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Michael's Diary -- 2001-2003 Archive   3.27.2003   Real tired. Long day with only enough of a break to gobble a grilled chicken sandwich. Unexepctedly had dinner with some friends and a couple of beers. Going to bed. 11:56 PM   So here I am again, it's 12:30 am and I'm only NOW going to bed. Got captivated by this link to a Gulf-based US soldier's online diary. Well worth checking out. 12:34 AM   Good evening and welcome to Operation: Going To Bed On Time. Still waiting on somebody to sign the guestbook. Perhaps there are no guests. Another busy day, two cool customers as it turns out. A video editing house and a film production house, very interesting stuff for me and cool folks to do some work for. Going back to one client on Monday with a part. Then the usual home, half-hour walk with Genevieve, cooking & eating dinner and before you know it it's 9:30 at night and if I'm lucky I can squeeze in some project work. Anyone I've been meaning to call, my apologies! The days have been getting away from me a little. The big news for me today was going to the doctor's office to have my shoulder looked at an discuss a few questions. My doctor always seems to not know who I am and what he's done for me. I feel like I have to remind him. Nice enough man but doesn't seem that incredibly interested in my welfare. My brother the doctor says it's like that at HMOs, and I guess he's right. Anyway, I got to weigh myself for the first time since the holidays. Now, unless the scale at my doctor and the scale at the nutritionist are completely out of whack, I have lost 50-60 pounds since last September (I can't remember my starting weight in September exactly). Roughly half of it by November's end and the rest since then. I have gone from being on 2 blood pressure medications to one mild one, and that only as a precaution as my BP has gone from considerably high to being what my doctor describes as "the high end of normal, borderline high". 140/90, it was today, you medical folks can straighten me out on that. This is really something to be proud of, and folks, I am 30% or better of the way to my goal weight, and moderation and a little exercise is all it has taken. My nutritionist told me I could only have three beers a week back in September and it wasn't long before that really started getting to me even more than the food issues. The thing is, if you eat the right things, and I'm not just talking vegetables, you can eat a ton of stuff and still not fall short of your calories burned in a standard day, let alone those extra ones burned by a half and hour's aerobic exercise -- and for me that mean a half-hour brisk walk 5 times a week. By "the right things" I mean food that totals up to an appropriate calorie count for you, with fat totaling up to less 30% or less of the calories. This means that you can still have some cheese or other goodies as long as you make room for it elsewhere in the day. I used to need to track it in a diary and if I feel I might be starting to slip, I keep track for a while until I'm sure I'm still in range. Tracking it religiously for a few weeks and sticking to it rigorously for a few months really ingrained the right way of doing things into my habits, and now it is just second nature. The cool thing is, I can still have pizza. I can have a chicken wing or two. Just not 4 slices of pizza or a dozen wings. I remember Pete Townshend discussing something his mentor told him: "If you're thirsty, you don't have to drink and entire lake." As the song which this quote inspired says, a little is enough. As to the beer, I stick to that too, rigorously. But it made me miserable. I hated going to bars because everyone else was getting a buzz and loosening up, and I couldn't. I was stone sober all night. Those who know me know that three beers ain't gonna do much damage. It really put a damper on my social life, and Genevieve and I couldn't just go out to a bar for a few drinks if I had had my three earlier in the week. Just a pain in the ass. Meanwhile, of course I had been hearing news stories saying moderate daily beer and wine consumption can be good for you, etc., etc. The capper came when I read up on it in my nutrition books here at home. All of them espoused moderate wine and beer consumption as relatively harmless, even beneficial. Looking at the raw data, it was obvious to me that having, say, six beers or even nine over a week was not going to impact my nutritional intake that adversely at all. So around Christmas I decided two things were needed to make this a lifestyle I could live with: 1. I needed to be able to go out for a few drinks without freaking out about it; 2. I needed to build in "days off" of my plan. I picked Christmas, Thanksgiving, my birthday, Genevieve's or a close friend's birthday, St. Patrick's Day, New Year's Eve, and Super Bowl Sunday. I'll also allow two or three days, flexible. The way I figure it, I don't have to feel like I'm denying myself my favorite foods, like wings and pizza and French fries and other things I almost never eat now, for ever and ever. This makes not eating them the rest of the time ridiculously easy. I just don't even want to! I know that these 10 days or so out of the whole year will not ruin me, when the next day comes it's back to business, and I know if I wait I can have some treats in a few weeks' time. The amazing thing is that at first, I really pigged out on a day off. But I felt ill the next day -- I wasn't used to the greasiness of wings & such! Next time I was more moderate. I think there are three other big factors