Untraditionally employed

The new euphemism for those of us without jobs is that we are "untraditionally employed." Actually, I sort of have a job now. I've picked up some freelance marketing work, writing and designing brochures and whatnot, for a local business, and I'll be doing some part time work at Huntington Learning Center and hopefully picking up some private students as well. It should keep me pretty busy. But in the lull before it picks up, I'm more aware than ever of time ticking by. I write a few hundred words a day, go for a bike ride or use the weight machines in the basement, run errands for Grandma, feed the dogs and cats and fish, take out the trash, and always there is time. Time time time. I wonder, if I'd published my book, won the nobel prize for literature, and helped bring about world peace, would I still feel like it's all wasted? The nice thing about punching the clock was that there was never any time to think about time. But now I've got nothing but time, and I'm spending as much as I can on myself, taking care of all that needs taking care of, and always I feel there is too much of it. There's too much of it and it's going by too quickly. There is too much and there is not enough. Or I cannot use it efficiently enough. No matter how much I do, there are minutes that slip past, so much gets wasted. A minute in front of the TV makes me feel guilty. Why am I not writing? Why am I not working out? Why am I not applying to grad school? Why am I not working on those brochures? Nevermind that I wrote 500 words today, that I booked a Kaplan GRE course, that I have downloaded grad school apps, that as soon as I'm done with this post (another waste of time!) I'll do 15 miles on my bike. All of this and yet somehow I am standing still. Standing still in fast forward. I wish I could get to the root of this feeling that everything is wasted.

So... Weight Watchers

So, I attended a Weight Watchers meeting the other day. Horrible. Everybody there is friendly and positive and eager to help you help yourself. And they're all failures. They've been attending the meetings for years, yo-yoing, dropping 95 pounds here (95!) regaining 50 there. It's depressing. And it's a fascinating microcosm of everything that's wrong with America, our food guilt, our obsessions with beauty and the beautiful, our inability to make even simple sacrifices like not going to McDonald's. Everybody talked about how hard it was to eat "on the go," thus McDonald's. But how is it that we've created a culture where so many people don't have time to take basic care of themselves? There should be time in the day to make a decent meal for one's self. Yet it seems this has become unacceptable. For those doing the 9-to-5 grind, it seems your job expects you to go to McD's because it's faster and more efficient than letting you wander in 10 minutes late because you took the time to make a sandwich that day. (Notice how I don't allow for the possibility of getting up 10 minutes earlier. This is because you already work all fucking day and you at least deserve a decent night's sleep. And no going to bed 10 minutes earlier either, because if you're going to get through the week without mowing down your coworkers before turning the gun on yourself, you need a few hours to unwind, to at least get a little drunk.)

Let's do some math: Work lasts from 9 to 5, so you get up at 7 so you can leave the house by 8 (and sit in traffic for an hour). This means you want to be in bed by 11 in order to get 8 hours of sack time. Now, if work ends at 5, you're not home until 6, and immediately there must be dinner because by now you're in a starvation food frenzy like you just got off the Survivor Island. So your chill-out time doesn't really start until 7 at the earliest. Which, assuming you have no kids to take care of, no errands or chores that need doing, and no personal commitments other than to be well rested for work the next day, you get a whopping 4 hours to yourself before you have to hit the sack. Four hours. That's bullshit. Yet this is how America functions. We live for our jobs, do little to nothing for ourselves, and die at the age of 56 because we had to eat McDonald's for lunch every day.

This is one of the reasons I quit Good House. Or, rather, it's one of the realizations that made me think I'd be better off jumping off the 59th street bridge. I saw my "career path" laid out in front of me and felt like I was already dead. Probably not everybody feels this way. Probably most people are grateful for whatever job they can get and live for the weekends. I don't know. I just know I can't live that way. If I have to live in a shack like a bum, or, as presently, back with my parents, like a loser, that's fine, as long as I can work on the things that are meaningful to me.

But this brings me back to the people at Weight Watchers. Allegedly their health is important to them. Or, at least their vanity and self esteem are. And attending Weight Watchers and trying to follow "the program" (it's not a diet! don't call it a diet!) is their token effort at fulfilling that need. But what really needs to happen is that your life needs to change and your values need to be put front and center.

