278.8

Wow. That was my weight on Monday, July 21. That was the most I’ve ever weighed, and it represented a gain of over thirteen pounds just in the last four months. My doctor has been after me for a couple of years now to lose weight, and I often asked him, “How?”

He would reply to eat healthier and get more exercise. But how, exactly, are you supposed to do that? I mean, I’m a reasonably intelligent guy. I know that a nice, fresh peach makes a far healthier snack than a bag of Cheetos. It’s easy to say (especially for someone fit and trim, like my doctor), but the psychology of it is overwhelming. For example, I’m hungry when I get off work. Am I going to snack on celery sticks? No, I’m stopping at the EZ Food Mart and picking up a bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos. If all I have in the house is healthy things, I’m more apt to eat nothing, or to grab the car keys and head to the Zip ‘n Go for a bag of Tostitos and a jar of Salsa con Queso. (Okay, now I officially blame Frito Lay for making me overweight. Is there a lawsuit here?)

So I heard about a diet called the Shangri-La Diet which claims to reduce your hunger while you don’t have to change what you eat. You just feel fuller, so you don’t eat as much. It sounds like a bunch of garbage, especially when you consider that the way you quash that hunger is to throw 300-500 calories worth of oil or sugar-water down your gullet every day. Yet, as crackpot as the theory behind it sounded, it made some sort of sense to me, and so, with really nothing to lose except my high-blood pressure, high cholesterol, and a not-quite-there-yet-but-give-it-some-time-and-you’ll-be-diabetic blood glucose level, I embarked upon the Shangri-La Diet one week ago today.

275.0

That’s my current weight. Did I do anything different besides consume a bunch of olive oil? Aside from walking on the treadmill once, I did nothing special. I ate fast food, like I normally would have. I even craved and ate Doritos. The difference was that I didn’t eat as much. And, because my appetite is down, my cravings for certain things are down, too. When we went to Carl’s Jr. last week, I skipped the fries – I just didn’t want them – and I was perfectly satisfied with just the sandwich. And I’ve begun to desire things I never thought I’d want. I was upset on Saturday that we had no fresh fruit in the house, and I was excited that there were some raw carrots on an hors d’oeuvre platter at a party we attended Saturday night.

Time will tell if this is just some crazy placebo effect that will wear off in two weeks or if it’s really something. Therefore, beginning today, I’m going to be posting my weight on this page weekly (I hope). I figure if people are actually looking at my weight, the less chance I’m going to have to stray.

But what I’m not going to do is turn this into a weight-loss blog. To me, nothing could be more tedious. So, check back often to see how I'm doing. Hopefully, you'll be seeing a lot smaller number in that box to the right in the near future.

An Easy Way to Post a Blog

A thinly veiled challenge from Liz, so I'm lifting it directly from her.

The rules say you can only type one word.

1. Where is your cell phone? charging
2. Your significant other? febrile
3. Your hair? thinning
4. Your Skin? splotchy
5.Your mother? aging
6. Your favorite thing? family
7. Your dream last night? wistful
8. Your favorite drink? Diet
9. Your dream/goal? relaxation
10. The room you're in? kitchen
11. Your ex? Nonexistent
12. Your fear? fire
13. Where do you want to be in 6 years? Here
14. Where were you last night? sleeping
15. What you're not? ambitious
16. Muffins? Buttermilk
17. One of your wish list items? confidence
18. Where you grew up? suburbs
19. The last thing you did? dishes
20. What are you wearing? pajamas
21. Your TV? annoying
22. Your pet(S)? kitties
23. Your computer? archive
24. Your life? harried
25. Your mood? pensive
26. Missing someone? Sigh...
27 Your car? utile
28. Something you're not wearing? socks
29 Favorite Store? Online
30. Your summer? bittersweet
31. Like someone? Yeah
32. Your favorite color? puce
33. When is the last time you laughed? evening
34. Last time you cried? January
35. Who will/would re-post this? Nobody!

-----

Okay, the challenge is out there, you strange reader who just stumbled across this page by hitting the "Next Blog" link! Post it on your blog! Put it in an e-mail and annoy your co-workers!