that continue to help me. The biggest is mindset. Before, I always associated dieting with self-denial and pain. Not anymore. I started thinking about eating right in terms of giving myself something positive, the greatest gift I could -- a better life, and more of it! Just repeating this to myself and embedding it in my relationship to food has changed my whole way of dealing with food and has been the biggest thing I've done. Another is the great feeling of pulling out clothes that never fit me in the first place and finding out they are too big, being able to go to the store and buy something in a size I haven't worn in 20 years. I suppose that on some level I'm connecting the positive emotions of that to staying on track so that helps. Support from my wife, family and friends has helped a lot too. Thanks. Anyway, that's enough of celebrating my accomplishment. Just wanted to shout it from the rooftops. I am gonna go to bed now. Busy day tomorrow beginning with a sojourn alllllll the way down to South 81st St. For those not in Chicago, I am essentially at North 47th St. (It's actually Lawrence Ave, but by the numberings it would be 47th). That means I have roughly two rivers and 120 long, long Chicago city blocks to cover tomorrow morning. My next call, a few hours later, is nort and west of my house out by the airport. Happy Happy Happy. 12:16 AM 3.26.2003   Incidentally, is nobody going to sign or use the goddamned Guestbook? Is it too hard to figure out, too useless, or what? Is anyone even reading this? Please advise. I think it would be a fun place to host some conversations. But perhaps I am a total dork. 10:47 AM   Surprise, stayed up too late last night. It's really odd the way I know, from experience in the morning, that staying up too late makes me feel really crappy in the AM, whilst getting at least 6 hours' slumber makes me feel pretty good. So I have this direct feedback, and still, I override it at night. It's always puzzling to me, my capacity for -- I guess it's temporary self-delusion? Don't know what to call it. I promise to go to sleep early, I swear I will, and then I keep putting it off until, bang-o, it's 12:30 and I've stayed up too late. I have ALWAYS been one to stay up too late. Even when I was a kid, I would stay up late in my bed in our old house on Edgewood Ave., under my sheets, tuning in radio stations on my little AM transistor radio. It was so cool to hear people talking on distant stations from Cincinatti or Florida. The coolest was when an old-time radio show would be on in some faraway city, on some nostalgia program. I always felt like my radio was a time machine beaming me these old shows... anyway, I digress. I have always been a night owl. Perhaps it's just wired into me by now. I don't know -- I usually get to feeling sleepy at a usual time and decide to do "just one more thing" on the computer or whatever, and then the sleepiness passes, I am focused on the task at hand, and 2 hours slip by. I have got to get better at going to bed when I'm sleepy! Well, at least I did watch a film last night, and a delightful one, Amelie. I found the complete title translates to "The Fabulous Destiny of Amelie Poulain," and that "poulain" means "foal," an illuminating bit of wisdom that is relevant to one of the most striking images in the film. Audrey Tatou is just delightful in the film, which is a kind of sweet, fluffy pastry of a Paris fantasy but also a kind of rumination on individual purpose and finding one's self. It's also hilariously funny, something I was not expecting the first time I'd seen it. Highly recommended. Watched a little war news this morning, noticed I was watching it for too long, and switched it off. If you are careful and tune in at the top of an hour, you will get all the developments that have occurred in the last several hours; after that it's regurgitation of the same stories, meandering features on various apsects of military life, and so on. The actual "hard news" content is very small. If the war has you edgy, as it certainly has a few people I know, please take my advice and limit how much of it you're watching. This is not hiding from it or sticking your head in the sand -- it's good common sense. Fill your mind with violent images from the battlefields all day and your heart with unease, and you'll pay the price in anxiety and ill health. You can do just as well getting a few news blips throughout the day as you can being glued to the set. Take some time to take a walk or smell some flowers, if they've yet bloomed where you live. What you focus on is who you are, in the moment, I think. Had a morning customer cancel, so I have time for these (pretentious?) musings. But now I have some things to do. A doctor's appointment to deal with nagging and often horrible shoulder pain, which I think originated from a time when a friend separated my shoulder for me 10 years ago. (Thanks a lot, Ray.) A little organizing and rescheduling. And then some afternoon customers, including, alas, a late one at 4:00, which usually means I don't get home until 6:00. And then some work tonight on one of my endeavors. I'll update before I go to bed. 10:37 AM   http://www.dancingbush.com/ 6:25 AM 3.25.2003   Not much of an entry tonight. Really want to watch a movie. Not sure which one. Any movie will do. So I'm gonna keep it short. Colder today than yesterday's 70. 60 or so. Not bad. Fought off a bit of gloom and had a productive day, two customers and a couple of key errands, home, walk with G, nice, cooking/eating dinner, an abortive attempt to make a new background loop for the webpage, now this and a movie. Listened to too much War News today. Kind of gave me the blahs. Must have more music. 