personal advice to you specifically

People are too fit around here, on this campus. That really shouldn’t be. This is a demanding, prestigious, cushy school; most of us have worked hard to get here, and most of us continue to work hard mentally so that we don’t have to physically. No manual labor for us! This has been a battle cry for the upper tier of society for the past 10,000 years, and has been the driving force of civilization. Let’s review, briefly, the arrival of man on the natural scene and his eventual destination of us. A while back, we were done fighting baboons for goat innards and berries, so abracadabra, dumb mammals become our close personal friends--- or something, I don’t know--- and then they were domesticated. Our fields were ripe with wheat. We won the war on wheat. Agriculture gave us the free time to do other stuff, like art, science, Facebook, writing, math. Thinking. The birth of civilization. The rising sun of humanity. We learned to love each other and hate each other more, and we rose from a physical existence to a mental one. The best of us, with luck and opportunity, came to devote ourselves to learning, completely removed from physical labor. We win the war on labor.

And now, in these days of high definition broadband wi-fi cellular nicknackery, in these days of nine to five and four by four and twenty four seven, in these days of the year two thousand and six, anno domini, ladies and gentlemen of this respected institution, you are going against the last 10,000 years of human progression by staying in shape! We’ve been working so long for so hard so that you don’t have to outrun the beasties and hunt the bulls. By all logic, with your dining halls and fancy coffees, with your IKEA futons and second-hand bean bag chairs, with your never-ending dining plans and open kitchens, you should be on the verge of obesity. But only the verge. I tell you here, let yourselves go, let yourselves grow. Have you seen what Henry VIII looked like? He looked like a big fucking success and he showed it. Wear your success like a badge, or like… an extra layer of skin. Stop your exercise. Stop going to the gym. Stop making me look like the underdeveloped pencil boy that I am. I’m not sour. I’m just plotting my dominance by slowly orchestrating the demise of The Fit. It’s a passive approach, because obviously, I’m too lazy to exercise.