This Explains a Lot

ONE OF THE MAFIA SPECIALTIES I find most fascinating is loansharking. Wildly lucrative, damn near ubiquitous, yet nearly invisible, the art and science of the vig hold a peculiar intrigue for me. I could never make it in that business. Aside from its being grossly illegal, and my being physically and mentally less imposing than the job description requires, my math skills are so shite that to calculate what anybody owed me at a given point, I'd use up so much scrap paper, that the Feds could survey my crimes from orbit with a View-Master.

While Googling the term juice loan, however, this came up as the top paid search result. I hope it's because of the word loan, but it's tough not to connect this with the orgy of cheap subprime credit that got us into our current mess:

"Whether Sought or Unsought"

SOME OF THE FINAL PRESIDENTIAL words of Dwight David Eisenhower — whose example of taking responsibility for both potential sides of a grave decision was cited recently by a disastrously unworthy aspirant to his position — which still give me chills to read or hear since I first saw Ike deliver them at the beginning of JFK:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Full audio of the address available here; video available various places; the excerpt used in the opening of JFK here.

My Goal One Year Ago Today

I AM UTTERLY CONVINCED THAT I made some mention of this a year ago or so, but I can't find the post. Maybe it was a journal entry. How dare I write something that doesn't get sprayed like narcotic frosting all over the Internet?

Anyway, a year ago today, while frustrated with my lack of progress on the then-current exercise routine, I got angry enough to yank my manual typewriter out of its case behind the couch, roll in a 3" x 5", and type the following off the top of my head:

The first month will be hell. Early mornings, uncaring stars, frost on the car and ice in the bones. Temptation will call you back to bed and warm oblivion. Fight past the alarm and out into the morning. Exercise six — SIX — times per week, 30–45 minutes each. Eat right. Purse each day with cheer. Revel in success and be humble, forgiving, and wise when course corrections are needed. You wield the most powerful force on the planet — an unfettered human will. Stack successes like the bricks of an immortal monument and meet triumph head on.

—10/6/07

I was trying to dedicate myself to more frequent and programmatic exercise. I wanted a daily reminder of my committment to pin next to my bathroom mirror. And, surprisingly, it came to 100 words if you count the date, which would have made the folks at the 100 Words site happy. Though a touch fascist sounding, about what else in life can one afford to be dictatorial other than one's health? Anyway, I thumbtacked it on said bathroom wall and there it hung, aside from visits from guests (I didn't want to frighten them off).

Today, I fought past that alarm and into a cold autumn morning where I could see my breath as I walked to the car. I rode the elliptical trainer for 10 minutes to pump heat into my stiff limbs, then went upstairs to the weight floor. There, I managed to add just a little weight to the squats and bench presses I've been doing. The work I have to do comes outside the gym too, by making smarter decisions about food and sleep. But it all starts with throwing off those sheets and shutting down that alarm . . . and then putting on sneakers and gym clothes and getting the hell over there.

Moral? Write your goals down. No matter how small. Especially if they're small. Meet that small goal, then write another one down and hit that too. You don't yell at a person climbing a thousand stairs for taking them one at a time. You congratulate him or her for making the remaining number smaller. That's what fixing a goal to paper can help you do. It's seeing last workout's weight figures and saying, "Let's see what another 2.5 lb. can do here." It's noting that you consumed the right amount of protein and kept simple carbs well under control by checking the last week's worth of meals.

You'll have no idea how far you've come if you don't leave some traces of the steps you took to get there. Set yourself a little goal and see where your first step leads.

Spam Guard or Lovecraftian Horror?

A CAPTCHA I JUST SAW on my friend Amy's blog. I think the protagonists had to use the Powder of Ibn Ghazi on this one, then send it back to the other side with the Voorish Sign:

Dread Ylhtlgwm was sent gibbering back through the yawning dimensional chasm, where it was tended by blind idiot adjectives and quadripthongs until the stars (and spellcheck) be right again.

Inching Back to Normal

FRUSTRATION. Two weeks' worth of business travel have halted my forward motion on the 30x40 weight loss/exercise plan. Traffic/transit snarls Friday and today, plus the feeling of a cold coming on, wrecked my plan to see a back-to-back Godfather and Godfather Part II showing in the city. And the downside of fall — wet chill in the air and rain — draped the morning in gloom and further stymied my desire to get out and enjoy a Manhattan autumn Sunday.

I decided to sleep off the cold as much as I could. I'd been visiting the gym regularly since my return from River City, so skipping one day out of the past six wouldn't be a problem. Instead, I set the alarm clock for noon and curled back up beneath the covers. I heeded the clock's screech and ate breakfast, feeling less like I was getting a cold than actually getting over one: stiff joints and muscles, slow thoughts, and cabin fever. The day was still grim outside, which cut my desire to venture forth for a paper. Instead, I munched Grape Nuts and spent the rest of the noon hour doing chores I'd been catching up with since escaping from the black hole of business travel.

As always, things could be worse, even on the lonely, Sunday side of a three-day weekend. I'm just bitching. I did get to watch the Giants stomp the Seahags like roaches. The cold didn't feel much worse, and perhaps was just the side effect of leaving the windows open last night. Throat still feels a bit scratchy, though. On the social front, I've got the beginnings of a plan to see a friend of mine, with whom I recently reconnected after quite some time, some time later this month. And Jen and Steve will host the traditional Halloween party on the Saturday just after 10/31. No idea how I'll trump last year's award-winning costume, but I've got a few weeks to try.

So the goals for next week are (a) somehow dodge getting a full-blown cold, (b) resume my full-scale exercise and eating routine, and (c) enjoy as much of autumn as I can. I'd hate for the switchover this year to be straight from heat to dreary late-November rain.

Last Week's Work Travel

I SHOULD NOTE A FEW facts about last week's travel, before zapping off for another dose of it this week. After which, successful trip or not, I'll be quite ready to settle in for a few months.

Getting to the airport: Because flights to Central City on Continental are far less frequent than those to Las Vegas, I needed to awaken at 3:15 to get to the airport for a 6:15 flight. Oh, both of those are ante meridian. In a radical cost-cutting move, and to avoid having another narcoleptic chauffeur from the company's standard car service, I drove my own car to the airport. I decided to bet on there being little traffic, and that I would have no problem leaving my car untended in one of the medium-term lots at Newark for 2 full days.

