ANYone get this sentiment?

I see dudes on tv and in films who are in exceptionally good shape and I feel like I'm insulting them by, myself, not being in shape.
It's a weird concept but I think it is good. I think it's good.
I wonder where I can extrapolate to. (I want this to make Jesus sense.)

I think it's funny when my male friends get squeamish about certain things. Heck, I think it's funny when anyone gets squeamish about anything, when it's not something that I happen to be squeamish about, too.


Today in the Bullring

Yesterday, while playing Scrabbulous, I instinctively threw my hand up to cover a seductive-looking Jessica Alba who had popped up to the left of my board. (In the past few days I have been instinctively averting my eyes from many things which has surprized me. I usually don't react in that way in particular, the almost offended kind of instant evasion. I think it's good. Ahh yes. I remember - it started while I was watching The Devil's Advocate (1997) on AMC about a week ago. Something just surprized and shockled me.... and I looked away, ALMOST as if I was embarassed but it was something deeper than that. (I don't have that reflex.) I'm not trying to curb the reflex at all. Really? I just want to study it.)
Today, while having an informal meeting on campus, I was not-too-subtley eyeing a few servers in the bar. I've been in this place enough to know these guys fairly well and they never disappoint me as optical entertainment. Then this one guy walked out of the kitchen (we were about 15 feet from the door and I was facing it almost dead-on) and he had apparently not thought too much of his outer shirt... leaving a plain grey tank. I....was shocked at first, to say the least. As I later explained to my co-hort: it wouldn't have been so bad if the kid had walked in with just the tank on but knowing that something was stripped away was catching my attention in a very....constant way.

So now I gotta wonder. Why avoid avoid avoid the girls and not-so-much-care about the guys? You'd think I'd be passive about the females (because they don't do anything for me) and highly concerned about the mendawgs (because they can cause me the trouble for realsies). But..... I dunno. I'd like to blame the portrayal. Or....no. I think I'm making a bad comparison here because real life and mass media/entertainment are two different things. (More later.)
Still, I maintain that I've been well trained in recognizing who a conventionally good-looking woman is, and what is supposed to make me want to have sex, on account of how many bad college films; Coor's Light, Captain Morgan, Budweiser and Labatt's commercials; magazine covers; raunchy post-2am adverts; and Frank n' Steins Thursdays I have seen.
No one forced me to watch any of it...and I regret some of it... but I firmly declare that I have learned well which women "I" (?) am supposed to be attracted to. I gotta throw "I" in there, even though I know those commercials are for men, or "men". (The "What about ME?!" post will arrive shortly, I'm sure.)
I guess the moral of that story is that I can flinch when a sex-drenched image of a woman is presented to me because I am far more familiar with that than the sex-drenched man. Or even the sexy man. (Is our conventional "sexy man" created by men or women? I wanna think it's men and you can see insecurities written all over him, the poster boy. Hmm... another post, too.)


[Whatever was it that triggered me to start thinking about this stuff or thinking in this way in the first place? It's only a few weeks old... I do know that I've recently realized that saying, "Oh I commit this sin every now and then and it's bad and I'm selfish and thank God for the Cross and blah-dee-honkin-blah," is a revoltingly simple and almost pretentious way to look at something serious. Man, sin is the stuff Jesus died for. Ahhh I can't say it without sounding cliché. My little indiscretions, the things I laugh about, the stuff I overlook, the things I SAY I struggle with and then continue drinking my tea, THOSE are the things that are melted at 1000°C, poured into a mold, cooled and then hammered through a wristbone. ahh it's so serious. Those "little" problems of mine signed my death certificate..how can I joke about them? What's worse -- how can I say they're bad, just for the sake of saying it, without actually acknowledging it? I'm sure that kind of hypocrisy is worse than complete ignorance or denial. I've asked it before and I'll ask it again: how can you look in the face of a bleeding, gasping, innocent man hung to die and dismiss or laugh at the very thing that's holding him there? I think of The Passion of the Christ when I walk down this road. I also am reminded of the first few times I ever heard the line in "How Deep the Father's Love", Ashamed, I hear my mocking voice call out among the scoffers. It struck me hard. (How was I a scoffer?! I would have known Him... I would have been crying and maybe shouting at soldiers.... I wouldn't have...)]


Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what is says. Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like a man who loks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. But the man who loks intently into the perfect law that agives freedom, and continues to do this, not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it--he will be blessed in what he does.
James 1:22-5