Of course, if I have all the answers, it's fair to ask why I'm at Weight Watchers too. And to criticize my criticisms as those of a person who sees himself as too good for these other, lesser, people. The truth is that I think WW is a good program and I know people who've been very successful with it. I decided to go because I need to know more about the nutritional value of foods. I need someone to guide me when I'm in the supermarket so I'm not only buying things that are healthy but will also help me lose weight. I bought a bunch of raisins and trail mix the other day, thinking I was buying good "diet" snacks, and it turns out those things are loaded with calories. They're not loaded with all the other crap you get in candy bars and whatnot, so that's good, but I need to lose 40 pounds, and with raw nuts and fruit (though raising are dried) I was still taking in too many calories. So now I know a little more about which fruit and nuts I should buy and how much of them I should be eating. Which is what I wanted.

What I don't want though is to wind up as another Yo-yo-dieting American. I've seen my mother and sister and tons of female friends go through it a million times, and now more and more men are doing it as well. It's bad news. I want a Permanent Diet Revolution.

Running is hard.

I've been riding my bike pretty regularly these days. I ride more days than not, usually for at least an hour, and go between 10 and 20 miles at a shot. My parents' house is also at sea level, so no matter what I start out with a nice climb. And there's a route into Port Jeff that feels like it's up hill both ways which I do about once a week. So I've been feeling like I'm getting into pretty good shape. And one of my dreams has always been to do long distance running. I used to be able to do a few miles on the treadmill at the gym, so today I figured I'd leave the bike in the garage and go for a run down to the beach. I don't think it's even a mile and it totally kicked my ass. Running for real, out on an actual road, is freakin' hard! My legs held up alright. They're nice and toned from all the biking. But my lungs couldn't get enough air. It felt like they were hardly filling up at all. (I might try an inhaler next time, since technically I'm asthmatic, but it hasn't bothered me in years and this felt more like I had half a lung rather than that wheezing, breathing through a straw feeling I associate with asthma.) So now I have a new challenge: run to the beach and back without throwing up, passing out, or dying. It's going to be hard work, but I'm up to it. Besides, running is something we should all work on just in case we one day find ourselves being chased by ninjas or grisly bears (or grisly bear ninjas, which would be awesome).

The Golden Balls Award

The Times-Picayune Newspaper of New Orleans ran a brutal editorial today criticizing Bush and FEMA for the absolutely inexcusable response to hurricane Katrina. They straight up call Brown (head of FEMA) a liar, and implicitly call W an imbecile for praising Brown's botched job. Their editorial is a breath of fresh air among media that lacks conviction and critical thought. So today I am proud to announce that the Times-Picayune is the first recipient of The Golden Balls Award for journalism that cares more about its constituency than about toeing the party line.

You can read the editorial here via CNN.

25,144

I'm officially at the 1/4 of the way finished mark with the book. It's pretty exciting. I haven't been this productive with my writing in a long time and it feels great to be getting all this work done. Of course, it's not a polished 25,000 words. But I'm saving the fine tuning for the 100,000 mark. Right now what's most important is that I keep generating material. Honest material. Not just words to fill space. That's the real trick. It's going well right now. I just hope I can keep it up.

Blogs

Blogs are bullshit unless they bring about the end of the world.

100, 228

The book is nearing the 100 page mark and I'm pretty psyched about it. Of course, it's not a polished 100 pages, but I'll save all the fine tuning for the end. Right now the important thing is to keep generating material. Plus I still have lots of stuff to add from things I wrote a long time ago. Progress is being made and this is the best I've felt about the book in a long time.

Meanwhile, my weight is still hovering around the 228 mark, though I continue to exercise regularly and my diet isn't bad. Not sure what that's all about. I like to think it's because I'm putting on muscle (and I do feel a little leaner), but it'd be nice to see the numbers on the scale going down.

Tattoo

I have a huge scar just above my right ankle from a fantastic compound fracture of of my tib + fib. I'm thinking I should get a tattoo right above it that says "scar." Or, possibly better: "Tattoo." I guess I'm feeling postmodern lately.

