The Downward Spiral

my head has been totally killing me from this diet.. well it had been.. I’m actually pretty good today.  I have been keeping very near Al’s prescription of 1300 calories.  This morning I was at 221 pounds…. which is like 8 or more off… ya I was up around 230.. yikes.  Like I told Shannon, I’ll be happy when I see 21something.. that’ll be nice… I haven’t been there in years.  Oh and there’s a huge box of Lamar’s sitting in the other room (still at work waiting on a shipment) .. no fair.

In 1300 calories there’s no room for ice cream or donuts or most cheeseburgers or anything like that.. you know.. nothing good.  Is it worth living to see every day but not be able to eat 4/5ths the stuff out there?  Maybe… anyway… it’s all diet food kinda stuff… well.. I mean.. here’s what I’ve been doing… it’s been 16oz apple juice for breakfast which is 202 calories, a sandwich (and water) for lunch which is between 337 and 682 calories for lunch (Mr Goodcents Gold Penny Club is 337 or Arby’s wrap which is 682.. and actually I can do a little better at Arby’s, but it’s not as good.. but Backyard Burger looks promising), which leaves 416 - 761 for dinner.  At < 416 calories, we are talking a multigrain bread (80 calories per slice) sandwich with tuna (about 221 by Mr GC tuna) is 381.  761 is a little better.. but not much.. that’s 2 tuna sandwiches.. and there you go.

… I’m not sure if I like this game… but I think I’ll keep playing for the next month.  Also, I hadn’t really been eating breakfast dinner until I started working out, but I’m sure I had a huge lunch.. well over 1500 calories (probably like 3000), normally… so maybe spreading it out is better for me, but eating almost nothing 3 times a day is teh suck.

Really, I bet if I can cut out fries during the week, forever, and only drink pop when I have a mixed drink (dr. pepper and captain) then I bet I can maintain appropriately.  DP is 260 calories per 8oz.. I had been drinking a number of those during the week… I think that’s the largest source of extra calories I had… well that and fried crap.

Fresca (blackcherry) has zero calories… which means it has no sugar… which means that I get a headache when I drink it… but with enough raspberry vodka in it, it’s not so bad.. lol

Mr Goodcents gold has made a believer out of me though.. 337 calories for lunch is great… I’ll likely get that a lot.  If nothing else, I can do that.

Anyway… enough about that… I had other shit to complain about

I’ve worked on so much crap this week.. my work journal is chock full of stuff.  Headache + work + rush hour traffic == irritable nick who is no fun to be around.  But it’s getting better.

I haven’t gone to karate any day this week except judo on Monday.  Tuesday was Shannon and I’s anniversary, Wednesday I didn’t get out of Kirk’s until late (surprise!) and I felt like ass yesterday after Temp-Con because I hadn’t eaten (working on 3 computers at once!) and since Al wasn’t home, I didn’t want to wait around Olathe for a few hours.

I think I’m going to move to just Tuesday and Thursday for karate anyway.  I mean if I do that then I’ll keep Wednesdays, which I never seem to make out there anyway from work, and then Mondays which is judo which I really don’t like… I mean I’m so wrecked after it for the rest of the week.. ugh.  And it scares me.  And I suck at it.  I supposed doing it more and more will make me not scared of it, but in the mean time I’m in a class with people who are not scared of it.. or at least have overcome their fear of diving at the ground enough not to tense up and say ‘fuck fuck fuck’ to themselves the whole time.. ya.  I can trick myself in to thinking that "hey this will be ok" but every Tuesday I know I’ve been lying to myself… so it’s hard to keep up the lie.  Seriously, I dunno what it is, but getting hit in the face scares me less then falling / being thrown on my back.

So I’ll go Tuesday cuz it’ll be a good workout and Thursday because I like weapons and the knife/escrima stuff we do that day.  Also, since Al is like 30 minutes from me driving and hour for there and back just to stay that much time is wearing on me.  So .. I don’t wanna drive that in to the ground… if I kept up the really trying to make 4 days, feeling like ass if I went, guilty if I didn’t go, then I’d hate it… and I don’t want to that.

Anyway.. weekend is upon me.  I won’t pig out… but I’ll probably drink a lot.

which is of course not a diet at all but The Way… so I’m to limit myself to 400-600 calories at lunch, eat a breakfast bar (at about 90 calories), ditch pop (except when drinking, cuz that’s not gonna happen), and eat a multivitamin.. that’s about all that’s different.. the rest is just a small shift.

so the two foods that I can eat so far that I have been eating all the time are grilled chicken sandwiches from BK (so likely all grilled chicken sandwiches are about 400 cuz there’s no way that’s like "the best") and penny clubs with premium bread at Mr Goodcents.