The one hitch was food. Neither of the local bagel joints were open. I didn't feel like Dunkin Donuts (heresy to some readers here), so I got on the road without further local exploration and pulled into the McDonald's after the Route 3 exit on the Garden State Parkway. There, I ordered the only edible thing on the menu, hash browns. A guy who appeared to be the only employee in the joint asked if it was okay if it took a few minutes to get the two of them cooked, as he had none under the hot lamps; I said no sweat. As if to apologize for the very short wait, he gave me what felt like an extra one. I thanked him profusely and began digging them out one by one, shoveling them in as I drove with my knees. It turned out he gave me five of these steamy little grease slabs! I finished wolfing them down while navigating the little dippity-do through local streets to get from the GSP to 78 East, as I'd seen numerous car-service drivers do on past Vegas airport runs, and was, in record time, zooming onto airport property with an oil-scorched tongue and greasy fingers.

Parking: I left my car somewhat close to the entrance of the airport-wide monorail in one of the medium-term parking lots. I figured the closer to the Air Train entrance, the more often the airport security patrols would pass my car. There were plenty of spaces, actually, and probably even more in the cut-rate long-term lots. I didn't want to experiment while on such a tight schedule. At any rate, the lot was virtually dead. I took a picture of the nearest sign with my cellphone, and hefted my bags over to the escalator to wait for the train. Aside from a change of monorail cars halfway through, this process was quite simple, and I soon found myself at Continental's Terminal C.

Security: The streak of all but cartwheeling through the TSA gauntlet continues unabated. By this point it was about 5:00 or so, and the checkpoint was a ghost town. It might even have been that ersatz Rock Ridge from Blazing Saddles, complete with prop-up plywood TSA staff. With no computer, and all fluids obediently parceled in 3-oz. doses, I had nothing of interest to them. Putting my shoes and belt back on took longer than the whole scan of both me and my gear.

Now we wait: In addition to no bagel stores being open near home, the other flaw in my plan was that newspapers had yet to be delivered to the airport. Considering there had been big weekend financial news, I was hoping to read about the last living moments of Lehman Bros. I would have to wait until I arrived in Central City for a Web-based refresher. So I gritted my teeth while listening to the airport CNN and inane phone conversations of my fellow passengers. (Who the fuck was awake at that hour to take a call?) Boarding of our surprisingly full plane commenced on time, and we pushed away and lofted only about 10 minutes late. Flight was quick and smooth.

Lodgings: It was still way too early to check in at my hotel, but it was across the street from the Central City HQ, so I did duck in to check it out. Seemed nicer than the place I'd stayed the first time. I made my way up to the office, found a rest room to change into garb a bit businesslike, and accompanied one of the Central City magazine staff to my temporary cube. Aside from a computer set up for me to help close the issue in house, the cube was entirely empty. Considering my cube in the NJ office was strewn with many hastily unpacked piles from our move several weeks ago, I gazed on the blank walls and desk surfaces with envy.

Meetings and more meetings: One of my teammates estimated that we spent 5 hours in meetings that Monday. Brutal. The two meetings that mattered most were more or less painless, but I was numb by the end of the two days. Between meetings, I reviewed copy for the issue in production and harassed friends via email.

Night of the living Jesus freaks: Fortunately, my only night out there was a Monday night, so I had the Cowboys–Eagles game to watch. It turned out to be a barn-burner of a match. I caught part of the first quarter over mediocre Mexamerican food at a nearby Chili's. The scoring never stopped in this game; I missed one touchdown while calculating the tip, and a turnover while scouting out the restroom.

I scurried back to my hotel after eating to watch the rest. The lobby, previously empty, was seething with the members of some sort of Christian religious organization. A tour bus or two must have dropped them off. People of all ages, with matching religious medals on their chests, were standing around chatting. Some looked like high schoolers; I wondered how children could get sucked into a sect like this so young. Through the parents, perhaps. A whole clutch of these clowns was fussing over a fundraising sale in one of the small conference rooms, scrutinizing jewelry that made the knockoffs on Canal Street look like the contents of Tiffany's windows. I had to excuse myself twice to edge past one fervent pilgrim buttonholing a priest with the following query: "Does the prayer say, 'Now and at the hour of our death,' or, 'Now and at the hour of our deaths?'" Keep counting those pin-dancing angels, true believer.

I arose late the next morning; between watching the entire game and the luxury of a 2-minute commute, I could afford to sleep in. I wandered out sometime around eight for the hotel's breakfast. In the lobby and lounge, what looked like the entire group of Jesus freaks was congregating for a morning ceremony of some kind. As I sat in the adjoining restaurant area, I watched the harried hostess try to stop the worshippers from taking the chairs away from the tables into the lounge. Each time a new person came down from his or her room to attend the Mass, he or she would try to steal a chair, forcing the hostess to repeat her polite, wordy request not to take chairs from paying restaurant customers. So much for the Eighth Commandment.

One of these zombies tried to shuffle off with my chair while I was toasting a bagel. I rejected the hostess's apologetic approach and merely grabbed the chair to arrest his retreat, saying, "This is mine." The hostess caught up with us and she eased the thief away with her standard apology, sparing me the effort of escalating to threats of a broken pelvis. Apparently this crowd clots the joint a number of times a year. Assuming this poor hostess therefore had to repeat this act each visit, I tipped big.

After showering and dressing, I hauled my shit out to the front desk, having to thread through these pinheads once again. This time, they were all focused on something happening up by where the priest might be. Those not in the lounge seemed distracted, as did the hostess, temporarily drawn from her chair-guarding duties. I found out why. As exited the hotel, an ambulance pulled up, followed closely by a second emergency vehicle. Someone must have been stricken in the short time I was in my room. Well, at least this trip would be memorable for them.