And, it's very hard to answer some of these questions with ONE word. Last time you cried? How can you distill January 2006 into one word that would convey the month AND the year?

My Future Trip to Culver City

If you glance over to see what books I'm reading right now, you'll see that I've picked up Prisoner of Trebekistan by former Jeopardy! champ Bob Harris. This is because I received an e-mail today from the friendly folks at Sony Pictures Studios inviting me to a contestant audition on March 14th. Yikes! Guess I passed the online test, though.

I figure reading the book can't hurt, although it might psych me out a little...

Why Strip Clubs Bother Me

A couple of months ago, to celebrate a coworker's last day, a group of us from work went out for drinks. This is not something I do frequently -- the last time I can recall doing this was well over 10 years ago. Anyway, we went to the local El Torito because they were the only place in town that had karaoke on Friday nights, and this was something a couple of us wanted to do.

Because I knew I had to drive a long distance home, I had two quick drinks and stopped so I would be sure to be sober when I left. As I sobered up rapidly, the rest of my party kept drinking. As I got levelheaded, they got reckless. The karaoke D.J. was terrible; he wouldn't play any of the songs that we wanted to sing to, and we got a little restless. One of my female coworkers suggested that we pick up our stakes and go elsewhere. When I inquired as to where she thought we should go, she replied, "City Lights."

City Lights is a strip club in a seedy area over by the airport. I blanched at this suggestion and replied that I had never been to a strip club and would prefer to keep it that way. Around the table the gasps of surprise were audible. No one could believe I had never been to a strip club. It was something that they did quite frequently.

The thing that surprised me about this was the fact that, of the seven people sitting around that table, five of them were women. When did women start hanging out at strip clubs? This fascinated and disgusted me simultaneously. My group began trying to convince me that going to a strip club was a fun experience and something I should try. One of the young ladies at my table, a girl barely twenty-one years of age, tried to convince me to give it a whirl by offering that a lot of her friends from high school worked as dancers at places like City Lights and that "they were all nice girls." For some reason, not only did this not convince me to go, but it depressed me to think of these "nice girls" taking off their clothes for a group of anonymous guys (and, apparently now, gals) so that they can get some weird jollies and hopefully have them stuff a few dollar bills into their g-strings.

Honestly, I have no problem with what people do in their bedrooms, so long as it's legal and consensual. I just find strip clubs to be so incredibly degrading to women, more so than even pornography. I guess my rationale is that if a woman is on the pages of Penthouse or some like-minded publication, she is turned into a fantasy-object for the viewer. Put that same woman on stage, dancing, wrapping herself around a stripper pole, and not only is it a very public exhibition with groups of people getting themselves lathered up at the show, but by the simple act of just being there and hearing the exhortations, the catcalls, the insults -- everything changes. In my opinion, the woman has declined from "fantasy object" to just "object," and all the way to "piece of meat."

I have heard that strippers, even at dives like City Lights, can make a lot of money. Well, all I can say is that I sure hope so. I'm sure that stripping for strangers takes a pretty big psychological toll on you. They'll need that money for therapy later on.

I dunno. Am I being stupid here, or do I have a point? In the meantime, I have an El Torito cocktail napkin signed by my coworkers that I can redeem for a lap dance (at their expense) at City Lights anytime in the future. Whoopee.

10 Random Things

At the insistence of Liz. Here's 10 random things about me.

1. I memorized the 50 states in alphabetical order when I was in the first grade and at one time could recite them in 14.5 seconds.

2. In my youth, I was able to put my feet behind my head and do other strange acts of contortion with my lower body. About 5 years ago, I tried it again. I was still able to do it, but my left knee hurt for about a week afterward and I swore I'd never do it again. In the last month or so, my left knee has been a source of agonizing pain, even though I've suffered no trauma to said joint. Is there a causal relationship here?

