Category Archives: Lifestyle

Protein bars for women?

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While eating a LUNA protein bar today, I happened to notice a section on the wrapper that was some sort of salute or dedication (“to mom”, etc.). Below it is a call to action directing me to compose and send my own LUNA dedication at lunabar.com. Weird. So I go to check it out, and the site is clearly targeting women. This makes me look back at the food label, which clearly says “The Whole Nutrition Bar for Women.” I’ve been munching these things for weeks now. At 10 grams of protein with only 5 grams of fat, they’re pretty hard to beat for augmenting the vegetarian diet. Now that I take a closer look at the label, I note that the figures posing in silhouette on it do have feminine figures. I suppose that these bars are, like Secret deodorant, strong enough for a man but made for a woman. I’ll have to check and see if Clif (the makers of the LUNA bar) make anything just for men. In the mean time, I think I’ll just have to power through and continue to be secure in my manhood as I munch on LUNA bars. The smores and the oatmeal raisin ones in particular are tasty treats.

The first beast

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For the past few weeks, I’ve been carrying my camera with me everywhere I’ve gone in hopes of snapping a photo of this guy. I saw him a couple of times on a corner on my route to and from the gym, and I was curious about what he was peddling. I have to say that displaying a big sign like this on a busy corner isn’t the best way to get your message out. I was never able to read it. Of course, he also has a little microphone setup, but I was never able to hear him (thanks, Doppler). He also has, um, a dummy whose mouth he moves as he talks. It’s all very intriguing.

The other day, I saw him and was able to read something about Noah’s having received a revelation and using his ark as the instrument for its fulfillment. The sign also said something about his (street corner guy) dummy being the instrument for his revelation’s fulfillment. Or something like that.

Mleeka recently got a few pictures of him, and in one of them, you can get the gist of one side of his sign. Here’s my transcription (all obvious things sic):

God reveal to me the first beast over 23 years ago Revel.13 18 Ronald Wilsom Reagon 666. Also one of his seven heads or members was wounded unto death an was healed Revel.13.1,3 Now the second beast is out their an he is coming from this nation. Also he might be in power Now is know time for you to be living in sin. My friend turn unto the lord Jesus now people and he will save your soul. Jesus is the only way.

So, there you have it.

Paring down

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I’ve been slowly reducing the size of my book collection. There’s a big used bookstore in Knoxville called McKay’s that I’ve patronized for years (along with the rest of literate Knoxville). When I first moved here and was getting into ebay, I spent some time buying up cheap batches of sci fi and mystery novels there and reselling them for a decent profit at McKay’s. Naturally, I always opted to get store credit instead of cash because you get a much higher return that way. Until this weekend, I had five sets of bookshelves in my office. For a long time, they’ve had books crammed in every spot and then stacked up sideways in front of the shelved books and in some cases stacked on the floor and in other spots of the house (there’s usually a stack of four or five books on my nightstand). Several times in the last few months, we’ve taken big boxes of books down to McKay’s to resell, just to help get rid of some of the clutter. We’re considering selling our house, and as part of an effort to do even more cleanup, I stayed up very late Sunday night cleaning up the office. In the process, I eliminated two bookshelves and produced the stack of books pictured here, some of which I’m having a really hard time getting rid of. It just bothers me to get rid of Yeats’s collected poems, for example, though I haven’t picked that book up more than five times in the last seven years. The same goes for a book of Hardy’s poems (and several novels) and the book of Restoration and Augustan poets and of that Chekhov I’ve been meaning to read for years. And then the books of Renaissance theater history and literary criticism I cling to with a special urgency even though I’ve cracked none of them since college.

But it’s time to pare down. I’m finally admitting to myself that I’m not the literary consumer that I used to be and have always wanted to be. Well, that’s not entirely true. I’m keeping the books that are the most important to me (DFW, Gaddis, Pynchon are going nowhere; nor is Melville; nor are my old, old volumes of Longfellow and Jonson and Byron). But I am finally sloughing off the books that I’ve held onto for years almost out of a sense of (not necessarily premeditated) pretension or self-importance (“If I have all these books on my shelves, people will think I’m well-read and smart”). As hard as it is to get rid of some of these, it feels good to eliminate some of the clutter from my life.

