in one style and a 6 in another. Ms. VanBrackle said she tried the jeans on and was impressed: “That machine, in a 30-second scan, it tells you what to do.”

The customer steps into a circular booth, fully dressed. A wand rotates around her, emitting low-power radio waves that record about 200,000 body measurements, figuring out things like thigh circumference.

Next, the system matches the customer’s measurements to clothes in its database. MyBestFit currently measures clothes from about 50 stores, including Old Navy, Eddie Bauer and Talbots.

Customers then receive a printout of the sizes at each store that ought to fit the customer best. The retailers pay a fee when they appear in the results, but they cannot pay to be included in the results; the rankings are based solely on fit. (The company saves the data, with ID numbers but not names, and may give aggregate information to retailers as feedback.)

Don Thomas, who manages the Eddie Bauer store at the King of Prussia Mall outside Philadelphia, said the system was helpful to shoppers. “Nine times out of 10, if left on their own, they will choose the wrong size pant,” he said. With a printout, “if it says they’re a 4 or a 6, they’re a 4 or a 6, generally. So it’s really good for the customer who’s time-starved, which we all are.”

Ms. Shaw says there are plans for 13 more scanning machines in malls along the East Coast and in California by the end of the year.

The sizing variations are a big contributor to $194 billion in clothing purchases returned in 2010, or more than 8 percent of all clothing purchases, according to the National Retail Federation.

The scanners are a modern solution to an old problem. Studying dress sizes in Vogue advertisements from 1922 on, Alaina Zulli, a designer focusing on costume history, found clothing sizes have been irregular for decades.

A woman with a 32-inch bust would have worn a Size 14 in Sears’s 1937 catalog. By 1967, she would have worn an 8, Ms. Zulli found.

Today, she would wear a zero.

Plenty of people have tried to address these arbitrary sizes. Advocating a labeling system called Fitlogic over the last few years, an entrepreneur, Cricket Lee, discovered just how difficult it is to change manufacturers’ approach to size.

Her labeling system divides women’s bodies into three shapes, straight, hourglass or bottom-heavy, and a Fitlogic label carries both the standard size and the shape.

Ms. Lee did tests in the mid-2000s with manufacturers like Jones Apparel and retailers like Nordstrom. But retailers said consumers had trouble grasping the concept. “The manufacturers were so afraid of producing more than one fit in the very beginning,” she said.

Still, she said, she will soon try to sell the sizing system again.

Some brands are taking their own approaches to make the fitting room less demoralizing. Mary Alderete, vice president for women’s global marketing at Levi’s, said, “When we try on 10 pairs of jeans to buy one, the reason you feel bad is because you think something’s wrong with you.”

Last fall, the company introduced Curve ID, a line that offers three styles, depending on how rounded a woman’s backside is — slight, demi and bold. (Levi’s is now testing a fourth style, called supreme curve.) Each of the three styles includes about 29 fits and colors, and dozens of sizes. Ms. Alderete said the company had sold more than one million pairs of the Curve jeans.

Marie-Eve Faust, the program director of fashion merchandising at Philadelphia University, called the Levi’s effort “a good start.”

“The next step is to have the major players sit together, manufacturers, retailers, brands, and say ‘This type of label should be appropriate for all of us. Let’s standardize,’ ” she said.

Dr. Faust said she had been discussing a new kind of label that takes into account the wearer’s shape, but expected retailers to bristle.

Still, Dr. Faust said, change is needed.

“It would be nice just to take the pant, look at the label and say, ‘That should fit me,’ ” she said.

John Pollack is an admitted compulsive pun maker. He claims that his first complete sentence was “Bears go barefoot.” He won the 1995 O. Henry Pun-Off World Championship. The stipulated subject was “external body parts.” The double meaning that gained him his victory was “I’m going to chinnel my energy into coming up with a new pun.”

Mercifully, once Pollack has finished describing this contest in excruciating detail, he has a number of things to say that are intelligent instead of clever.