Escape from Central City: My boss kindly drove me to the nearby airport, where — at about 5:15 p.m. — there was no security line whatsoever. I cruised through that, then bought a Wall Street Journal to read about the fast-moving collapse of Lehman for an hour or so. The flight back through beautiful stratospheric twilight took about another hour, and deposited me in Newark on time. There, to my relief, my car sat where I'd left it. I burned rubber for home, where I dropped my luggage and slept deeply, happy to be back in my own bed again.

Nutritional Bankruptcy

HAVE YOU EVER BEEN HAPPY to report failure? Surprisingly, I am. Last week, I failed to stick to the usual eating plan, and didn't track my eating accurately each day. What makes me happy is that this was only the first time I did so in 2 months and 3 weeks on the 30x40 weight loss quest. Even with my hit-and-miss dinner choices during some weeks, this is one of the most consistent attempts to establish a positive habit I've ever undertaken, and I am very pleased with the effort and the results. Plus my failure highlights the vulnerabilities of this plan, which will help me anticipate and avoid them. So even this misstep can be useful. And I'd be more nervous than anything else if I hadn't had at least one bust of a week.

Travel triggered my failure. I spent Monday and Tuesday in Central City, contending with chain-restaurant food, office-cafeteria grub, and gluey nutrition bars, with no gym access. Due to a late-Tuesday return, I had little time to buy decent food (especially vegetables) before Wednesday's workday began, so that day's nutrition was haphazard. Through Saturday, I did record my consumption on paper while at work, and I resumed gym visits Thursday morning, to my great relief (and soreness Friday morning). But my rhythm was thrown off. Most of my meals were in fact "on program," featuring the usual whole grains, proteins, nuts, and smoothie-makin's I eat or drink each day. Dinner choices, though, were poor, including a trip to a Chinese restaurant one night, which I try to restrict to weekends, and rarely at that. I supplemented during the remaining weekdays with protein bars, which I've come to believe are terrible, last-ditch replacements for real food.

So in sum, I declared nutritional bankruptcy last week and decided to soldier through the weekend as best I could, with this week as a chance to pick up where I left off. I weigh 223 lbs. today, not terrible, but a few pounds over where I had been last Sunday. The week proceeding that Sunday was great; I dropped fat on a clean diet and got stronger, particularly in my squat form and capacity. I knew 2 days of travel would disrupt this, so I tried to charge into it with fitness to spare. Gaining fat back to 223 during that trip and its aftermath is therefore not an immovable barrier to progress.

But I have to travel yet again this week, this time to, oh, let's call it River City. This hotel appears to have a partnership with a local gym, so I may be able to lift more often than I could during my two Central City trips. I would be overjoyed to find a squat rack with an Olympic bar to keep that up over my 4 days in the area. But I will be happy with some dumbbells and a couple of weight machines that were manufactured sometime after the release of Pumping Iron. The real challenge will be to find decent food while out there. Once past this week, I should be looking at a free and clear October — and autumn — in which to make the next big push toward the goal.

Elusive Sleep

I'M HAVING SOME TROUBLE SLEEPING. This poses a problem, as I need to awaken tomorrow at 3:00 a.m. I have a sixish flight out of Newark to Central City, and I'm taking the unprecedented step of driving there and parking my car in an airport lot. I prefer to handle unknowns by padding them with lots of time in which to fuck up once or twice.

I'm throwing the company a vague bone in using my own car. The last time I traveled for them, they raised no complaints about my use of the car service with which the company contracts, at an expense of somewhere between $175 and $200 for transit to and from the airport. I'm a little nervous about the expense it takes to get me out there — between hotel and flight, nearly a grand — and I wonder how long it will be before they decide not to burden themselves with such an expense in the NYC area if they can just cut me out and hire locally, as they did when they relocated several titles out there.

I will get reimbursed for using the car at IRS rates, as well as for parking fees and tolls, but using Newark's parking garages is an unknown quantity to me. I have a map of the airport, and the route of a tram that appears to connect the garages with the Continental terminal. My parents quailed at the prospect of my leaving the car so near to Newark. For two days' worth, I figured it was worth a risk. Just as long as I don't come back to find a decomposing Mob figure in my trunk.

If the remnants of Ike don't screw up landing conditions in Central City, I ought to get there well before the opening of the office, and hours prior to the usual 3:00 p.m. check-in time at the hotel out there. I doubt I'll be able to claim my room that early, but I might be able to dump my bags across the street at the office, then use the hotel, then just sort of announce my presence as an eventual paying guest, and either use their gym facilities, or ask them to point me toward the nearest source of real food. The hotel boasts a breakfast buffet. As long as it has caffeine, I'm set. As for the check-in, I'm very tempted to see if they'll compromise with a noon room-claim, then cut over there at lunch and nap for an hour-and-change.

It's actually two meetings I need to attend, one Monday, one Tuesday. The Monday one will probably end up being something I could've attended via speakerphone. The second one affects design of the publication's website, and thus may have a visual component. They're setting up a computer for me out there so I can do work. For some bizarre reason, perhaps because we're ramming this month's issue through production to compensate for three workdays we'll lose to an industry convention at the end of September, I broke a major rule against working on weekends by updating the website from here. (And in record time, with no office distractions.) Granted, the Giants game was on during part of it. But I am a firm believer in not working for free. Still, with my parents trekking down to the Jersey Shore, and thus not present for our usual Sunday dinner, and no duties today save the gym, packing, and football, I wedged in a bit of work. For which I fully intend to take back time from the company at an opportunity of my convenient choosing.

Hell, between these couple of hours, and the time I'll need to burn tomorrow morning and Tuesday night getting my ass to and from the airport, they'll probably end up owing me the better part of a day. The only question is whether to take it as a full day, or to salami-slice bits off of several workdays and either cruise home through unobstructed streets or get 30 minutes more sleep each morning.

May this be the most difficult side effect of letting travel for a job crimp my free time. I'll just be happy if my car's intact when I return.

Squats Are Paying Off

DESPITE SOME OFF-PLAN DINNERS this week, I managed to meet today's goal weight of 221. This after a temporary spike, last weekend, to 226, which I attribute to Sunday's carbohydrate-heavy dinner at my parents' place. Three of my dinners this week were considerably subpar as compared to the clean, controlled portions of protein, complex carbs, and healthful fats I had through the other four or five small meals each day. So why, at the end of the week, when I weighed myself and then double-checked the result with a tape measure around my waist, did I still manage to drop 5 lb.?