Fish tale

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Fish tattoo designsIt’s not so much a question any more of whether I’m getting a tattoo but rather of what and where. For a while now, I’ve been thinking about getting a tattoo. That there are a couple of shows on cable right now showcasing the art has probably influenced me. It’s a strange yearning for me. Many people get tattoos to symbolize or commemorate something in particular — the death of a loved one, for example, or religious faith. I don’t have anything in particular I want to say with body art. I just think it might be neat to have a tattoo.

Not having anything in particular I want to express causes a bit of a dilemma in that I have to come up with something meaningful to me or go with something arbitrary and probably boiler-plate (so to speak). In trying to come up with something not completely lame, I’ve felt a little like a high school student told to write a thesis and working hard to come up with a thesis and support it.

I thought about doing something with pi, but I don’t think pi stands alone as a tattoo for a guy who can barely tell you what pi even is (for the record, it’s the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter). Carl Sagan said beautiful and interesting things about pi in his novel Contact (the movie version of which I recently re-watched). Pi in some form or another is something that I notice on a more or less daily basis. Beginning in college, I noticed that I frequently happened to look at the clock when it read 3:14, and Mleeka and I settled on pi day (March 14, or 3/14) for our wedding date when we had no other special day in mind. In response to my mini-obsession with pi, my parents recently got me a pi dish (a pie dish with the pi symbol in the bottom and a few dozen digits of pi around the rim). Pi by itself has no special significance to me, but it is a number and a symbol I have enjoyed in a layman’s way for several years, so it’s a solid candidate. I still hold that it doesn’t stand alone as a pictogram to be engraved on my body, though.

So what else? Mleeka proposed a whale. If you know me reasonably well, you probably know that I have another mini-obsession with Moby Dick. Tattooing is very much present in that venerable tome, and it’s not lost on me that scrimshaw (animal bones and teeth carved with elaborate designs by whalers, which art form I have yet another mini-obsession with) and tattooing share something of a kinship as carving arts. So a whale tattoo maybe makes sense for me. But it’s a little too close to blue-anchor-retro to really be fitting for me. I think maybe there should be a law against getting a whale or otherwise seriously nautical tattoo unless you actually have something to do with whales or sailing. Plus I think it’d be really easy to get a crappy looking whale tattoo.

Now what? Let’s turn to word-origin and -play.

According to Melville (who was wrong, but quaintly wrong), a whale is a fish with its tail turned sideways. So, whale = fish. The latin word for fish (plural, I think) is “pisces.” So whale = fish = pisces. And pisces, if you’ll grant me some license here, is a homophone for “pi seas” (which calls to mind for me the phrase “chicken of the sea,” which is actually a word-playful way of saying “fish”). So whale = fish = pisces = pi seas = fish = whale = one nice big circle of equivocation and linguistic chicanery that appeals to me while at the same time touching at least tangentially (recall from high school geometry precisely what a tangent is?) on a couple of the ideas that have appealed to me for tattoos.

But wait, there’s more.

In college, I latched onto the fish (and the hunt for the fish and catch and release and the fish as a religious symbol and losing the fish and all manner of other similar things) as a metaphor meaningful enough that it became the centerpiece (and a part of the title) of a manuscript I wrote while completing my writing minor. This was all before I read Moby Dick, mind you, and Melville did a much better job in his treatment of the metaphor than I managed, naturally. The point, though, is that the pi and the whale ideas crystalizing in my mind through word-play (something else that’s a largish part of who I am) to converge on the idea of the fish, which has also been meaningful to me in what I once considered my own little art and thought — well, it’s nice. It’s appealing, if not as significant as paying homage to a dead loved one by duplicating his or her tattoo (for example).

