Dipodism

This is what happens when a friend and I talk on the phone for too long while we're both sleep-deprived. The fact that she kept on laughing only made us keep going because there are few things I like better than making people laugh.

The gist of dipodism can be embodied in a single phrase: "Life is best when lived with both feet."

Of course, this only applies to bipods. If you want to make it apply to all creatures, you'd have to make it "Life is best when lived with the number of feet you were born with." And that would imply that mutants born with too many or too few legs are living life to its fullest potential, which isn't exactly what we mean at all, so you'd have to change our motto even more to "Life is best when lived with the number of feet that a non-mutant member of your species would be born with." That's just too long, so we leave it at "Life is best when lived with both feet," and if anyone asks we specify that this only applies to bipods.

Two scenarios have been brought up to challenge this view thus far. I have countered them only as far as I desire, because if you pushed it farther or tweaked the situation, it could be shown that at times living with an abnormal number of feet would be preferable, but that would undermine our entire philosophy. We just can't have that, now can we. The only way to maintain an untenable philosophy is to pretend that the opposition was never voiced or say that fruit does not grow on that tree. Or you can say that the critics don't have enough "faith", but we haven't incorporated "faith" into dipodism just yet.

• Opposition 1: What if someone was provided the means to live because they had a disability?
  The specific story we use for this case is of a veteran who lost a leg in a war, came back, ended up unemployed and homeless, and was taken into a shelter because of his/her handicap. Our response to this is that if he/she hadn't lost the leg (and thus the foot) in the first place, he/she would've been able to find a better job and he/she wouldn't have had to live in a shelter.
• Opposition 2: What if, after losing a foot, someone settled down to a life that ended up being better than the one they led before the loss?
  While we recognize that this is completely possible for someone to be happier after losing a foot, we believe that this contentment isn't the result of having lost a foot. Wouldn't they be even happier at that time if they had both feet with which to enjoy their life?

So there you have it. Dipodism defended in a fairly shallow manner, but defended nonetheless.

So far we've only come up with two practices for our cult, both of which haven't been enacted yet. First, we really need to make up a dance move that celebrates both feet, but after more than a month we still haven't come up with anything truly amazing. Second, our cult meetings will involve sitting in the back of our French classroom drawing parallel lines across our wrists with a red pen to simulate cuts (don't worry, we aren't disturbed or depressed or anything, the reason for this practice comes from a completely separate story). Seeing as how we haven't had any meetings yet, we haven't gotten to scare the living daylights out of our French teacher so that he will go out of his way not to offend us in any way for at least three or four days.

As a last note on dipodism, an addendum was recently added. It's as simple as the main point of our philosophy and even more easily debunked: "It is always the right time to strike a pose." More specifically, it's always the right time for a group of people to count to three, spring out of their desks, and strike a pose (one that effectively demonstrates the use of both feet if possible). Unlike the two practices mentioned in the last paragraph, a group of my friends and I have actually done this on a couple occasions.