I believe it's because my addition of squats to the exercise regimen. This week, I did squats on Tuesday and Thursday, owing to taking Monday off from the gym after a solid week of gym visits. I actually woke up before my alarm on Tuesday morning eager to get over to the gym Squatting was the first thought on my mind. How weird is that?

I bumped up this week to eight reps (from seven) of five squats with nothing on the bar. I'll visit the gym for weight training tomorrow, after a cardio session today, because I don't know what sort of gym facilities the hotel where I'm staying Monday and Tuesday in Central City will have. Doubtful they'll have a power rack. I'll be lucky if they have one of those vibrating weight belts from the Coolidge era. So my idea is to put in a vigorous workout tomorrow that will hold me through spotty exercise opportunities and food options until Wednesday.

But back to the weight loss conundrum. I noticed my face looked a touch thinner; I could see my cheekbones more clearly. The waist measurement this morning indicated I'd lost ½" since last Monday, when the scale read 226. When I walked during the week, I was conscious of my quadriceps, the large thigh muscles that squats target. The feedback I got from them was an odd combo of postworkout soreness (though far less than the first couple of times I squatted) and the sense of being larger. The shape of the muscles are a touch different than two weeks ago. They're not Incredible Hulk huge by any means; I won't have to lay in a massive supply of purple pants to replace the ones my gamma surges shred. Indeed, my quads compete for space with no small amount of adipose tissue, to put it clincally. But it seems to be a slightly smaller amount of said fat, and a touch larger amount of said muscle.

I am permitting myself the least perceptibly hubristic shred of joy I can muster.

When you have an enemy on the run, you pursue and reduce them while they are thus vulnerable. My war against fat is still young. But any war comprises many battles, many duels between armies across the vast theater of strife. If I was able to add muscle and drop fat even when I had nacho chips and cheese two nights this week, along with pizza on a third, how much more success might I achieve with an entirely clean diet? Rather than ruing my slips, I will take them as proof that my exercise plan is working, that the overall 30x40 goal may be achievable, and that if I die young anyway, it will be in the midst of a fight I finally have dedicated myself to winning.

Too Late for a Blog Title Change?

HAD THIS BLOG STARTED ON 9/11/07 instead of 9/11/05, and had I read this interview, by Nick Hornsby, of David Simon, creator/writer/producer of The Wire, at the time, I might have been tempted to use the line in bold Verdana as my blog's title:

NH: Every time I think, Man, I’d love to write for The Wire, I quickly realize that I wouldn’t know my True dats from my narcos. Did you know all that before you started? Do you get input from those who might be more familiar with the idiom?

DS: My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.

(Original pair of quotes found, via Merlin Mann's Kung Fu Grippe, in The Believer.)

Two Minor Steps Toward Better Fitness

LABOR DAY WEEKEND WAS, as I suspected, a foodfest. Though it lacked the sweets and chips I had over July Fourth weekend, just before I started my 30x40 program, it nonetheless included much "off-program" food I don't usually eat on a Monday. After a scary spike to 226 last Tuesday, I worked down to something closer to more recent averages. I missed my target weight for this Saturday of 221.5 by one pound, but it's drifted down a bit today. Even at 222, that leaves 24 more pounds to lose, about 2.4/month by next June 27. Insofar as I've been as low as 219.5 in mid-August, the new goal for next Saturday (221 lb.) ought not be unimaginable should my eating and exercise be sound.

I did make two changes to my life along both these lines in the past couple of weeks. I reduced the amount of Diet Coke (and with it aspartame) I drink, and I added the dreaded squat to my exercise program.

I am a hardcore Diet Coke addict. Caffeine addict, to be precise. Three cans per day keep the headaches away. Nine, twelve, and three is the dosage schedule. I kicked caffeine completely once, for several weeks, by weaning myself off using caffeine-free Diet Coke. This ended when my stress level at work surged. You can imagine how such abstinence didn't occur to me earlier this year.

I've been drinking green tea as the main liquid ingredient of my post-workout protein smoothies for months now. I brew up a big jug of the stuff every week or so and keep it in the fridge, ready to go when I come back from the gym. Two weeks ago, I brewed a travel mug of the tea separately, to drink at work later that morning while eating my cereal or oatmeal. No sweetener; I get enough early-morning simple carbs from the fruit and protein powder in my smoothie. I've been doing this since, except for last Thursday, when I forgot to bring my travel mug home.

This wasn't as much a caffeine-control move as a way to cut my aspartame intake. The amount of tea I'm drinking to replace that first Diet Coke contains nearly twice the caffeine of the omitted soda, according to Wikipedia's caffeine entry. (Though a couple of days last week, I got afternoon caffeine-withdrawal headaches. Another razor-accurate Wikipedia page for you.) For several weekends, I'd been drinking either hot green tea or coffee for my first day's caffeine, so this seemed a a good way to cut my dosage of a potentially dangerous chemical. The last thing I want to find out 40 years ago is that the tumors I'm having irradiated are due to this nasty shit that Donald Rumsfeld pimped to the food industry while working for chemical company G.D. Searle. By then he'll be too dead to receive my vengeance.

As for the exercise change, I attempted to add squats to my exercise routine in 2005. Recovering from the first couple of sessions in which I did them was tough, and I let that difficulty convince me to drop them in favor of an isolation-exercise machine for quadricep development. But I began studying the articles on squats at Stronglifts.com, and realized that I hadn't been doing them right.

I've given them another try, and thus far, I think I'm not only doing them right, but building a little more muscle with them. I have no weight on the bar, which itself weighs about 45 lb. I've been able to increase from five sets to seven (the goal is to have three light warmup sets, then five "working" sets with heavier weights). My quadriceps were burning burger last Sunday, and I could barely manage to sit while standing or get up once seated. The recovery time for each subsequent squat session has been shorter, even while adding new sets. And only my quads have hurt; last time I tried these, my back and knees hurt during recovery. Properly done, squats call upon back muscles and knees as stabilizers; only your quads should be hit. I think I'm doing a better "flight check" of the steps one takes before and during the motion. Bottom line: I haven't blown out a knee or snapped a hamstring. With any luck, greater proficiency and more weight will make those fates even more distant.