10:00 PM 3.24.2003   Whew, a busy and productive and positive day. Fixed some long-standing problems on my main system, got some paperwork out of the way for my job, ran some errands, got the car washed, did the grocery shopping, took a half-hour walk with Genevieve, cooked dinner, and chatted with my brother Sean for a bit. We toyed with idea of helping him with his computer problem but agreed it's too late. We'd both end up hitting the sack at like 12:30, again. Instead I am going to bed now. Or, in a few minutes anyway. My God the war coverage is just too much. The worst offender by far has been MSNBC in my opinion -- with their maudlin and sentimental troop tributes at every ad break followed by their absolutely disgusting, shameless advertising of their own war coverage. Which is wrong on so many levels it boggles the mind. I remember Don Imus one time early in his MSNBC career ragging on their early ads based around a "get connected" theme -- which only ran on MSNBC. "If you're seeing this ad, you're already connected!" he was shrieking. Well, I'm already watching MSNBC this evening when they run a full minute-long ad touting their great war coverage and how they are doing it better than anyone else. I'm already watching it, so what's the point? And beyond that, how low can you sink to pimp yourself? Pictures of dead boys are airing on their network and everyone else's and they advertise it like it was an episode of Baretta. Just nauseating, especially when juxtaposed with a sappy, syrupy "tribute" to Our Boys. I've personally made a deliberate effort to limit my news exposure. It's just too depressing and anxiety-provoking. There is precious little I can do about it apart from send my good wishes to those affected so I see no point in updating myself every minute of the day. I dose myself with a little in the morning with the Sun-Times and the BBC World Service over the Internet (at least getting a different perspective, if Allied) or the Irish morning news from that day on RTE, check out the headlines at lunch if they are available wherever I am, and get a quick update at dinnertime, and that's it. If I never hear Larry King ask a military person "What did you think of Al-Jazirah airing those pictures of the POWs?" again it will be too soon, far too soon. Gosh, Larry, whad'ya THINK her response is gonna be? "I thought it was just great, Larry." pant. . . pant . . . OK, I'm calm now. It's almost 11:30 and time to go to bed. 11:41 PM   As goes Monday, so goes the week. So far, this has been a reasonably good Monday. The weather is warm (!) and kinda sunny, I got up early, and have been doing useful work both for my job and personally ever since. I managed to get the streaming webcam up and running, finally, by messing about with my machine's IP address and the router settings. It's pretty cool too. Got to wave at my sister and had a chat with a friend already today. Have to do some paperwork for my job and then it's off to run errands. 1:58 PM   Struggles with a webcam after after I swore I wouldn't and watching way more (like, 30 minutes) of the Oscars than I ever swore I would again. Michael Moore was great. What balls on that guy, whatever you think of him. Just brass ones. Otherwise . . . I've not seen Chicago, but can it really be that good? At least Polanski got the best director Oscar . . . if they had to screw Marty again, at least it was for another iconoclast. Now, got to go to sleep . . . late . . . again. Must stop this. 12:55 AM 3.23.2003   Just updated the website. I also added a kind of bulletin board Guestbook. Check out the link to it on the left. Stripped out some crap that was lying around, to make room for some work I'll be putting up there in the near future. Made the interface a litle cleaner and added a goofy-looking picture of myself. Also added a link to the Hunger Site, where you can take advantage of a click-for-food program to help feed the hungry. More of this sort of thing to come, along with some projects. It struck me today that I have an enormous resource available in terms of creative work and an outlet for it in the Internet. After years of telling other people about this potential, I am finally going to get around to practising what I preach. I am going to put up a short, downloadable film during the week and make another few, loading them up as I am able. I'll be sticking my amateur music projects up as well in mp3. And that's as motivated as I am today. Tony Levin was great last night, although the abject pain of my lower back and aching feet really took me out of the music for much of the show. (Not to mention the usual coterie of giants who showed up late and shoved their way in front of my wife and me.) 6 hours of standing around watching King Crimson last week took its toll -- that and the fact that I still have an awful lot of weight to lose. I can't stand still for more than an hour without really feeling fatigued. 3 hours is agony. Last night, partially thanks to the really, really pretentious opening act running long, it was 4.5 hours. Speaking of the opening act -- the worst sort of thing -- a lot of wanky, fast runs on a sax, flashy drumming, and worst of all, annoying, obnoxious sounds made with a variety of cheap kiddie toys, repetitively and, grr, just so aggravatingly self-indulgent. And now to play a little Toontown Online with the wife. A very fun multiplayer online game run by Disney. Look for us, Prince Wacko Peppernose and Princess Jellybean, if you join up for their free trial. 6:09 PM