And then the rest of the day I get about 500-700 calories to work with… so cheesy tots for dinner but not lunch (well that’s 720 with chicken).. or something like that… stopping at 1300/day .. I bet I could do 1320 without much of a problem  since I’m likely well over double that right now:)

Mexican is probably all out since it kills me anyway.  I haven’t eating TB except like once or twice in a year now and I stopped going to chipotle too.. haven’t been there in months.  BBQ doesn’t kill me as much, and it’s probably ok as long as I don’t eat fries.  And if I go out to eat and have no idea what I’m eating caloric-wise, stop eating at half.

Those bread haters really are on to something, but no bread and no sugar is kinda crazy.  And I can’t eat sugar free stuff w/o dying, so f that in the a.

Also… likely this is just for like normal eating… when I get in to eating right, I’ll naturally do this… but that won’t be for awhile.  I think I just need to fix my during the week eating, then the weekends will be more relaxed.  Since I’m not tricking my body in to something and will just be basically weaning it off during the week, then I think my weekends and going out will be more lax.

The bitch of it all is how shitty I’m going to feel until I unamericanize my eating, but it’s worth it… probably

this comic is pure greatness… along with the rest of the comics I read

xkcd
penny-arcade
ctrlaltdel-online
spacecowboysoftware’s four panels of fun

PREPARE YOURSELF FOR THE FULL REALIZATION OF OUR HORRIFIC VISION!!
– jellybeans

Buttercup Festival

reposted from: http://www.aspentimes.com/article/2008198091324

There is a great amount of interest in this year’s presidential elections, as everybody seems to recognize that our next president has to be a lot better than George Bush. The Democrats are riding high with two groundbreaking candidates — a woman and an African-American — while the conservative Republicans are in a quandary about their party’s nod to a quasi-liberal maverick, John McCain.

Each candidate is carefully pandering to a smorgasbord of special-interest groups, ranging from gay, lesbian and transgender people to children of illegal immigrants to working mothers to evangelical Christians.

There is one group no one has recognized, and it is the group that will decide the election: the Angry White Man. The Angry White Man comes from all economic backgrounds, from dirt-poor to filthy rich. He represents all geographic areas in America, from urban sophisticate to rural redneck, deep South to mountain West, left Coast to Eastern Seaboard.

His common traits are that he isn’t looking for anything from anyone — just the promise to be able to make his own way on a level playing field. In many cases, he is an independent businessman and employs several people. He pays more than his share of taxes and works hard.

The victimhood syndrome buzzwords — “disenfranchised,” “marginalized” and “voiceless” — don’t resonate with him. “Press ‘one’ for English” is a curse-word to him. He’s used to picking up the tab, whether it’s the company Christmas party, three sets of braces, three college educations or a beautiful wedding.
He believes the Constitution is to be interpreted literally, not as a “living document” open to the whims and vagaries of a panel of judges who have never worked an honest day in their lives.

The Angry White Man owns firearms, and he’s willing to pick up a gun to defend his home and his country. He is willing to lay down his life to defend the freedom and safety of others, and the thought of killing someone who needs killing really doesn’t bother him.

The Angry White Man is not a metrosexual, a homosexual or a victim. Nobody like him drowned in Hurricane Katrina — he got his people together and got the hell out, then went back in to rescue those too helpless and stupid to help themselves, often as a police officer, a National Guard soldier or a volunteer firefighter.

His last name and religion don’t matter. His background might be Italian, English, Polish, German, Slavic, Irish, or Russian, and he might have Cherokee, Mexican, or Puerto Rican mixed in, but he considers himself a white American.
He’s a man’s man, the kind of guy who likes to play poker, watch football, hunt white-tailed deer, call turkeys, play golf, spend a few bucks at a strip club once in a blue moon, change his own oil and build things. He coaches baseball, soccer and football teams and doesn’t ask for a penny. He’s the kind of guy who can put an addition on his house with a couple of friends, drill an oil well, weld a new bumper for his truck, design a factory and publish books. He can fill a train with 100,000 tons of coal and get it to the power plant on time so that you keep the lights on and never know what it took to flip that light switch.
Women either love him or hate him, but they know he’s a man, not a dishrag. If they’re looking for someone to walk all over, they’ve got the wrong guy. He stands up straight, opens doors for women and says “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am.”

He might be a Republican and he might be a Democrat; he might be a Libertarian or a Green. He knows that his wife is more emotional than rational, and he guides the family in a rational manner.

He’s not a racist, but he is annoyed and disappointed when people of certain backgrounds exhibit behavior that typifies the worst stereotypes of their race. He’s willing to give everybody a fair chance if they work hard, play by the rules and learn English.