Slipping away

Since my breakdown, I've been trying to keep close tabs on my mental and emotional state. This includes consciously keeping track of what I'm feeling, when I'm feeling it, and, if possible, why I'm feeling whatever it is I'm feeling, plus how much control I have over myself. Now that I've been on medication for about two weeks, things in my head are getting back to normal. Mostly. Last night was the big exception. As I was lying in bed, somewhere between waking and sleep, my memories of the last year of my life changed from memories of things that actually happened to memories of things I've dreamed about. I don't know if that makes sense. In other words, I know the last year happened, but when I think about it, it's like I'm remembering things from a dream. All the feelings associated with the events are somehow less tangible, less meaningful. It's like if you were scared or sad in a dream, you wake up remembering those feelings, but they ultimately don't register as feelings that matter, as feelings that really impact you.

So, if you can follow that, then you understand how it's extremely disconcerting. Especially in regard to M, the girl who dumped me and broke my heart. When I think about her now, it's like remembering someone from a dream, someone who isn't real. I was actually so worried for a moment that she wasn't real that I had to dig up some pictures of us just to prove it to myself. My only explanation for this feeling is that I no longer feel as intensely about her -- good or bad, love or loss -- as I used to, and the contrast between past intensity and this new more neutral feeling is fucking with my head. And I don't like it. Plus it's made me really want to see her again just to try to spark some of those old feelings, even if they're painful, just so I know she really is a person in the world who really was such an important part of my life even for a short time. I want to see her and hear her voice again. I guess, in a sense, this is another layer of loss. One thing that probably adds to it is the fact that she disappeared from my life so suddenly. I went from seeing and talking to her every day, to having no contact with at all almost instantly. And now that I've quit my job and am moving out of my apartment, I could easily never see her again. Not that I could bear to see her again just yet. But this is a new layer to the loss I've been dealing with.

Also: What happens to people who disappear from our lives like that? Do they exist anymore? Their lives go forward and they change and soon they become somebody else, living lives that are no longer so intimately connected to our own.

The most fun I've had in weeks...

came today when I got to throw a sofa-bed off the balcony at my parents' house. Ker-thunk!

I was a little disappointed that it didn't smash into a million pieces when it hit the driveway -- I guess most of it was metal for the bed, as opposed to wood -- but it was still awesome watching that thing drop. Hopefully tomorrow there'll be more stuff to chuck.

228

At long last I've gotten my weight below 230 lbs. 'Bout freakin' time. My highest recorded weight was 270. That was a long time ago, and I was at about 260, about a year ago, when I finally started making a conscious effort to eat better and exercise more. I'd gotten my weight down to 230 and then started to hover between 230 and 240 for a few months. So I once again revamped my diet, cutting out most junk food, and started exercising even more by biking everywhere possible. My reward for that effort came this morning when I stood on the scale and saw I was at 228. Howdy doody. My goal is to get down to 190 by mid January. We shall see.

Poll: Should I buy a new laptop?

Even a month ago I wouldn't have worried too much about shelling out $1600 for a new laptop, but now that I'm about to be dirt poor (as I'm operating under the assumption that I'm about to be out of a job), I can hardly justify laying out that much cash. However, my laptop is near death. It took a bit of a spill several months ago and has been steadily dying since -- it's a little slower every day, and it's having semi-frequent kernel panics. I've run various disk utilities to try to fix it, but nothing has helped, and the Apple store says repairs could easily cost several hundred dollars. My last step is to reinstall the OS, but I'm betting that won't work either. Meanwhile, I've got an Apple Loan I can dip into that has more than enough bread to cover the cost of a new laptop, and payments would be less than $50 a month. But do I really want another monthly bill? Not really. Yet my laptop is now my livelihood. Everything from my writing to my banking to my job hunting (and soon apartment hunting) happens here, not to mention my blogging(!), and it lets me work while I'm on the go.

So what to do?

Here's your chance to tell me how to spend, or not spend, my money. Tell me what to do and I'll do it. (Unless I think it's a really bad idea.)

Interactive: Answers

1. How were time zones established?

The long answer can be found here.

The short answer is that we owe the time zones to the US railroads and some Canadian dude.

