M.lb. - Opening Day

This post is not (entirely) what you think it is. It is the start, I hope, of something new and exciting, and something that I hope those of you who read this blog will become involved in. In fact, I'll be urging your involvement as much as you possibly can as I begin this new endeavor.

First, some background. I'm sitting here on my couch, in a tiny, lonely apartment, waiting for the New York Yankees rain delay to end so I can enjoy the first game of the as-always-anticipated regular season. I've always loved the beginning of baseball season because it signifies to me the certain end of winter, a season I frankly abhor. It's cold, it's miserable, and you can't do anything that I consider fun, like go swimming or ride roller coasters or watch/play/attend baseball games. The baseball season is a crucial step in my emergence from hibernation and my dispatch of cabin fever. It's what really invigorates me again.

The winter this year has been especially cruel. Not personally, but mostly in a psychological sense. The delay of my fall papers, which have hung over my head for all but the past couple of weeks, did a great deal to increase the stress and dismay that I normally feel in the winter. It also hasn't helped that I've felt lethargic and sedentary for months, and that the motivation and inspiration to want to go to the gym and get myself moving has been hampered.

Above all, since I've been to grad school, though I came here with the desire to lose weight, I've actually gained. I'm not proud of this, but I have to admit it: back in junior year at Princeton, when I got sick and tired of being fat and decided I would start my 20s by trying to slim down, I successfully got myself down to the least I'd weighed since high school. It was still far short of my ultimate goal, but I was proud of what I was able to accomplish.

Unfortunately, since then, the stress of senior year, applications, and the adjustments I've made in grad school have had a terribly adverse effect on me. In the interest of full disclosure, which I feel I've got to start doing with regards to all this, I currently weigh more than I ever have before. And that's really scary to me. It's gotten to a point far beyond the mere compunction I'd felt at spoiling my good efforts of two years ago. It's time I put my foot down and said I've had enough.

Which is where you come in.

Today, I'm starting a new program that I've cleverly called Minus the Pounds, or M.lb. for short (get it?). I'm timing this with the beginning of the Yankees' season in the hopes that I can play the progression of the baseball season -- which is never a sprint but more of a marathon -- into my plan to patiently and progressively lose the weight I want to. It's also convenient that the last game of the Yankees' regular season falls on September 28, which is the weekend before my brother gets married. I promised myself I'd lose the weight for his wedding, yet I haven't been able to parlay that motivation into anything concentrated and successful.

Yet.

Starting with this post, I'll be posting weekly, every Monday, with a report of my current relative weight, my progress in terms of diet and exercise, and general musings about how I'm feeling. I ask you all to contribute whatever you can in terms of comments and exposure. Get on here and comment, sharing whatever you'd like: your own weight loss stories, your words of encouragement, even some creative jeers and jibes, if you will. More importantly, if you have a blog or know some people who tend to read these things, invite them to check this out and offer some words of encouragement as well.

Why am I making this so public? First of all, it's because, to a certain degree, I'm an attention whore. (I was going to get that accusation anyway, so I might as well handle it outright.) But this is about far more than merely having a whole bunch of people pat me on the back for losing weight. What I'm really hoping to get out of this is a sense of responsibility. Sure, it seems weird to ask the online world to expect things of me, but in truth, I have a traditionally hard time of doing things for my own good. I mean, if you think about it, this whole project is undertaken for the sake of my brother, so I don't look so fat in his wedding photos. It's not really about me at all, but I'm hoping with some build-up, I'll be able to turn this into something that I want to do for me and no one else.

But enough of this palaver! Let's get this show on the road!

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Day 1
March 31, 2008
Weight:  x

Progress: After conceiving of this project last week, I decided to give myself the weekend as a head-start, both to give myself a good starting number and to try to get myself into the gym again to see how my body reacted to, you know, movement. So far, I'm happy to say that two days of the gym have left me neither sore nor excessively winded. I've also been trying to eat less, and only when I'm really hungry, though I allowed myself a little chocolate bunny yesterday, as I haven't touched it since Easter.