Most important, the Angry White Man is pissed off. When his job site becomes flooded with illegal workers who don’t pay taxes and his wages drop like a stone, he gets righteously angry. When his job gets shipped overseas, and he has to speak to some incomprehensible idiot in India for tech support, he simmers. When Al Sharpton comes on TV, leading some rally for reparations for slavery or some such nonsense, he bites his tongue and he remembers. When a child gets charged with carrying a concealed weapon for mistakenly bringing a penknife to school, he takes note of who the local idiots are in education and law enforcement.

He also votes, and the Angry White Man loathes Hillary Clinton. Her voice reminds him of a shovel scraping a rock. He recoils at the mere sight of her on television. Her very image disgusts him, and he cannot fathom why anyone would want her as their leader. It’s not that she is a woman. It’s that she is who she is. It’s the liberal victim groups she panders to, the “poor me” attitude that she represents, her inability to give a straight answer to an honest question, his tax dollars that she wants to give to people who refuse to do anything for themselves.

There are many millions of Angry White Men. Four million Angry White Men are members of the National Rifle Association, and all of them will vote against Hillary Clinton, just as the great majority of them voted for George Bush.
He hopes that she will be the Democratic nominee for president in 2008, and he will make sure that she gets beaten like a drum.

Gary Hubbell is a regular columnist with the Aspen Times Weekly.

I thought I’d start signing up on some of these sites and check it out.  I might find a couple side things I could work on.  So I made an elance account (username is nmossie).  My profile is here:

http://nmossie.elance.com

so live writer is pretty slick actually.. there’s no gay windows signup.. there’s a button that integrates in to firefox (blog this, new post or open post). Startup time kinda sucks, but once it’s open it’s just fine. Categories and back dating work well. You can edit wordpress pages, which works the best out of all of the ones I tried so far. It tries to match your look with the look on the page, but not annoyingly so.

But.. of course…

1. Images upload is just like the rest of them, no remote browsing of images
2. No private posting(!!) ..
   • althogh it will meet me half way… I just hit save as draft and edit on website, so it saved it as a draft with the correct category, and opened a browser to make me login, which took me to the edit screen, and now I could mark this as private if I wanted to

.. which I didn’t do as this is public.. but I did hit publish on the website and then opened this up for writing again in live writer.

and the presentation is nice … and of course that goes a long way with me.

blogjet also sucks.. and just for two reasons that it seems all of them do, which makes them not as good as the web interface

1. you can’t mark things as private or pending review
2. while you can image upload, you can’t browse the images on the server.. your wordpress image library

so I’m certainly not paying for that.. I can let those things slide on a non-pay client, but certainly nothing I’d pay $50 for.

The free stuff is missing a clean fast integration in to mozilla.. that’s what I’m really looking for… which Deepest Sender has, but it has NO image support, which kinda sucks.  Scribefire’s image support sucks and it opens in that annoying half screen thing and the controls are just kinda kludgy.

Gah.. nothing as good as just logging in and using the website… maybe I’ll look at Livewriter… that might annoy me too much being an MS product.. I dunno.  If I have to get a windows ID, forget it.

I really like Wordpress, but so far I haven’t found a desktop client I really like.  Well, I really like Deepest Sender, but it doesn’t support wordpress that well.  Today I tried w.blogger, zoundry, scribefire, and blogdesk… I found them all lacking.  I’m gonna try BlogJet.. I might like it.. which sucks.. because it’s not free.  Me?  Paying for software?  No way.

I went and saw Manson last night.  Besides everything being late, it was fun.  Manson rules.  Tourniquet and the Reflecting God are my favorites.  I belted those out.  To think one time I through away that CD… I’ll say it: I’ve changed.  Wow huh?

Al went with me.  He had a good time too for much the same reasons.  He didn’t have to protect me :)  The crowd was a lot nicer then I thought it would have been.  I thought it was going to be rough for some reason, but it wasn’t.

I’m older.. that’s for sure.  I could see in the younger faces of the a lot of the people around me how I was at one time.  Not anymore.  I know where most of them were though.. how they felt.  Why they were there.  That used to be me.. just not all the makeup.

That wasn’t everyone though.  There were people older than me too.  And they were there for about the same reasons.  The people I once identified with grew up in different ways.  Now I guess I’m more of a prep than anything.  Someone called Al that… then he showed them his tattoo.  Do 29 year old fit in categories like that anymore?  I dunno.

I’m feeling all introspective again I guess.  People will confuse me being like this for being sad.. that’s not the case.  If it wasn’t for this I’d never be happy.
Just babbling… I’m probably just tired.  I fell asleep after work.  Didn’t make it to karate.  Did some laundry.  Updated this site (social assumptions->society and Richard Taylor).  Wrote this.  Thank god I’m going to the  lake this weekend with Shannon.. even if it will be a shitload of work… I need it.

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