3. I usually order a brandy and soda at a bar.

4. Just the thought of going into a strip club fills me with shame and horror.

5. I stepped on a baby food jar when I was three and got 18 stitches in my tiny little foot.

6. The first words my wife-to-be ever spoke to me were, "You're Gumby, aren't you?"

7. I can touch the tip of my nose with my tongue.

8. I'm quite content with the way my life turned out, but I wish I could get a do-over on two things.

9. I never win anything - at casinos, the lottery (save for two $100 prizes in an incredibly lucky five-month span), anything. One time, in a sweepstakes sponsored by Skin Bracer aftershave, I won fifth prize, a copy of Your Income Tax 1975, by J.K. Lasser. I won it in 1976.

10. I took the online qualification test for Jeopardy three nights ago. I'm not keeping my fingers crossed.

The Insufferable Art Garfunkel

I was reading a little article in the New Yorker about Art Garfunkel and how he has posted on his website a list of every book he’s read since 1968. It totals some crazy number like 1023 books, and the vast majority are books that “normal” folks like you and me will probably never read – tomes by Proust and Kant and Spinoza and probably works by Homer, Socrates and Plato in the original Greek. Every now and then he throws a bone to the layman (he read The DaVinci Code, for example), just so he appears to be down-to-earth. This was all very fascinating, I love to read about what other people read, and sometimes it spurs me on to try something new in my own literary world. But then he has a quote, “I avoid fluff.” He continues, “The stuff that men are always reading on planes: I don’t read that,” and he goes on to disparage the whole subgenre of postmodern fiction, just because he didn’t care for Gravity’s Rainbow (he found it “fraudulent”.)

Screw you, Art Garfunkel. No wonder Paul Simon went solo.

Literature snobs like Garfunkel just really get under my skin. I don’t give two whits if some guy wants to while away his leisure time reading Chaucer and Milton and Dante, in fact, I admire it. I’ve read quite a few classics out of a sense of duty, feeling that I wouldn’t be a rounded human being without them. I count Moby-Dick and Crime and Punishment among my favorite books of all time, and I’m a long time subscriber to the New Yorker, which screams “pretentious,” at least in my circles. But to put down a bunch of people because they may enjoy John Grisham or W.E.B. Griffin, Nicholas Sparks or Jan Karon, man, that stuff just really ticks me off. “I’m too good for that drivel,” is what Garfunkel seems to be saying, thumbing his nose at about 96.75% of the literature out there today.

One of my favorite authors and new literary hero (and someone Garfunkel wouldn’t deign to have in his library), Nick Hornby delivers a few zingers aimed at “literati” like Garfunkel in the preface to his book Housekeeping vs. The Dirt. This book, which is a collection of columns he wrote for some magazine that no one’s ever heard of, is a fascinating read. In his columns, he lists books he’s read in a particular month, and then gives a few comments about them. His earlier collection of columns, The Polysyllabic Spree, inspired me to try to find a few of the titles he spoke fondly of, and I’m sure that once I’m finished with this latest one, I will feel the same way.

Anyway, the preface to Housekeeping is the best part so far, with Hornby sticking up for everyone who has read something like The Notebook and liked it, while taking aim at “clever-dick” critics like Garfunkel. Hell, I’ll say it: I enjoyed Good in Bed by Jennifer Weiner. Yep, gotta love chick-lit.

Nick Hornby also has some valuable advice in this preface. Something that I wish I had read about 30 years ago. Namely, if you start reading something and you don’t care for it, if you can’t make it through a page without falling asleep, then READ SOMETHING ELSE THAT YOU’LL ENJOY. I can’t begin to tell you how long it took me to slog through One Hundred Years of Solitude. I guess I’m glad I read it, but I could have read a dozen other books that I might have enjoyed during that time. About two years ago, I got the book Riven Rock by T.C. Boyle. Now, T.C. Boyle is one of my very favorite authors ever, but there was something about this book that made it feel like I was reading it underwater. I didn’t enjoy it, the book felt like lead in my hands. But I felt guilty that I wasn’t reading it and liking it, so I read NOTHING rather than that doorstop. Finally, I got the guts to abandon it and move on, and now I’m currently reading like a madman (I’d forgotten how much I enjoy it!)

But, take a look at those books that I’ve recently read. Are they substantial enough? Do you think Art Garfunkel would approve?