It's annual Misery Month, my friends!

Oh yes, my best-beloveds. The Write Something, You Miserable Fuck LJ community is up and running and looking to share the pain! The annual membership drive is driving and will be until late on October 31, just in time for National Novel Writing Month! (Does anyone not know about that? Whatevs--links are fun.)

WriSoMiFu's goals are a little less...ambitious than NaNo. Instead of smacking out at least 50k words in a month, the WriSo goal is to write for at least ten minutes a day.

Yep, ten minutes. We all can do that, right? And then the best part is that you can bitch and moan about it as much as you like in the comments of the daily check-in posts. You get misery; you get company; you get productivity, what's not to love?

I love it, personally. It's fun and supportive, and I've met some really cool LJ friends via WriSo, too. So head on over to fitofpique's Live Journal and sign up. Seriously. All the cool kids are doing it.

It takes a village to witch-hunt a child.

Tell me, my dear ones, what would you do if, on Halloween, your child came home with this note in her treat bag?

All that yummy fat shaming!

Oh yes, that is real. It's also everywhere on the internet, though to check its legitimcacy I found it here at USA Today and here at Global News in Canada.

The woman, who probably regrets sending the letter to her local radio station, apparently sees it as her duty to solve the problem of childhood obesity by refusing to give the lil' chunky monkeys candy one night a year. Not only that, but by informing the obviously ignorant parents that their child is too fat to deserve candy. On Halloween.

You can probably tell what I think about this, but the first thing I thought when I saw this wasn't 'that's mean', but 'that's stupid'. How can this woman purport to know which child is 'moderately obese'? And what, exactly, is her criteria? Unlike adults, determining the BMI range for children is far more complicated. Worse, it's not even terribly accurate. If you can't tell if a child is at a healthy weight by measuring, how can you tell just by looking? And who or what gave her the right anyway?

I'm not sure how she thinks this is going to help. First of all, it's pretty damn likely that the parents already know. Second, telling a kid that they're too fat for candy isn't motivating, it's humiliating. And--which I'm sure comes as a big surprise to absolutely no one--fat shaming doesn't work. And it certainly won't work if some person the child likely doesn't even know shoves a note into their treat bag.

As other people said in comments on the sites carrying this story: if you don't want to contribute to childhood obesity, then don't give candy. Give stickers, or raisins, or pencils. Or turn off the porch light and don't give anything at all.

Personally, I'd much rather be known as the stingy neighbor who's never home on Halloween than the bitch who humiliated someone else's child. Though she might end up known as the house everybody toiletpapers or eggs. After all, it takes a village to do some serious pranking.