The Summer of Self-Loathing

I'm a glutton for punishment.

Case in point: I'd been working on a post declaring my temporary sabbatical from blogging when I realized that I'd wanted to elucidate an idea I'd been alluding to, both here and on various other forms of Internet communication services, for some time now. And so no sooner did I get myself through the "goodbye for now" than did I realize that there was another post that needed to happen. (Eight minutes later, you'll note, that very post began to form.)

It is with this thought in mind that I bring you an explanation for what I've been calling "The Summer of Self-Loathing."

It's not, for starters, about viciously masochistic self-hatred, at least not in a literal sense. It means that I'm attempting to do way too much in way too small a span of time, and that the end result will likely be an untangled, frayed Dave dangling perilously in the wind.

The biggest conflict is the one between my summer job and my commitments, both personally and professionally, to my graduate work. I knew that the time was shortly to come when I'd need to draw a line in the sand and declare that my academic work was simply more important than a mindless paycheck. Unfortunately, with my needing to be home for my brother's October wedding (and all the best-mannish/house-fixer-upper-ing that that entails), staying home was a damn near necessity.

So I'm still working my boring-ass summer gig, and it still doesn't excite me in the least, and it still distracts me from the massive pile of books I'm meaning to read this summer. What pile, you ask?



THAT pile.

For those of you with bad vision, and those wondering why exactly I've ordered things the way I have, I assure you there's a method to my madness. My to-be-read pile for the summer consists of three distinct categories:

"Pleasure" Reading (or, anything not required but not necessarily light or fun)
Julian Barnes - Arthur & George
Charlotte Brontë - Jane Eyre
Octavia E. Butler - Lilith's Brood
Italo Calvino - If on a winter's night a traveler
Willa Cather - O Pioneers!
Wilkie Collins - The Woman in White
Samuel R. Delany - Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
Daphne du Maurier - Rebecca
Neal Gabler - Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination
Neil Gaiman - American Gods
Alan Garner - Thursbitch
Seamus Heaney [translator] - Beowulf (Bilingual Edition)
Ernest Hemingway - The Old Man and the Sea
Kazuo Ishiguro - A Pale View of Hills
Kazuo Ishiguro - When We Were Orphans
Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go
Henry James - Tales of Henry James
Franz Kafka - Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared)
Cormac McCarthy - All the Pretty Horses
Haruki Murakami - after the quake: stories
Vladimir Nabokov - Bend Sinister
Vladimir Nabokov - Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
Thomas Nevins - The Age of the Conglomerates: A Novel of the Future [a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book!]
Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman
Chuck Palahniuk - Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey
Marcel Proust - In Search of Lost Time
Jean Rhys - Wide Sargasso Sea
Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint
Bram Stoker - Dracula
John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces
Kurt Vonnegut - Happy Birthday, Wanda June
Kurt Vonnegut - Between Time and Timbuktu, or Prometheus-5
Jennifer Hart Weed, Richard Davis, and Ronald Weed [editors] - 24 and Philosophy: The World According to Jack

Writing Books That I Must Peruse in Order to Decide Which Texts I'll Use in My Writing Classes Come This Fall
Dohra Ahmad [editor] - Rotten English: A Literary Anthology
John Dufresne - The Lie That Tells a Truth: A Guide to Writing Fiction
Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein - "They Say/I Say": The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing
Stuart Greene and April Lidinsky - From Inquiry to Academic Writing: A Practical Guide
Diana Hacker - A Pocket Style Manual [Fifth Edition]
Diana Hacker - Rules for Writers [Sixth Edition]
Maxine Hairston and Michael Keene - Successful Writing [Fifth Edition]
Sharon Hamilton - Essential Literary Terms: A Brief Norton Guide with Exercises
Noah Lukeman - A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation
Andrea A. Lunsford and John J. Ruszkiewicz - Everything's an Argument [Fourth Edition]
Louis Mendoza and S. Shankar [editors] - Crossing into America: The New Literature of Immigration
Peter Turchi and Andrea Barrett [editors] - The Story Behind the Story: 26 Writers and How They Work