What remains is to figure out exactly what kind of fish I want to get, if I do in fact determine I have the stones to get a tattoo. I’m not interested in a colorful fish or even a realistic one (see note above about how easy it probably is to get a bad whale tattoo). Stylized Koi look great on some people, but they’re just not my bag. I’ve looked around at a lot of images online and finally settled (at least for the moment) on a derivative design of my own creation (or derivation), two drafts of which are pictured here. The basic shapes, especially toward the front of the fish, come from a tee-shirt design I found. The innards of the fish pictured on the shirt are rather more maze-like and less fish-like than the treatment in my current draft. I added gills (note that they look a little pi-like) and modified the spine and tail pretty substantially. I’m not terribly happy with the back half of the fish, which seems a little inconsistent stylistically with the rest of the image, so I’d probably take one of these images to a tattoo artist to provide a starting point.

So there you have it. The “what” I mentioned initially is more or less resolved, and I need now to figure out the where (on my body), which may require the advice of a tattoo artist.

If I chicken out (and if I do, I think it’ll be because I harbor a tiny worry that I’d regret a tattoo in 20 years), I hope you’ll think of me as the chicken of the sea = pi of the seas = pisces = fish = whale. And we all know how messing with the whale turned out for Ahab, now, don’t we?

Share Play, Daddy (But Hold the Meat)

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We made a little sandbox for Lennie. It’s just a big shallow rubbermade container filled with 50 pounds of sand. Now it’s filled with more like 49 pounds, as Lennie has dumped a bit out. She’s got a little shovel and rake and a bucket and some yogurt containers that she uses to move the sand around. The night we set it up, I was sitting in one of our foldy chairs nearby watching her play, and she came up to me and said “Share play, Daddy.” She’s asked Mleeka to share play a few times as well. What a wonderful synthesis of concepts this is. She knows sharing, and she knows playing, but she doesn’t know how to say “play with me” (which makes sense, because the connective tissue of that sentence is the abstract and almost meaningless “with”). So she combines two verbs she does know to communicate what she wants. It’s a great little innovation that I’m very proud of.

In other news, we’re thinking we’re going to try to lay off meat for a little while. More and more lately, meat has just grossed me out. Because good grilling weather is approaching again, I’ll feel like grabbing some nice big steaks, but when I go to the meat aisle and look at the glistening cold red slabs of flesh, I’m completely turned off by the idea. (The fact that the meat industry in America is terrible — that, for example, we have lower standards for domestic meat than countries we export to do, that we’ll feed our own people meat of a much lower grade than other countries will buy from us — doesn’t help.) Chicken hasn’t been bothering me as much, and we’ve eaten a fair amount of fish lately.

Partially in response to my being a little grossed out by meat and partially to get out of the food rut I’m in wherein I don’t feel like learning new recipes but am also tired of eating the same old things all the time, I sort of wanted to force a change on myself. I’m a slave to routine and the familiar, so making myself mix things up from time to time is good for me and will probably eventually keep me from turning into a recluse with ridiculously long fingernails who roams around the house with tissue boxes on his feet. So the other night, I made myself look up and decide to prepare some new recipes. Last night, I tried some black bean and artichoke burritos that were pretty good. I also picked up some tofu and am going to see if I can learn to like it (it’s never been my favorite). This is sort of an experiment, and I may decide I can’t live without meat and wind up going back to being an omnivore. For the moment, though, we’re going to try to avoid meat, and red meat in particular.

I should note that this isn’t part of some liberal hand-wringing for the poor animals or anything. It’s not a moral or an ethical issue. We’ve got teeth that are designed for tearing meat, for crying out loud (ugh, I’m teetering on the brink of the naturalistic fallacy there, I know). That said, I have thought for years that it was sort of bizarre that we decided at some point to chase small animals around to eat. I picture Og and Oog sitting by a fire. Suddenly, a rabbit darts out of the brush, and Og scratches his prodigious jutting forehead says to Oog, “see that cute little bunny? If you were to catch it, we could put it on this here fire and eat it.” To which Oog replies, “WTF? Last week it was ‘hey, jam this bone through your septum.’ Now this?” Maybe it didn’t play out quite like that, but the decision that it might be a good idea to chase around and consume other animals does seem a little bizarre to me.