2. If you were to make something called "The Great Flying Whatever!" what would be it's useful application(s)?

My Great Flying Whatever! would primarily be used to elevate people’s feelings. If ever you were feeling low, you could give your feelings a ride on the Great Flying Whatever! and it would make you feel up again.

3. How fast is too fast for you
a. on a bike
b. in a car
c. on foot

I choose b., in a car.

4. Is it cheaper to go to Cailfornia, or by bus?

By bus, because there is not a lot of demand for busses because they suck because they are uncomfortable and the people on them are assholes.

5. What would you do if you were on a bus and a very old man pinched you hard on the arm and said, "If you tied two birds together, they would have four wings, yet they cannot fly"?

I’d tell him not to pimp that fruity dime-store Buddhism on me and to sit the fuck back down. Unless he was Japanese, in which case I’d have great reverence for his wisdom and invite him over for tea.

6. What parts of a shopping cart would burn best if you were to douse it in gasoline and light it in fire?

The wheels and the plastic part of the push bar burn best. I know this from experience.

7. What and where are you favorite pants right now?

Jeans, dark blue, that I bought at Kohl’s. They’re in the laundry basket behind me.

8. Do you want to smoke a joint with me?

Not sure I should mix marijuana and Prozac. Yes.

9. What is the greatest lesson you've learned thus far?

Follow your heart fearlessly. But just because I know it doesn’t mean I’m able to do it. I’m trying a little harder every day though.

10. Have you been to this awesome website:
rustychopper.com

Hells yes!

Interactive: 20 Questions

Let's play a game. You send me questions and I'll answer them. For now, let's limit it to twenty questions total. (So, if more than one person sends more than a total of 20, I'll pick and choose which to answer.) Assuming this exercise is a smashing success, we'll repeat it in the future. Think of all the fun we're going to have! Go on, I'll answer anything.

Dear Diary,

You know what I hate? I hate when I say something to someone and they don't understand what it was I just said so they're like "what?" and so I repeat myself, and then they say "Oh! I thought you said..." and then they go on to tell me it sounded like I said some ridiculous shit that no half-non-retarded English speaker would ever say. "Oh! I thought you said 'Pony dinkle shit!'" No, dumbfuck, I said "Posting on the Internet," and if you would just stop and think for two seconds and realize that nobody would ever say "Pony dinkle shit" ever to anybody, you might instead figure out what it was I did say using simple reasoning and deduction. I mean, if we're, say, already talking about blogs....

Morons.

Shit: losing it

Eleven days since my last post, but the blog is not dead.

Seven days ago I lost my shit. Complete nervous and emotional breakdown and I came the closest in my life I've ever been to doing myself in. In retrospect, it's scary that one can feel that way, that you can get so close to just saying fuck it and stepping off the edge of a bridge or whatever. It's an impulse that seems to come from out of nowhere (though looking back you see how the voice has been in your head for a long time), and it's almost involuntary, and if you get to the other side of it you look back and wonder by what grace did you manage to not do something deadly and permanent. Today I still have no answer for any of it.

But it's now seven days and three therapists later and things are less bleak (if still uncertain). And there has been progress on the rebuilding of my life. I've been hard at work on my query letters and on my book (both of which are ideal distractions right now), with a new and improved chapter outline and a ton of new material from a journal I started keeping about a month ago. A year ago the book seemed like it would be impossible to write. Now it feels like it can really happen. One of the main themes (which I now see has been developing for the past 18 months): Write or die.

No progress however on the cooking or dance lessons. Why dance lessons? Go see Mad Hot Ballroom. Why no progress on these things? Well, because I went nuts, and because I'm about to be poor since there's a good chance my job is history. There's a good chance things are going to get really thin around these parts. Stay tuned.

Baby steps

My book of literary agents showed up today, and I bought an e-book on writing query letters last night. Now comes the part where I need to get serious about finding an agent, which means writing and rewriting my query letter until it's perfect, then finding the right agents to send it to.

Also downloaded the swing dance study guide from the dance-manhattan site. Looks like they have lots of times when I can drop in for lessons. That's good, because the Institute for Culinary Education is running their Cooking 101 class again until late August. I should just sign up now and commit to it though.

