communication | Caitlin Burke

I have always been a fairly capable athlete, but my weight has bounced around a little over the years, particularly as my allergies and asthma have worsened. A few years ago, I had my treatment regimen reorganized, and while it took some time for everything to work smoothly, it was particularly nice to be able to step up my physical activity again.

In 2011, as winter approached, I decided I’d like to have a home option for a good workout on days I didn’t feel like riding my bike, and I got a rowing machine. That’s when I realized how much difference the better medical management made. Within 6 months, my body fat percentage, already well within the healthy range, dropped by 25%. I looked different. Lean.

Anyone who has lost a lot of weight has encountered this: people remark on it, and it’s usually positive, if clumsy, but all kinds of loaded terms come out. Skinny. Thin. Sometimes people we are close to have a negative response when we make a big change in exercise pattern or appearance, and the comments are frankly unkind. They may make fun of choosing fruit instead of a cookie, or warn against losing any more weight.

When my body fat percentage dropped, I only lost a few pounds. I replaced about 70% of the fat weight with lean body mass, tested before and after by BOD POD. (I had suspected my body would change, and I was interested to see how.) But I still got remarks like “too thin,” and expressions of concern. People with a chronic illness can become very lean, after all, even if there are no body-image issues at play, and I had been having health problems. Assuming that those remarks came from a place of caring, I tried to explain that my athletic performance was increasing in pretty much every way, but the only people who really engage with that line of reasoning are already doing the same things and, if anything, bring it up more likely to see if they can adopt your approach.

Over the winter holiday week, my mother and I were talking about some frustrations I’d experienced, and how I was feeling better overall. She made a lot of “thin” remarks last year, and it was a little frustrating, especially because I felt it was clear that my performance was improving. And she said, “I just remember you saying years ago that you felt that being thin equaled being depressed.”

She’s absolutely right, and I’m surprised I didn’t think of it. I am deeply sorry she had even a moment’s concern over why my body was changing so much, especially now that I have also realized that being heavier was part of the same problem. What matters to me now is keeping it all in balance: activity, food, sleep, well-being. Plus giving a little more thought to what people are trying to say when they comment on the surface.

The very basis of creativity is the recombination of existing elements into something new. No, it’s deeper than that – it’s the basis of a nuanced communication, the most exceptional and essential distinguishing human trait. Recombination and adaptation trace ideas through time and can offer a cutaway view of the mind. They delight and instruct.

I wouldn’t normally consider any of this controversial or even necessarily interesting to discuss. It seems obvious, especially if you study history or literature. It’s very difficult to comprehend these fields without context, and literature in particular is enriched immeasurably by a web of allusions, references, and borrowings. Even originality is praised for its new perspective, rather than its utterly novel content. And particularly where narrative is concerned, there are no new stories, only new combinations of circumstances and personalities and approaches. Life is remix culture.

Today we’re grappling with a new threat to this essential aspect of human interaction: corporate exploitation of intellectual property. Because consumerist, corporate culture is so interested in generating revenue, and because revenue opportunities are optimized where traffic is controlled, we now live in a matrix of labels of what belongs to whom and how it may be transferred, copied, or licensed. This can work well in a particular environment – as when statutes provided a method for publishers to obtain rights to make copies of written works in at a time when printing was expensive and uncommon, or in the case of the US Patent Office, which grants inventors a term of exclusive commercial opportunity in exchange for prompt publication of their inventions.

Intellectual-property claims can also be used as a cudgel, as when corporations acquire patents for the purpose of bringing legal action against other entities that they claim infringe on those patents. Or when corporations use technological means of control to limit fair use (under cover of protection of property) of copies of content sold into the marketplace. These strategies carry the risk of if not outright limiting creativity, at least skewing it toward the best capitalized entities in the culture, something we might understand here today as Disneyfication.

This issue populates thousands of articles, books, blogs, court cases, legal letters, and conversations around the world. If you don’t know much about it, you might be interested if you like being able to listen to the music you buy on any playing device you own. Or like lively teaching that uses clever and memorable examples from works in the culture to help students more rapidly understand their subjects. Or just enjoy art.

Caitlin Burke

Tag Archives: communication

What It Means to Be Thin

Remix Culture