I'm going to, for the sake of a little modesty, define my establishing weight as x. All future updates will be relative to x, though I will have a notebook on me that will keep track of the true numbers. I don't have any particular goal right now -- I just want to start fitting into my clothes better and see what kind of weight loss rate I can establish and maintain. I'll start thinking in terms of goals once I leave State College for the year and head home for the summer.

So it begins. Once again, if you've got advice, suggestion, or mocking you'd like to share, hit up the comments and invite others to do the same.

Thanks in advance, and stay tuned!

An Eye-Opening Eye Closing

I like sleeping. A whole lot. In fact, I would go so far as to consider it one of my favorite pastimes (right up there with video games, baseball, and eating to excess). I've been finding that, as a graduate student, a great change has come over me since my undergrad days with regards to this noble activity.

Back then, I loved sleeping, and would frequently nap in the afternoons and sleep on weekends and days off until some time that was, more often than not, followed by "pm". Granted, at that point, I was going to bed at times when television frequently shows little more than Billy Mays infomercials. There was nothing wrong with this arrangement in the eyes of anyone except the parents paying for what they presumed was an education being sorely wasted by my abysmal sleeping schedule. (My degree showed them...ha!)

But now, as I'm beginning to develop into what I can only call by the term "an old man," I'm finding that my inclination towards sleeping has, if nothing else, shifted back a few hours. When I'm in State College, attempting (that being the operative word) to be productive, I start to really get tired right around the pm-am switchover, and typically start to crave the comfort of my flannel sheets around 1:00am. As an undergrad, this is shameful; but as a grad student, with no one else's expectations to have to tolerate or satiate, I have no problem with this bedtime at all. Consequently, I find it very hard to sleep past 10:00am most mornings, even on weekends, if I manage to make it that long. This very weekend, in fact, after a much-needed night of restful sleep in my own (much tinier) bed, I could only manage to top out at around 9:30am.

And on Easter Sunday, I was up before my brother, which I assure you is quite the accomplishment. See, as a kid, I never slept in -- had to wake up early and play Nintendo before the parents woke up and caught me, after all -- and my brother would routinely maintain unconsciousness for several hours after I'd given up the game. We reversed roles for a few years when I was in college and he was working the five-days-a-week gig, but it's starting to look like the tides may be turning yet again.

Now, in fairness, he does a shit ton more during his average day than I do in mine -- and, in fact, I suspect the mostly sedentary nature of my present lifestyle is attributing to my desire to constantly be going to sleep -- but this whole sleeping thing has me awfully fascinated as of late. Especially because, over the past week or so, I'd been sleeping very restlessly without having anything on my hand or hanging over my head -- as you'll recall from the previous post, I exorcised that demon last week -- and only in the past day or two has that remedied itself.

I even found myself in the strange position, last night, of doing something I'd successfully being able to only during the last six months or so: having a dream, waking myself from it, and being able to fall asleep again and resume it. I made this happen during the fall semester a few times, and during all of these episodes, I had convinced myself that part of the dream was the belief that I'd woken up and fallen back asleep, thus not disrupting the continuity. But when I was able to resume the dream twice in the same night, it was too creepy to write off. This particular accomplishment has me rather curious because we've all had those dreams that we wished wouldn't end, as well as those that seemed poised to reach a climax when they are interrupted by, say, the regrettable droning of the alarm clock in the morning. Does it make me [more] fucked up [than normal] that I can occasionally do this? Is there a non-crackpot psychological explanation for why I can do this in the first place?

I realize that I've gone on at length here about my sleeping habits, with little or no indication of direction or purpose. This is all very true. I was inspired to think about these things earlier today, during my office hours, when the girl sitting next to me in the library fell asleep three times during the two hours I was next to her.