So these are the small things I've done that make me feel like I'm making progress. But they're not really the real work. That has yet to come. Can't afford to dawdle. Must have at least a serious first draft of the query letter done by Monday. If there's a beginner's swing class I can attend this weekend, I should do that too.

At the same time I'm struggling with my solitude. My ex rules my mind and I feel like a pathetic, paralyzed fool.

The heart's filthy lesson

There's nothing like having your heart broken to sink you deep into the sort of unfathomable depression from which one only emerges after doing some serious life reevaluation.

You get to thinking about what it's going to take to meet and then keep a girl of the caliber of the one who just sent you packing. You start to ask yourself, What do I have to offer? And at this point, your lowest of lows, the answer is always, "Not fuckin' much."

Thus I'm giving myself 6 months to get my life into the shape I want. I will lose 40 pounds; I will learn to dance (well), and learn to cook (well); and I will pursue literary agents in an effort to sell my book (still in progress) like there's no tomorrow. If, in six months, these things haven't been accomplished (or are not well underway), I'm jumping off the Queensborough bridge.

This blog is going to stand as a record of my efforts.

How a consumer's union can succeed in creating responsible shoppers

The more I explore this idea for a consumer's union, the more I find that there are plenty of people who've been down this path before. The Responsible Shopper site is a fine example, and a much needed resource for people who want to support well-behaved businesses.

So the question I have to ask myself is, if this idea has been tried before, why has it failed? Why aren't people shopping more responsibly? And, given the failures, why would new efforts be any different?

Well, I have a few answers.

Responsible Consumerism needs to become a movement. It has to be action packaged with a philosophy, and the people who care about it now have to commit to it now while we go about trying to get other people onboard.

We have to have more than just a Web site and a database. We have to have a brand. We have to market an idea to people, making it "cool" to shop responsibly, make buying products with the "Union Seal of Approval" feel as good as buying a name brand like Nike or Pepsi or Hugo Boss. And it can't just be a fad. It has to endure. And it has to be easy and painless for people to make the right choices.

People love to give money to charity. Lot's of it. Look at St. Jude's Children's Hospital, the Salvation Army, The Will Roger's Institute. They all survive (and succeed) on people just giving money to them.

People also want things like clean air. GE, Honda, Lexus, and BP are all running ad campaigns right now that show their products are cleaner and more enviro-friendly. There is a market for these ideals.

We have to bring all of this together -- take what people want and mix it with what they are willing to do -- and find the formula that will get people to take the right actions -- to spend their money the right way -- to help us create a better world.

So the reason I think these efforts have failed in the past is that they haven't been big enough, they've only tackled a small piece of the much larger effort that's necessary. Done right, done big, I believe this idea can succeed.

Do boycotts alone make sense?

Recently, there was some outrage among the left when CBS and NBC refused to run a "pro-gay" ad by the United Church of Christ. Understandably, the response to this from the left was to call for boycotts of CBS and NBC and even their advertisers, sending the message to those channels that we're done with them until they stop caving to gay-hate culture.

But what about channels that are running the UCC ad? Like TNT? Does it makes sense to boycott CBS and NBC and not give TNT some props?

This seems to be a problem with boycotts in general. A lot of fuss is made over punishing businesses that do the wrong thing, but nobody ever talks about rewarding the businesses that do the right thing.

Right now, as CBS and NBC consider the consequences of running the UCC ad, they have to weigh the loss of outraged liberal viewers against the loss of outraged conservative viewers. Given a lose-lose situation, how can we really blame them for playing it safe in a country that, on Nov.2 this year, made it clear that they don't really give a fuck about gay people?

So let's try changing the equation. For every company punished, there must be one rewarded. Don't just tell CBS and NBC and their advertisers that you're going to avoid them, tell them that you're going to go out of your way to support TNT and its advertisers. And make sure TNT gets the message too. Tell them you're going to tune in for Law and Order tonight instead of Everybody Loves Raymond or Las Vegas. Tell TNT they should pick up West Wing because you'd rather watch it on their channel than on NBC. While you're at it, tell the producers of West Wing the same thing.

Obviously this goes for more than just TV stations and gay rights issues. I worry that the left has gotten so caught up in its anti-corporate mentality that we forget that businesses who do the right things need our support if we're to have anything left worth supporting.