Storm Puts Brakes on Poker Jones

A TROPICAL STORM APPROACHES the area, threatening rain, wind, and flooding. I haven't wandered next door to the supermarket to engage in the ritual pre-storm purchase of milk yet. I used to wonder why folks swarmed the milk before hurricanes and snowstorms, but then I began drinking coffee, and then I Understood. Don't keep the residents of America's hurricane belt away from the morning joe, and maybe a nail to suck down while nervously eyeing the Weather Channel.

Aside from a catastrophic rainstorm back in 1994, I've lucked out during recent weather upheavals. Tropical Storm Floyd in 1999 laid waste to any parts of Bergen County near streams or rivers. An apartment complex owned by my landlord took on water to the second floor. Businesses near this building were saturated to the ceilings and condemned. All of this was only a couple hundred yards from my digs. While riding the bus on the Garden State Parkway the next day, I could see water shimmering in an unbroken sheet across the backyards of houses along the highway. Mere feet from my previous place of residence in Hackensack, Route 17 had become an inland sea through its Lodi–Rochelle Park stretch.

It's a stone bummer I won't be able to travel this weekend, but there's nothing out there that won't wait until fairer skies make my drive easier. I've got an itch to hit one of the local casinos. I haven't visited a cardroom since my return from Las Vegas. The Borgata is hosting a series of poker tournaments, which has the benefit of bringing out more crummy players, and would offer me another chance to say hi to the one and only Dr. Pauly of Tao of Poker, who is down there covering the tourneys. But that would take me straight down the barrel of the storm.

Heading north to Connecticut is the other option, but then I'd get tagged by Hannah's remnants while driving home in the dark. I do want to check out the expanded New England poker market soon. After missing out on the hold'em craze nearly from Day One by closing its poker room 5 years ago, Mohegan Sun launched a new cardroom this Labor Day. I've been giving them some time to get their shit together . . . and from the looks of this thread on the 2+2 Forums, they still have some glitches to shake loose. I hope they do.

It does seem they're trying to distinguish themselves from the 100-table poker room down the road at Foxwoods. From what I've read, poker dealers at Mohegan Sun keep their own tips, rather than following the lead of Foxwoods poker dealers many years ago to pool their tips with those earned by the rest of the casino's dealers. Nearly alone among the nation's poker dealers in this practice, Foxwoods' dealers occasionally get accused of being less committed to customer service. Insofar as the tips they're earning through good performance aren't entirely "theirs," they're perceived as not working for them as hard as Vegas or Atlantic City dealers do. I've seen dealers of every level of dedication at the Woods, both at poker tables and the regular casino games, but the rep was strong enough to motivate Big Mo's card-slingers to follow the example of their colleagues across the country and hang onto the chips they pick up during their downs.

Even grading the reactions of 2+2's posters on the usual curve for Internet opinions, there still seem to be some areas where the Mohegan Sun management can improve: selection of table limits, confused floor staff, the announcement system (i.e., the PA that calls players to games), weird cards. Plus they may have overtaxed their greenhorn dealers by soft-launching on a holiday weekend, which is going to stress even a veteran crew. Their official launch is said to be in October sometime. Still, even a couple of weeks' duty will tighten the operation, assuming the management is observant and attends to the real issues (and doesn't give in to any little nitty twitch of the notoriously fussy poker community). I'm looking forward to visiting, now that buying gasoline only requires a single kidney for collateral rather than both lungs or a leg. I like the ambience at Big Mo more than the mall-with-gambling feel of their older cousin down the road, Foxwoods. Granted the latter has upgraded its apparatus, pairing up with casino giants MGM Mirage to open a new wing. I haven't seen either the new Sun poker room or the Foxwoods expansion yet, and I'd like to take a day to explore them both.

This month will be a travel-packed cavalcade of whimsy, though. Two days in Central City midmonth, then four days at an industry convention in the final full week of September. Keeping the weekends free might be the only thing that keeps me sane amid this, and I might end up preferring just hanging locally for a boardgame night or run to a local eatery. We'll see how weekend plans pan out as this summer lashes us with its final few weeks of spiteful heat and hurricanes, before yielding to the welcoming embrace of autumn.

The Sarah Palin Question Nobody's Asking

WHERE WAS SARAH PALIN WHEN the plane of Louisiana Congressman Hale Boggs — a member of the Warren Commission — disappeared without a trace in Alaska?

And don't give me that "But she was seven!" shit. I've seen The Bad Seed.

A Truly Orwellian Blog

GEORGE ORWELL BLOGS. Being dead, he has some help. Domestic-life entries from 1938 right now, much concerned with local weather and wildlife, and — being the journal of a Brit — the garden. Come September, his political thoughts. Entries, each posted on the actual date + 70 years, are transcribed into WordPress; I hope they include more photos of the diaries themselves. I find the look of a person's diary as potentially interesting as its content, if not more so should the lettering be of striking character.

Bonus: Arch-diarist Samuel Pepys got the drop on Orwell more than 5 years ago.

30x40: Weeks of 8/18–8/25/08 Progress

A WEEK AFTER MY TRIP to Central City, I still find myself recovering from the divergence from my home weekday eating plan and the time away from the gym. Some of the problem was self-inflicted; getting dessert with dinner out there was a mistake. Some of it was inadvertent, notably the poor gym facilities at the hotel and the pizza lunch we were given on the big-meeting day (with no alternatives like salad; in fact, I think dessert pizza was the salad) in the CC office. And some of the problem arose from having a weekend right after this comparative fitness/nutrition desert. Although I allow myself some divergences from the usual diet on the weekend, Mom was kind enough to offer her macaroni and cheese Sunday night, which made for leftovers Monday and Tuesday nights. . . . So the weekend represented a bit of retracement.