There are a few caveats due here. Firstly, I do my office hours in the library's Humanities Reading Room, which is a very long room consisting of two rows of rather comfortable plush chairs and ottomans. This presents a problem at most hours of the day when seeking a seat, since at least half those chairs are occupied by oddly-contorted unconscious undergrads. No matter what time of day you go. Even if it's roughly an hour after most people have woken up -- because, seriously, who the fuck naps at 11:00am?

Now, I was in this room at 2:00pm, which is prime nap time, as far as I'm concerned. But this girl wasn't like many others who take out notebooks and sheets of paper as mere pretense for their dozing: those fakers can be found curled up with their jackets draped over them like blankets and the "work" they were doing stacked neatly on the small tables next to the chairs. No, these folks are all about show. The true passed-out workers are found in the same manner in which I found my collegiate colleague when I took the chair next to her: a book half in hand, half on the cushion, slumped over as if her neck were snapped, glasses and earbuds ever so slightly askew against her head. This was, doubtless, a girl who couldn't stay awake while reading.

(Which I found to be atrocious because, when she regained consciousness and her book moved, I could see she was reading Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories. And while I'll be the last to admit that any of my recreational pleasures are remotely near normal, I have to confess that being curled up in a plush chair with a Philip Roth novel would be downright heavenly.)

I found her asleep, I would leave her asleep. But twice during my tenure in the chair, she would awaken and resume her work -- a pattern that has astonished me all along. Because while my own productivity overall is neither admirable nor commendable, I wonder why this girl couldn't stay focused for long enough to get through a few stories.

I was forced to consider a few possibilities: that her sleep schedule was even more fucked up than my own, and she was fighting sleep as best she could to no avail; that she was simply managing her time poorly, something that I'm not good at either but that has improved over time; or, most likely of all, that I was simply being a curmudgeonly old fart who has forgotten already how good he had it as an undergrad.

And what freaked me out most of all was that, no matter which of these options I chose, they all pointed to the same general symptom: goddamn it, I'm getting old.

So that was what I learned today. I'm going to go back to trying to regain a little of my youth. By drinking Scotch, watching Food Network, and then going to bed...soon...

I'm too far gone already, aren't I?

Rejoining the Wagon

My fine fellow Princetonian, Laura Sillers, whose blog Life of Soup I read regularly, recently won the Washington Post's second annual Peep diorama contest -- you can see her winning entry here -- and in giving her congratulations and catching up, we briefly discussed our respective blogs. I'd confessed to her, "I was starting to get a little worried...I put your blog on my page and then you didn't post for a while," something that's happened to almost every member of my little blogroll on the side of this page. She then reminded me, "Haha, I think you did the same when I put you on there." Touché.

I'll be the first to admit that my life isn't terribly exciting right now, and a great deal of the truly fascinating mental things that are going on in my mind aren't anywhere near fruition and, therefore, not particularly worth being brought up in a public forum. That, and the majority of most of my days, as I confessed to Laura, consist of the following sequence of events: "woke up today...went to class...read a bunch...wasn't productive enough...watched Food Network...went to bed." Enthralling shit, I know.

The most exciting thing that happened during my spring break, for instance, besides my tattoo, was the aforementioned power outage that left two days of very little action and even less consciousness. (Related side note: How the hell do the Amish do it?) The week did eventually give way to a lunch with an old teacher of mine, who is doing quite well in his quest for the Ph.D. he never got when he was younger; a trip to Princeton, to see some friends and make myself feel better about the fact that Princeton basketball really does suck more now than it did when I was an undergrad; and a few other small adventures to see people who were home that I hadn't seen in a while.

The one thing I didn't do while home was work with any kind of diligence. And that bit me in the ass come Friday, when I realized I still had a paper to finish from last semester that would, by Monday, have dire consequences if left unfinished.

A Brief History: Last semester, I took a class on science fiction that really interested me, but when it came time to the write the paper (on Coheed and Cambria), I got so caught up in it that it took on an overwhelming new life, becoming far more involved than I'd originally anticipated. I opted to defer my grade in order to have more time to spend on it, and have been working with little urgency since then as a result of not having a set deadline for its completion.

