The conversation continued a ways from there, but that's pretty much the long and short of the thing.
The tricky part is that he has confided to me his growing disillusionment of the education system, especially where language is concerned—and incidentally several of the things he told me were going on were what I distinctly remember telling him I observed as one of the taught years ago in high school—and how he had almost several times gone into the Army (was ROTC in high school) but had pursued/continued to pursue his Bachelor's in English Ed because of subtle family pressure against military enlistment, and is almost dead-set on enlisting after this semester (since he'll graduate finally, though he should have been out two semesters ago and almost had to wait until after the fall semester this year because of how awesome our campus administration is).
I have encouraged him in this vein mostly because it's what he wanted to do in the first place and I remembered my own stupidity in going into Music Education even though engineering was what I wanted to do. And I think on some level he's trying to prepare himself partially for BT. But his focus in that regard, or so he said then, was to get his strength back to where it was a few years ago. And now it's to lose weight.
Except he doesn't have weight to lose.
Like, I understand wanting to be healthy and wanting to stay in shape. I do not understand wanting to "lose weight" because of some misguided belief that staying healthy and in shape means you have to weigh less. Hell, being in shape for me would mean weight about fifty pounds more, and if I gain fifty pounds of body composition (muscle, fat reserves, etc.) that would be awesome.
But if I told someone "Hey, I gained fifty pounds this summer," I have a feeling their eyes would fly open in horror, and then shift to confusion because I didn't appear to look "fat" and yet I gained weight.
So I suppose the underlying problem I'm having is that he seems to be buying into the notion that being healthy always means weighing less; and since he's my friend (and since his body shape is quite similar to my own albeit with a tad more muscle presence) AND he has not in the past shown himself to be so quick to fall into following something without looking at all sides of the situation, I am sincerely bothered.
I'm probably going to try to find time to talk with him either Thursday or Friday afternoon, and I believe, given our past discussions, that he'll both listen to me talk and try to hear what I'm saying.
Oh why can't I just leave well enough alone.