My weight didn't visibly shift too much, and my Monday gut measurement didn't show any gain, but I did feel fatter for a couple of days after my return. The bags felt heavier when I carried them upstairs here, and not because I stuffed them with souvenirs. (More likely were binges at the comic book and boardgame stores across from my hotel.) Not exactly the streak I wanted to rack up just before my second-month anniversary on the 30x40 plan. I'd much rather have continued the run I had between 8/14 — when I touched 220 for the first time in years — and 8/16 — the second of two days at 219.5. I'll have to analyze what exercise and eating combination resulted in this dip. But from the standpoint of the broader goal (losing .57 lb./week or 2.5 lb./month), I met my milestone: 222.5 lb. on August 27, down from 225.0 on July 27, for a loss of exactly 2.5 lb.


I didn't sweat the fat gain too badly upon my return. No mistake is totally irrevocable on this plan, and some — like a cold, or a business trip — are unavoidable and best rolled with and corrected ASAP. The iron was waiting for me when I returned to the gym Saturday afternoon, and I racked up a shockingly energetic weight routine. Doing so well got me through the last few days; nightmares have been kicking me out of bed at hours early even for me. This has left me a walking corpse by the end of the workday, which in turn fucks up my attempts to eat a healthful dinner. But I kept going back to the gym each day, to keep my muscles going on a regular schedule. When one aspect of my life gets out of balance, the smartest thing I can do is stay consistent with as many other aspects of it as I can, until I can fix the problem. Sleep last night was far more consistent and horror free than has been the recent case, so my plan may be working.

With Labor Day Weekend coming, I have a chance to address the dinner difficulty. And lunch; after I got sick of my usual turkey sandwiches, I had an important void to fill. I can grill a shitload of animal protein on Monday to get me through a few days of next week. Veggies I can handle day to day. (It would help if the current crop of broccoli were better; the heads I'm finding are being harvested far too late, with loose, overdeveloped florets. I am a broccoli snob.)

I wrote everything preceding this paragraph before I left for work this morning. As I closed the door after me upon my return home, I noticed the running list of daily weigh-ins, and the top- and bottom-left entries in that block of early-morning scribbles jumped out at me:

7/22: 225.5
. . .
8/22: 222.5

Three pounds in a month. As much as I still need to lose, as attentive as I need to be in my eating, as hard as I'll have to lift to keep what fitness I have and maybe develop just a little more, I can't help but be proud of that three-pound drop.

Inspiring Trip, and Fighting Pessimism

SOMETIMES I THINK PESSIMISM IS as reflexive a response in my system as blinking or breathing. These two functions and others like them don't veer off as unreasonably as does my willingness to assume the worst, however. May they never catch up. Better, may my flights to pessimism be delayed or cancelled.

It is in this spirit that I report being proved wrong in my initial feelings toward the Central City meeting in which I participated this week. I hope my apprehension grew from my anticipated sour experience with midweek air travel, my very real trouble in even getting a company travel account set up, and basic fear of the unknown — I'd never attended an editorial review of this type. I'd scoffed at the need to visit in person, wondering whether the cost of bringing me out there would justify the difficulty of hurdling the TSA and airline obstacles doubtless in my route.

As usual, these spectres fled under the light of actual events.

Tuesday morning found me packed and ready to fly. I used my Las Vegas packing list to assemble my gear; a fun-starved smattering of work-pertinent items and clothing bereft of the usual sunblock, desert hat, copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and poker dough. Naked, I felt.

After 2 hours in the office, I headed home to await the car service. When I wandered downstairs 15 minutes early to dump some garbage, I found him already there, catching some Z's. I awakened him and we got underway. I suspect he was sleep starved, as he spiced his 75-mph race to the airport with frequent drifts into the left lane, or the shoulder. He may have been drowsy, but it sure woke me up.

The first challenge was to get a boarding pass, which I couldn't print through the company 's chosen travel site. The credit card reader didn't recognize my purchase and instead referred me to human assistance. Said human realized my card had not yet been charged for the trips. She did so, then ground out my pass. I was glad I'd gotten there 2 hours early and during the midweek dead of August, rather than close to a major travel holiday. From there I went to the dreaded TSA chokepoint, where the line was delightfully short — shorter even than some of the 6 a.m. lines I find prior to a Vegas run. With such a small hoard of junk, I presented them with a boring X-ray profile, so I was through and clear in moments.

I boarded the Central City flight with ease, and lucked out by getting an empty seat between me (in the window seat) and the other row-occupant. Of course, the flight was preceded by about 25 minutes of delays on the ground. I realize now that the airlines are baking the delays into the ticket times, as they anticipate the impact of departing traffic and arrival snags. Flight itself was brief (compared to the EWR–LAS run) and smooth through clear weather, and with no checked luggage, I was into a cab and hotel bound swiftly upon arrival.

My hotel was one of several clustered near the Central City airport, in the midst of what appeared to be the chain-restaurant district, and across the street from both a mall and the local branch of my company. No need to rent a car. After checking in, I wandered over to the mall, which had the virtue of a local casual-dining choice; I'd scouted the area from home and decided, as with Vegas, why eat on the road what I can get at home? The burger there proved to be a solid choice, though the dessert (you can tell I was using a company card) nearly put me in a coma. Five bucks apparently buys a lot more out there, and I only made it halfway through the platter of death-carbs under whipped cream I received.

As I ate, I noticed a person who was leaving the mall with a plastic bag that advertised Free Comic Book Day. I wondered if there might be a comic shop in the bowels of the mall. A few minutes later, another person emerged with a bag that advertised a business with a fairly geeky name. That settled it. After I paid, I wandered into the mall proper to hunt this source down. No greater love there is for a geek than to patronize one's friendly local game/comic/music shop. Sure enough, not only was there a comic book shop, but two doors down there was a boardgame store. Both sported RPG and CCG sections, as well as tables on which to play them, and the comic shop also was a Warhammer miniatures dealer. Central City was beginning to look more salvageable by the minute.

Fitness and sleep were troublesome, though. The hotel featured a "fitness center," which included an exercycle, a treadmill, and a Universal-style weight center that posed more health danger in its use than its neglect. I elected 30 minutes on the treadmill the first morning I was there, and skipped it entirely the second day, resuming regular gym visits Friday. The first weight-training visit on Saturday actually showed some improvement; this makes me wonder whether I ought to add a little more rest time between lifting visits. As for sleeping, my room was close to the ice machine on the first floor. When the staff began laying out the complimentary breakfast, they needed to scoop up some ice, which they did at 5:30 a.m. both mornings. This is actually later than my usual wakeup time on weekdays, but I'd run into trouble both nights trying to fall asleep (both bed and pillow were far spongier than my home setup), so each morning I was staggering around on subpar sleep.