All of which was fine and dandy until I received an e-mail on Thursday, informing me that on Monday, all unresolved deferred grades without a professor's approval for extension would automatically become failures. Fuck.

So the race until Monday became tense, with me trying to get my thoughts coherent and well-developed while continuing to struggle with the same sense that I desperately needed something to give and let me get through this paper in one piece. It all culminated with an e-mail to the professor, asking if a paper turned into his mailbox on Monday morning would be there with enough time for me to receive a grade. Response: affirmative. All I had to do now was, you know, finish it by Monday.

And it cost me a lot of sleep, and probably a few years off the end of my life, but I got it done, and handed in on time. All was good in the proverbial 'hood, right?

Well...except for the fact that I, panicky bastard that I am, would not rest until I knew my grade was certain. So I checked every couple of hours, to no avail, until finally, at around 3:30, my weighty eyelids decided they'd been open long enough and it was time for the kind of nap I'd savored in a near-epicurean fashion during my undergraduate days. Off to bed I strolled, falling quickly asleep for about three hours.

I awoke to the always-entertaining sound of my upstairs neighbors fucking so vocally that I thought the girl must have been filming a (bad) porno flick. So much for more sleep.

Awake and somewhat refreshed, it was once more time to check my grade, which had, at last, been filled in. With an F.

The words that followed featured the words "fuck" or "shit" so many times that even I don't believe I could write them here enough times to do myself justice. I was upset, I was disappointed, I was confused, and I was freaking the hell out. The next few hours were spent trying to calm myself (a fun task, I assure you) as well as try to, as reasonably as possible, plot out the course of action necessary to ensure this didn't permanently blemish my graduate school record.

A few hours and lots of whimpering later, Danielle, in her infinite wisdom, decided I needed a drink and offered to pour me some conciliatory Scotch. I liked her thinking, and I'd really wanted a glass of Macallan 12 to celebrate the demise of the semester that had heretofore haunted me, but she suggested that perhaps I might have some Glenlivet 12 instead, and save the Macallan for when I'd actually settled this whole thing.

So she poured me some Glenlivet and, as the glass was placed before me, I decided to check the grade one last time. And it was a good thing I decided not to have some of the Scotch while I did so, because it would've ended up spewed across the screen -- a screen which now read "A."

I'm not really sure what happened, why it happened, or how it happened, but my grade was just entered late. So in the course of a few hours, I'd improved my grade from an F to an A, something I'm proud to say had never happened to me before -- but, in hindsight, I'm glad it happened at the particular moment it did, so that I didn't actually have to go groveling in the Grad School office begging them not to ruin the rest of my life by failing me.

So it was, in fact, all good in the 'hood.

The rest of the week, thankfully, has been uneventful. I'm back home for Easter weekend, and have no obligations nearly as impending as that to contend with this time around. Also, there's power here, which is great, as well as a few books that I'd been wanting to read for fun that I can actually peruse guilt-free -- at least for the time being. Unfortunately, the one thing home does not have is Scotch. But that's not such a travesty either.

Right after I saw the grade, I downed the Glenlivet and poured out the Macallan, just like I said I would.

Yup. All good.

When the Bug Bites...

...you simply must answer the call. It's not the kind of thing that everyone experiences, but if you hear it, the best you can hope to do is put it off for a while. It never stops calling, it never gets quieter. And to resist is futile.

So on Friday I gave in and answered the call:


(Click it to see the full-size image.)

It's healing pretty well so far and looks really killer, so I couldn't be more excited.

Sometime in the next few days, I'll get back and blog a full, proper post. But because of the weather or some human calamity (or a combination of both), we've been without power for the better part of three days, and just got power back a few minutes ago after over 48 hours in the dark. How that happens in suburban New Jersey is beyond me, so I need some time to readjust to the world of the living and collect some thoughts that have more substance than "Fuck you, PSE&G."

When my head is clear and the shock of not having to pee in the dark wears off, I'll be back in full form.