My motivation for giving meat a rest is mostly just the gross-out factor, though. There’ve been times in my life during which I’ve gotten much of my nutrition from cold Chef Boy Ardee. During each of these phases, I’ve eventually grown sick and tired of the orange gelatinous tube of food and have laid off for a while. Now it’s meat’s turn.

180

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I’m sort of manic after a poor night’s sleep (3.5 hours tops). Woke up a little after 4:00 this morning, read some stuff online, wrote a couple of emails, and decided it’d be a good day to reinstate my gym habit. I haven’t gotten any noteworthy exercise in over a month. I was in California at the beginning of February, and I did get on the treadmill at my hotel that week, but in the airport on my way home in anticipation of a long flight, I was stretching my legs pretty vigorously and managed to strain a muscle. That bothered me for a couple of weeks, during which interval I got pretty well used to sleeping in until 8:30 or 9:00 (and sometimes later). So the last couple of weeks, I’ve just been too lazy to drag myself out of bed at 6:00 in the morning. Today was a good opportunity to get back in the swing of things.

Remarkably enough, in spite of having guzzled lots of empty soft drink calories and eaten lots of cheesy and otherwise fatty foods, paying less attention to portion size than previously, I’m down to my lowest weight in a solid 10 years. I was surprised the Friday before last to weigh in at 188 at my doctor’s office (which usually, probably thanks to clothing, puts me at 2 pounds heavier than the gym scale) and even more surprised to register 180 this morning. That’s a cumulative loss in the last six months of 60 pounds with really very little effort.

I mention it not because I think anybody who reads this is particularly interested but because the blog is not only my occasional mouthpiece (to all three of you) but also a chronicle for my future reference of how my life’s been going. Sorry to have bothered you with this (if you happen not to be me reading back in a few years to try to remember how I lost all that weight).

Making an Honest Man of Myself

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For a long time now, I’ve been very pleased to use open source software. To the uninitiated, what that means is that all of the software I use on a daily basis is free. There’s much more nuance to the culture surrounding open source software, but that’s what’s really significant about it to me with respect to daily use.

For example, when I was a Windows user, I never ponied up and paid for a license for Microsoft Word. If it didn’t come on my computer, I used an old CD to install it, probably using an install key I found on the internet. Open source software lets me have great (often comparable) software at no cost and with no guilt. I simply download Open Office and use that as my document software now. My use of and later involvement with the production and marketing of open source software have bled in recent years into another significant area of my daily life.

As a programmer, I often find myself listening to music while I work. My tastes vary. Sometimes I’ll pop in 20th century Estonian classical and sometimes Eminem. Sometimes bluegrass, sometimes Chemical Brothers. Sometimes the Statler Brothers or Aaron Neville and sometimes RadioHead or Nine Inch Nails. Much of the music I’ve listened to over the past few years has been pirated. I had one employer that kept a music library selected by its employees. That is, each month, each employee got to pick an album that the company bought and had available for the employees to listen to. Another company had some people in it who happened to toss mp3s of a lot of their songs onto a server. I’ve derived much enjoyment and distraction from songs I copied from these sources.

And lately, I’ve been feeling pretty guilty about it, largely because I’ve also felt guilty about stealing software as I used to do. A few times recently, I’ve declined to share my music with friends who got iPods. It’s hard to do that, to know you’re going to come off as some sort of ninny for being so rigid about not wanting to facilitate music theft. At the same time, though, I’ve kept and enjoyed the music I’ve stolen over the years. It was pretty hypocritical. I’ve justified it in part by saying “well, it’s already stolen, and I can’t unsteal it.” But that’s bullshit. Any justification is bullshit.

So today, I deleted it. There are probably a few tunes I inadvertently skipped (you try going quickly through a few thousand songs to delete the ones you didn’t buy), but I made a good faith effort to purge anything I haven’t either personally bought or been given a legitimately purchased copy of. I’m now an honest man, no longer a hypocrite. And it feels good.

If you’re a friend and you’ve asked for music, please don’t take personally my disinclination to give it to you. And don’t think I’m judging you. I don’t care who does what. I just know that I personally felt guilty for using music I hadn’t paid for that people expect to be paid for, so I’m not doing it anymore. I also feel guilty when I accidentally kill a bug (I prefer to let them out the door), but that doesn’t mean I’m looking at you askance if you bust out a flyswatter.