The next two days were spent primarily at the local office, about which I must be elliptical for security. I must say it's nicer than the one in Jersey, plus they allow employees to bring in houseplants. The first day comprised discussion of our editorial calendar for next year, as well as a look ahead at what conferences we might want to attend to foster development of these articles. It was tough to wing off for a few days for a convention when the headcount on the title was a whopping two, so with a full bullpen we can do this again now.

The second day was the money day. A pair of edit-gurus led a positive, open-ended discussion of what we'd accomplished over the past year, examining our mission, our graphic design (which we'd redone a year ago, so now was the time to see if it was working), the replies to a reader survey, and what our online outreach would accomplish . . . an area that involves me. I didn't get the chance to discuss a blog strategy, because apparently the site will be redesigned soon. We were told a couple of things we could do with the current site, the design of which was rejiggered at the same time as the print pub's, and I made it clear to the two hosts that my ability to address any of this sort of thing had been hampered by the staff shortage; I had been offloading my own web duties to a freelancer during that stretch. Those who mattered at the meeting seemed to understand this, so my ass is not on the line or anything . . . which, over the course of these meetings, I found myself once again caring about.

I took a ton of notes for what we can do in all of these areas, because we had unprecedented access to two keen thinkers on what makes magazines work. I also got the message that the new web design, as well as anything we would want to do in a blog, are up to us. I told them I would need some heavy training in these areas if I am to do anything besides just check to see that monthly content uploads were executed right; it's one of my review goals, in fact. But I presented myself as being part of a future set of solutions, not as any sort of whiner or cripple. I felt very much more part of a team effort, above and beyond enjoying the uncommon privilege of having the rest of the gang there in the flesh.

I think it's time to lay to rest any reference to our being short on staff. I never used it as a hollow excuse, but it was the legitimate reason why we weren't able to do anything besides put a monthly publication out there. With a full staff, I can ease some of my edit duties over to the other folks if the web action becomes more of a daily task — an offer my boss made unbidden after the meeting. I had been nervous about the rest of the staff getting web training that would render my own obsolete. Now there is a chance I may revisit the Central City office (where the head of all things web is based) for further, more specialized training and assistance in enacting the redesign once the staff and managers decide what we need to feature. All of this is possible now that we are well past the crisis stretch.

I thought about the ways I could make this sort of training serve me as I flew home. No trouble getting to the airport or traversing the tiny TSA line helped foster a reflective mood for the flight back. I do feel more enthusiastic about the position, which now seems at my power to craft. A former supervisor of mine used to say, "Once you stop learning, you're dead." I have the chance to stay alive in this sense now, even to flourish. Still wondering if this will truly be my calling, something I strain at the leash to do each morning. But my previous pessimism may be clouding my attempts to see what that might be.

Winging Out of Here (Sadly Not to Vegas)

TEMPORARY RADIO SILENCE FOR THE next couple of days, as I have to fly to the other office for a 2-day meeting. I didn't get the chance to update you on my old goals for last week, but I nailed the hell out of the weight one and did better on the rest. My current goal, based on the possibly subpar food choices I may be faced with on the road, is not to undo too much of my progress. If I can keep down to 223.5 by Saturday (I come back Thursday night), without losing a lot of my workout achievements (and they do have a "fitness center" at the motel), I should be OK. We shall see. If I have to spend more than 5 hours in an airport on either side, I may begin freebasing a Cinnabon.

No Future?

I'VE ALLUDED TO SOME GREATER-THAN-AVERAGE discontent with my job in the recent past. Doing so without explaining why is, at best, whiny . . . and frankly this post may emphasize this suspicion. I had started a couple of times during the past week to write up the current conditions there, but I just got sick of what sounded like someone bitching about starving with two loaves of bread under his arms. (Those big, crusty French loaves that take a week to finish. Imaginary simple carbs are OK on my diet.) We're flirting with recession, after all, and I've survived two layoffs there. Nice to be needed. But do I need them as much as they need me? Ah, there's the question.

Let's try this again by describing the office as it now is. We moved internally over last weekend. I'm no longer in an area of the office that was surrounded by empty cubes, abandoned by the former staffers of my magazine; loud assholes involved in marketing and sales (and to show you how this company thinks, after the last move, when my former coworkers complained about the adjacent noise, they were given cheap noise-control earmuffs rather than any disciplinary assistance); and one dingbat, who used to sit to my direct right, and who muttered to herself all day when she wasn't seized with racking, lung-hemorrhaging choking fits.

I am now ensconced among the editors of another magazine — all corpse-quiet, all capable of intelligent banter — and two of the company web team, one of whom I need to bug occasionally, so her placement is convenient. So the atmosphere last week was radically better.

So why did I feel like my composure was going to unravel through most of the week?

I now quote from a long letter to myself I wrote over the bulk of July 25, in lieu of work, to keep me from losing it one day:

I'm wondering how long I'll be able to last in the current work arrangement. The office, which was not even completely full when I started last year, is a ghost town. Entire rows of cubes and several offices stand empty. [ . . . ] The phone list, far shorter in total than when I started, was bumped up in type size, to project the illusion of full staffing. [ . . . ]

There's no "coworkers" here, not in the sense of people with whom you collaborate daily, and, if you're lucky, look forward to seeing on Mondays. [ . . . ] there's nobody to talk to. [ . . . ] I don't have a boss present here to distribute work, nor do I have the autonomy to make these moves myself. (I'd like to think that, as a freelancer, I'd be able to set my day's activities and find interesting work w/o getting into a wandering mindset, but at least I'd be self-sufficient for staff.) [ . . . ]

As regards the remote staff, the top brass on that side, who was picked to replace [my previous managing editor, P.] b/c she drove off the previous staff & became overmatched by the tide of work to be done, hasn't represented a very new direction. He's been out of the office 2½ weeks of the past 5. He had proposed weekly meetings to keep things moving & possibly get the magazine back on schedule, but he hasn't hosted a single one. The 2nd-in-command, my immediate boss, doesn't seem interested in hosting them himself. He does the necessary writing speedily enough, but hasn't stepped up to run the joint as much as I believe he's gonna need to in light of the group editor's current split of responsibilities. I don't think that we're even 25% of his time across 4 publications [ . . . ]

The clinical editor declared herself overwhelmed the last time we actually did have a staff meeting. The review process requires articles to spend a stretch of time in another company's hands, and the need to be liaison for all of the back-and-forth is challenging for her. P. managed to do it all, but she never slept & let stress & overwork destroy her health. I credit the clin. ed. for sending up a signal flare, which led to a bit of scrambling to cover her column duties. At least I was able to do a little more writing for the issue.