Advance Reading for Next Semester's Classes
Peter Ackroyd - The Trial of Elizabeth Cree
E. Lynn Harris - If This World Were Mine
Marina Lewycka - A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian
Dinaw Mengestu - The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
Ruth Ozeki - All Over Creation
Susan Power - The Grass Dancer
Richard Powers - Gain
Nelly Rosario - Song of the Water Saints
Adrian Tomine - Shortcomings
M. G. Vassanji - The Book of Secrets
William T. Vollmann - Europe Central
Martin Heidegger - Basic Writings
Michael Cunningham - The Hours
E. M. Forster - Howards End
E. M. Forster - A Passage to India
E. M. Forster - Maurice
Christopher Reed - Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity
Zadie Smith - On Beauty
Lytton Strachey - Eminent Victorians
Virginia Woolf - Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf - A Room of One's Own

In order to make this list somewhat more palatable, I've given myself some timelines. I need to make my textbook orders by June 13, so sometime soon, I'm gonna knock out most if not all of that second column. Outside of that, there's the sensible idea that books read closer to the fall will be better retained, so I'm saving most of the third column for later in the summer. So I've been working through the first list so far, with mostly success.

My real-time progress on the reading can be found by either looking at my LibraryThing profile and reading my reviews, or by checking out my AIM profile.

Oh, and one more thing. The truly eagle-eyed among you might notice that not all the books on the above list are represented in the further-above photo. That's because some have been added in the intervening weeks since I took said photo. And since I'm a compulsive book buyer, and can't resist a well-timed coupon from Barnes & Noble or Borders, that list is almost always growing on a day-by-day basis.

Fingers crossed I don't drop before the leaves change.

Pardon the Interruption

While I've joked considerably about the general lack of readership my blog receives, this note is strictly to inform the few of you that do read that there will be a slight service delay as I work to resolve some things.

A few of those issues are somewhat personal, and I may or may not, at a later date, decide to discuss them herein. If you're truly that curious, you probably feel free enough to IM or e-mail or call or visit me and ask me yourself, in which case I'll probably spill my guts to you if I haven't already. That seems like a fair compromise to me.

You may also have noticed that I didn't post an "M.lb." blog this past week, or the week before. For the curious weight watchers out there, I assure you the program is still in progress, but it has stalled out, largely for reasons closely associated with the aforementioned veiled "undisclosed circumstances." If you must know, I'm still down roughly ten pounds, and very proud that I'm not putting any weight back on, but I've got some things to handle before I get back to losing weight in earnest. Frankly, I'll probably just abandon the weekly posts (they haven't been all that popular anyway), but I'll bring the topic up if I feel it warrants discussing -- which is generally the way things have always run around my neck of the blogosphere.

Other than that, the truth of the matter is that the upcoming weeks plan to be extraordinarily busy: this weekend alone, I have three days of my first alumni trip to Reunions, plus John's bachelor party, to be followed next weekend by John and Caitlin's wedding, to be followed two weeks thereafter by Michael and Sara's wedding. As my schedule has barely allowed time for me to keep up with the massive amount of reading I've planned on doing for the summer, I'm thinking I should get that business in line first, before spouting off at the keyboard.

So forgive my somewhat-insolent silence, but real life is forcing me away from the computer for awhile. Rest assured, I'm still here and thriving -- I just need to some time to clear my head. If you're willing to find me around here, I assure you I'd appreciate your joining me in the real world during this brief respite.

Soon to be back to your regularly-scheduled programming...

M.lb. - Week 7, etc.

Day 43
May 12, 2008
Weight:  x - 10

We're at something of an impasse here. After several weeks of doing this experiment at Penn State, where I had the benefit of a supposedly "very accurate" electronic scale, I have now returned to Wayne and have to use my home scale, which is spring-loaded and reads somewhat lower than the electronic scale did.