I’ll miss a lot of the music I deleted, though a lot of it was junk I’ve never listened to very much (so I really lose two sorts of burden as a result of the deletion). The upside is that I can purchase much of it back and be legitimate. Radio Head doesn’t seem to have anything on iTunes, and that’s perhaps my biggest woe. But it’s a pretty small price to pay in exchange for not feeling like a hypocrite.

Holiday Roundup

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I started back to work yesterday after 11 days in a row off work. I think I may have had 13 consecutive days off when Lennie was born and thanks in part to an additional hospitalization on Mleeka’s part, but that was hardly a relaxing break. This holiday season wasn’t altogether relaxing, but it was very nice.

We stayed pretty busy, going on a trip to the aquarium with Zac and Ella and family and going to a couple of holiday parties. Then we unloaded Lennie onto her Aunt Abbey for a day while we did some cleaning up around the house (our bedroom closet now looks like something off a home enhancement show). Then I spent the better part of a day shopping for and buying and returning (a defective) TV and buying a replacement and getting that installed. We now watch our 10 basic cable channels on a glorious 32-inch screen rather than the postage-stamp we had been accustomed to viewing. What a waste, huh? We also got a Playstation 2, having enjoyed hours of fun playing Andy’s (sorry, Mike, I know you recommended a modded X-box, but I just didn’t see myself doing all the work to mod it and I’m not into pirating games, so I figured I should get the same system several of my family members have so we could swap games, have big ass-whipping tournaments, etc.). So Mleeka and I spent a fair amount of time over the last week beating (almost) the 007 game we bought.

The best thing about the break was all the extra time I got to spend with Lennie. I’m pretty well accustomed by now to getting her up between 8:00 and 8:30 and hanging out with her until 9:00ish, trying to get some breakfast in her while watching cartoons together. But the last week or so, I had just hours and hours more time with her, and now that I’m back at work, I miss her. Even when I wasn’t actively playing with her, it was nice to watch her toddling around getting into various things and chattering about various usually unintelligible things.

She seems to me to be on the verge of a language explosion. She’s learned possessives, for example (the concept, if not the grammar). She’ll say “Daddy juice” when she wants some of my drink. And she keeps picking up new words (I bought some Wheat Thins this week, and she’ll run over to the counter where we keep them, saying “cacker”). She’s long said “up, please” when she’s wanted to be picked up or lifted over one of our gates, but now she says it (though she’s actually trying to say “help, please”) when she wants help with something like wiping her hands (she’s very picky about having clean hands). There’s lots more that’s not coming to mind, but she’s definitely getting more and more intelligibly verbal, and it’s fun to watch.

Last night, I was sharing some of my beverage with her, and we spilled it all down the front of her shirt. She immediately got up and ran into the kitchen and pulled a towel out of one of the drawers so she could dry herself off. It was a first and was very funny. She’s getting a sense of at-homeness, I think. She knows where things are and is starting to figure out how to take care of some things on her own. Similarly, when she’s got a booger, she’ll tell us now. The other night, when she kept dipping her fingers in some mustard (which she now favors over ketchup) and asking us to wipe it off her hand, I finally just gave her a napkin and showed her how to use it, and she made a pretty good go of it. Now she tells us when she’s pooped. She’ll come up to me and say something that sounds like her version of “apple” (which if you think about it, “diaper” and “apple” are pretty close linguistically) and then lead me into her room and lie there calmly while I change her. She’s not always so calm about diaper changes that I initiate. The next step will be to start getting the little potty out when she does this to help reinforce that association.

In other brain development news, she’s slowly getting her colors, and she’s pretty good at shape sorting and stacking. We got her one toy that’s four colored pegs on a little board. For each peg, there are different numbers of shapes in the corresponding color. The first time she played with this toy, she started putting the right color shapes on the right pegs. She continues to be a very good colorer and an able musician (she can now play the harmonica, the keyboard, a little xylophone, her drum, various shakers, etc.) and seems to have a pretty good sense of rhythm. We think we may have a little artist of some sort on our hands.