He rightly gives the pun the broadest definition, encompassing all the linguistic, symbolic and even gestural ambiguities of communication. One of the “world’s experts on the science of laughter” tells him that “the first joke in human history was most likely a feigned tickle.” He describes the neurological backtracking and cross-referencing required to process ambiguity. His explanations of the anatomical regions and electrochemical activities in the brain are scientific, but not so scientific as to make the brain ache. He tells us, with a clarity unusual for the subject, how the mind works when presented with the multiple meanings of a pun “to make its best educated guess about the speaker’s intent, including the possibility that this intent is to convey multiple meanings.”

Most of the book, however, is devoted to the history and significance of punning. The recorded history of the pun goes back further than the recorded history of almost anything else. In the caves of our Paleolithic ancestors, 35,000-year-old figurines have been found, each appearing to be a naked woman when viewed from one angle and an erect penis when viewed from another. The human tendency to pun is carved in stone.

Pollack, who has worked as a journalist and was a presidential speechwriter for Bill Clinton, collects a variety of research, anecdotes and observations. Punning is the source of the phonetic alphabet. Sumerian scribes began using pictographs to represent not just what was pictured but the sound of the name of what was pictured. The result, Pollack says, was comparable to a modern text message — “cu 2morrow @5.”

King Charles I’s court jester, Archy Armstrong, lost his job by saying grace — “Great praise be given to God and little laud to the Devil” — at dinner with the archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. The Newspeak of “1984” was meant to preclude, among other things, puns. “Its vocabulary was so constructed,” George Orwell wrote, “as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings.” And although the pun seems always to have had its comic uses, it is also a formal rhetorical device. The pun can be employed seriously, as when Lady Macbeth goes to smear the blood of murdered Duncan on some innocent servants: “I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal, / For it must seem their guilt.”

The problem with Pollack’s historical survey of puns is that it misses the greatest puns in history. He ignores many of the best practitioners of the idiom — Jesus and Sir Charles Napier, to name two. Jesus said to his disciple Peter, “Upon this rock I will build my church.” That was not only a pun on Peter’s name, which means rock, but also a pun on the character of Peter, who, in the garden of Gethsemane, would deny Jesus thrice before cockcrow. Napier led an unauthorized conquest of the Indian emirate of Sind and is supposed to have sent Queen Victoria a one-word dispatch: “Peccavi.” (Latin for “I have sinned.”)

Pollack mentions Abbott and Costello only in passing, without description or transcription of their “Who’s on first?” exchange. He also gives short shrift to the Marx Brothers, even though the “contract scene” in “A Night at the Opera” contains perhaps the 20th century’s most famous pun.

Groucho: “That’s in every contract. That’s, that’s what they call a ‘sanity clause.’ ”

Chico: “You can’t fool me. There ain’t no Sanity Claus.”

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P. J. O’Rourke’s latest book is “Don’t Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards.”

As a young man, West had been an R.A.F. officer and a collegiate and county cricketer, and had graduated with a first from Oxford, something achieved through impressive feats of scholarship or by sheer dazzle — he managed both. A novelist by the time he and Ackerman fell in love in the early 1970s, he “had a draper’s touch for the unfolding fabric of a sentence, and he collected words like rare buttons,” Acker­man writes. Indeed, words were the oxygen of their love. Every morning, she knew she’d “find a little hand-scrawled love note awaiting me, a gung-ho welcome to the world again after a nighttime away. . . . A new note appeared almost every day for decades.”

Thus it was particularly tragic when, in 2003, West suffered a stroke that left him with global aphasia: an inability to produce words or to understand words spoken to him. “He had chosen to live the proverbial ‘life of the mind’ to the exclusion of all else, reserving his energy for writing and for his equally word-­passionate wife,” Ackerman writes. “Taking words from Paul was like emptying his toy chest, rendering him a deadbeat, switching his identity, severing his umbilical to loved ones and stealing his manna.” His new vocabulary consisted of only one word, a meaningless syllable that he repeated, raising the volume when he was frustrated: “MEM, MEM, MEM. . . .”