I had been hoping that, at this point in the game, I'd have been able to get a decent estimate of the difference between the two and take it from there, but that hasn't quite panned out. Here's the not-so-scientific study I recently did:

At the start of Week 4, the day before my fourth weigh-in, I weighed myself on the home scale to see what it said. Relative to the electronic scale (and the reading of x that I've been using as my starting weight), the home scale said I was at x - 10.5. That next day, as you can see in the post above, the electronic scale read x - 8. So, assuming I didn't somehow lose a whole bunch of weight over one day, the two scales should have been about 2.5 lbs. apart.

A few weeks later, and things have gotten more complicated. I broke my cardinal rule of one weigh-in per week on Friday, because I knew I was leaving to come home. The scale, as it had this past Monday, read x - 10, unsurprising since I'd been sick. I ate breakfast during the drive home, but got back and hopped on the home scale anyway -- which read, shockingly, x - 17.5! Something clearly was amiss.

This morning's weigh-in came back down to x - 15.5 on the home scale. Not knowing what that is relative to the electronic scale has been frustrating, but I think I've hit upon a solution.

As many of you know, the past two weeks have been very trying for me, dealing not only with the stress of finals and final projects, but also with some unexplainable mystery illness that sidelined me from most anything fun. In fact, after a week and a half of dealing (poorly) with it, it was an unexplainable sleepless Thursday night that led me, after an hour-and-a-half of tossing and turning, to wake up at 6:00am on Friday morning -- running on a whole three hours of sleep -- and pack all my shit up and get the fuck out of State College so I could get home and see a doctor stat.

Today, I saw the doctor, who diagnosed me with an infection of the sinuses behind my eyes -- which explains the headache, the tingles, the pressure, the fucked-up equilibrium, and the lack of any constant nose-blowing. I'm currently on antibiotics to kill the bastard, and hopefully I should be back to fighting form really soon.

But while I was at the doctor, they had me hop on the scale. And their scale read, within a tiny little margin of error, almost precisely what the electronic scale had measured last week: x - 10! So I'm going to trust that the roughly five-pound discrepancy between the doctor's scale and my home scale is equal to the discrepancy between the electronic scale and the home scale.

So I'm going to stick with x - 10 as my official weight for the week, and the actual reading of my home scale for the week will be the baseline for further decreases from there.

(If this still feels arbitrary, take it on good faith that my home scale has never read me as weighing any more than ten pounds above what it is now, which still makes all the numbers make sense. Granted, if I were willing to divulge the actual numbers of the scale, this might be a whole lot easier to manage, but...nope, sorry. Still not willing.)

And so begins the home leg of this journey, which will be much more challenging since I'll not have the benefit of a gym to go to every day. So I'm really going to have to make sure I watch what I eat and limit my portions and caloric intake accordingly. Naturally, so long as the weather holds up, I'll try to get out on my bike or take a walk around Packanack Lake or do some other kind of exercise that suits me. But the way I see it, I'm now at the point where I'm trying to really follow Dr. Rosenthal's rules for weight control, which he gave me so many, many months ago, and which specifically say that long-term weight loss is a matter of maintaining control of your eating, not your exercising (although, as he admitted, exercise never hurts).

So I've given myself a jump-start already, and it's time to see what happens next. I've got wedding season starting in a few short weeks, and I need to get myself on a roll if I want to find long-term success over the next few months.

Let the Summer of Self-Loathing begin!

M.lb. - Week 6

Day 36
May 5, 2008
Weight:  x - 10

This week's post will be very short and sweet, since I've got a lot of work to do and I also haven't been feeling very well. I'm attributing most of my success to the fact that I haven't eaten shit. Which I know isn't healthy. And I know I need to actually start eating, and I swear I will if I can shake this borderline-hypochondriac thing that's been bothering me as of late. But in the absence of the gym -- because I'm pretty sure it's not a healthy idea to work out intensely when you feel dizzy and lightheaded all the time -- I've been eating less and it seems that my weight loss indicates that I'm still keeping a negative balance which isn't so bad.

I'd list my goals for the week, but the truth is that I'm far more concerned with getting healthy and getting all my school shit done than with my workouts. I'll just try to keep the healthy eating plan alive for a few more days and then, fingers crossed, getting myself back into gear when I return home for the summer.

See you back in Wayne!