That’s it for now, I guess. Have to get back to work, which is unbelievably hard now after such a nice time off. Maybe I’ll go out today and buy a few hundred lottery tickets. Or maybe a philanthropist will venture across this post and decide to fund the further development of my obviously bright child by giving me enough money to sustain my family and play a more active role in her rearing. Here’s hoping.

In weight loss news, after a couple of weeks of pretty lousy adherence to the low-fat diet and a week off from the gym, I figured I’d be up 5 or 10 pounds, but I’ve held pretty steady, weighing in at 191 today. I’ve recently modified my workout so that hopefully my body will burn fat more efficiently. This should get rid of the remaining spare (bike) tire I’ve got and some other less than firm areas that I’ve had limited luck toning to date.

189

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Sorry, Mike, but I seem to have misplaced most of those 13 pounds you asked me for. I’m down nine more pounds in the last three or so weeks. A week gorging myself in California oddly enough always seems to drop five or so pounds. Then I spent a week not eating much at all thanks to the plague that struck my family. Now I’m back more or less on track and am down to 189 after a two-week absence from the gym. The once-thought-unattainable college weight is four pounds away. Oddly, I think I’m still technically obese or borderline obese. I’d like to get my body mass index down to a reasonable range, and so my new goal is to drop to 170ish.

Don’t worry, I’m not wasting away or anything. I still have a pretty substantial girdle of fat around my midsection along with some fat I’m paring slowly away from my upper arms that I think will account for most of that. Once I hit or get fairly close to my goal, it’ll be all about maintaining and not about losing anymore.

That’s a 51 pound drop since September 3, when I began chronicling my weight loss. I’ve lost more than 20% of my body since then. That’s two toddlers, or a third of an average-sized man. I’m four-fifths the man I used to be.

Breaking the Pound Barrier

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A couple of weeks ago, I posted that I had dropped 37 pounds. Shortly thereafter, I caught something nasty that kept me away from the gym for about two weeks. On top of that, though we continue to eat pretty low-fat meals, we’ve strayed away from the strict measurement of our fat intake. We’re making meals that seem low-fat, but I don’t have a book telling me that I’m getting X grams of fat a day. Moreover, I feel as if I’ve been snacking a lot more, though I do keep my snacks more or less healthy (I’ve rediscovered sherbet, for example, which is fat free and yummy; I’ve also rediscovered pretzels, which I never used to like very much because they struck me as being sort of bland). And I’ve been drinking a lot more calories in orange juice (downing about a gallon a day for a week or so). I also had begun to feel as if I was starting to get a little chubbier than I had gotten. So when I returned to the gym at last yesterday, I fully expected to have put 5 or 10 pounds back on.

As it turns out, I was down a few more pounds. I’ve punched through the 200 mark, weighing in at 199 yesterday and 198 today. I’m still no featherweight, but this is the first time I’ve been under 200 pounds since probably college, so it’s a definite milestone. It also makes getting back to my college weight seem entirely plausible. I’ve lost 42 pounds and have 13 to go. Can you imagine losing 55 pounds? That’s an average sized child. It’s a third of a slightly below average (I’d guess) adult woman. I’m not bragging here. I’m stupefied at the thought that I had let myself get to the point at which, after losing the weight of an average 7ish-year-old, I’m still technically overweight and still have enough fat around my gut to get a good double handful.

One thing I’ve noticed lately is that as I’ve found myself getting closer to being trim, my body image has changed for the worse. 42 pounds ago, I thought I seemed a little chubby. Now as I walk by the row of mirrors on the way to the shower in the locker room, I see a little jiggle around my waistline, and I see the little sag of what’s left of my gut, and it looks somehow worse. It’s as if where before, I was so far from being trim that I seemed pleasantly filled out, I’m now close enough to being thin that every little bulge stands out. Don’t get me wrong: I’m happy with where I am, and it’s not as if I’m going to stop eating or start yakking after I eat. It’s just interesting to see how my perception of myself has changed over the last couple of months.