Ackerman is an unwavering presence at her husband’s side. As a naturalist, she produces observations that make this book so much more than a pathography, or a narrative of illness: “In the avian world, it sometimes happens that two fine-feathered mates duet to produce a characteristic song, with each singing their part so seamlessly that it’s easy to confuse the melody as the work of only one bird. If one dies, the song splinters and ends. Then, quite often, the mournful other bird begins singing both parts to keep the whole song alive. Without realizing it, I found myself taking over Paul’s old role of house song sparrow and began making up silly ditties to share.”

West’s every utterance becomes an exhausting guessing game. Years later, after he has recovered the ability to speak and write — though “aphasia still plagues him with its merry dances, . . . its occasionally missed adverbs and verbs, its automatically repeated words or phrases,” Acker­man explains — he is able to describe his own efforts. “On rare occasions,” he tells his wife, “the word I sought lay like an angel, begging to be used, even if only to be used in spirit ditties of no tone. I had the beginnings of a word, . . . maybe miles away, maybe too far for customary use, and it would remain, a delusive harbinger of night, a word unborn, doomed to remain unsaid as humm — or thal — unable to complete itself because of my aphasic ineptitude.”

A speech therapist working with West at home points to a picture of an angel, and West says “cherubim,” which the therapist thinks is a nonsense word. Acker­man corrects her, then decides to devise her own exercises “tailored to his lifelong strengths, words and creativity, exercises with a little fun, a little flair, and not condescending.” She realizes, too, that he has a great desire to write again, and she helps him at first by taking dictation — a hugely difficult task. Eventually, as he gradually improves, he begins to write on his own.

Why would West want to write when he is already expending huge energy trying to convey the simplest of desires? “Because of the huge gap between what he could say and what he could think,” Ackerman recalls. “Ideas inched through his speech, but they whipped around his thoughts like ice yachts.” Or as she quotes West explaining it: “The contrast reassured me as to what lay ahead. It was merely a matter of lining up the two in sync, making a match between my pall-mall thought and aphasia. Would it take six months or a year, or never happen at all? This was the great unknown of my life.”

As in her previous work — “A Natural History of Love” and “A Natural History of the Senses” being my favorites — here, Ackerman weds exquisite writing with profound insights, this time into speech and imagination: “Creativity is an intellectual adventure into those jungles where the jaguars of sweet laughter croon, with a willingness to double back, ignore fences or switch directions at the drop of a coconut.”

The book’s title stems from the fact that “once upon a time, in the Land of Before, Paul had so many pet names for me I was a one-woman zoo.” The stroke has left him struggling to say his wife’s name. When a friend asks him, “Do you have a pet name for Diane?” his face falls “as if touched by a Taser,” Ackerman writes. “ ‘Used to have . . . hundreds,’ he said with infinite sadness. ‘Now I can’t think of one.’ ”

Ackerman begins teaching him the names again, beginning with the simplest, “swan, pilot-poet,” and he recognizes them. She coaxes him to invent new ones, a morning ritual, and slowly “names arrived, spoken as we snuggled in bed, such marvels as ‘Little Moonskipper of the Tumbleweed Factory.’ ” An appendix lists the One Hundred Names, which Ackerman notes “continue to flow and flower, some funny, some romantic, some playfully outlandish — all a testament to how a brain can repair itself, and how a duet between two lovers can endure hardship. This is what we have made of a diminished thing. A bell with a crack in it may not ring as clearly, but it can ring as sweetly.”

I will confess I was deeply affected by “One Hundred Names for Love.” Ackerman and West’s is an extraordinary love story, and that a devastating stroke intervened has made it only more moving. Since we are all mortal, none of us will experience love without also experiencing loss. This book has done what no other has for me in recent years: it has renewed my faith in the redemptive power of love, the need to give and get it unstintingly, to hold nothing back, settle for nothing less, because when flesh and being and even life fall away, love endures. This book is proof.

Abraham Verghese is a professor of medicine at Stanford University and the author of the novel “Cutting for Stone.”