The art department is another story. After the in-house artist left [i.e., was effectively laid off], production duties fell to the new person in [Central City]. This person already had layout duties for (at least) all the other pubs of our group editor, plus maybe 1 more. So ours makes 5. Our guy had his hands full w/ 2! And keep in mind that the artist was responsible for hunting down stock photos, commissioning photo shoots for the lead/cover story, working with interior artists [for spot illustrations], etc. At our first art conference w/ the new person, she said she'd prefer to use stock photos for a lot of the inside art, including the spot illos we'd been securing from a graphic artist. So another freelancer gets it in the tail. Worse, she took her sweet time in getting in touch with our old artist (I eventually had to advocate for him @ a staff meeting w/ the publisher present) and has been unresponsive to our remaining artist's requests for information & offers to help. The impression she got is that this new person doesn't want to admit how overwhelmed she is. To which I say, tough shit to the company. They make the genius-level decision to can the vast majority of the NJ art staff, w/o thinking through the consequences of having all of this work fall to cheaper remote labor. Too bad.

I question how long I can endure here w/o the daily exchanges w/ colleagues that advance projects, that foster new ideas, that help to build trust. With the folks out of house, all they'll ever be is clients I meet on rare occasions. Without either absolute control over my work, or day-to-day running contact w/ folks who will see me develop and who can vouch w/ full authority for my worth when it comes to raises, plum assignments, and promotions, all I've got here is the job that comes up next in the rotation, some editing, some writing, and some Web work.

I've got 11 months until I turn 40. Usually guys @ that age are more established in a career or a company than I am here. Valued as an employee, perhaps; trusted and sought after to do good work, maybe; irreplaceable, no. I don't see as permanent the situation of the co. retaining a NYC-area-salaried employee while the rest of the magazine earns [Central City]–level money. Now is my time to make them understand what an asset I am at this price, especially in the face of a recession.

The problem is, I don't feel inspired to do so. Like a lot of my friends, I feel under-challenged, unmotivated, at this job. I'm not sure what else I might be able to do, but I'm sure it's more than I can achieve here, especially if they need to cut more employees as the economy continues to flounder. [ . . . ] I feel very easily distracted when facing tasks here, barely able to keep my attention on one task w/o hitting the Web for some diversion. Clearly a sign of disinterest.

What does rivet my attention? Doing a rigorous edit. Copyediting. Proofreading. Writing things. Can these things be done freelance and have any chance of earning enough $ to pay for insurance, to say nothing of 401(k)/retirement money? Or rent, even? At 40, will have to start a new business in my parents' basement?

I followed this letter with a long walk around the building and parking lot, a daily escape that has helped keep me on an even emotional keel.

Since, then, I've gotten a bit of perspective. Let's face it, jobs are usually self-inflicted, and if one's not in so much debt that any stable job has to be kept no matter what, and one can walk away, better to invest one's energy in finding that next job than in rhapsodizing about the pain it's supposedly causing. I don't think I was that whiny, but it wouldn't be the first time if I was. So allowing for the fact that this piece was written while I was in a bit of a trough, some points:

• There's certainly nothing wrong with starting a solo business, or with doing so in the most economical site you can find for it. Basements, garages, and attics have hosted many efflorescences of American genius, especially when the creator's getting a little help with the rent. So I got hyperbolic at the end here.
• The situation with the artist has, no hyperbole intended, gotten worse. My boss in Central City has confirmed that she is unresponsive to input from editors. She doesn't pay attention to deadlines until you remind her of them. And I had to get some graphics from her for the monthly website upload, all of which came back wrong despite my extensive directions. What do you do when you send someone Photoshop masters of some web graphics, ask for them to be saved as flattened JPEGs, and then keep getting .PSD files back after repeating this request thrice? (In my case, I stopped asking for the fix, briefed my boss on her failure, made the fixes myself, and put my head between my knees until hyperventilation ceased.)
• It took me one full day to find the name of a contact who could answer my questions about setting up a trip for this week, because the employee orientation manual is better than 2 years out of date, and another half a day to get an account opened with our online travel system, because the instructions fail to inform the user that you need various bits of obscure employee data to complete it. This was the same stretch when the artist was fucking up. I spent the next day wondering when the chest pains would begin.
  
• I finally took back the job of updating the magazine's website after handing it off for 6 months due to the staff crunch. I confess it felt good to do this myself again, and I remembered nearly all of the procedure. (If I'd truly not given a shit about it, I'd have forgotten it in total.) Future of the web work is unclear; writing ab0ut what's in store here is tough without ID'ing the whole shebang, but let's say instructions on how to do things are simultaneously in flux but being codified in a written guide. Lots of fun.
  
• More alarming, I learned that the magazine's editors all got a formal lesson in updating the website. Partly this will allow them to place content on the fly, between the monthly print publications. But it also makes my knowledge less unique, and me more replaceable.

Now ahead of a big editorial review meeting this coming week, which I have to attend in person out at the other office, I have the ace in the hole of proposing some ideas for setting up a proper blog for the magazine. The one we launched a year ago died after two entries when the previous clinical editor left. Good thing, too; going with the company ethic of "pay for shit, get shit," they did it as a series of HTML pages on our site — rather than on a blogging platform — which took four clicks to reach from the "Blog" button on the front page. My ideas more or less boil down to, "Find out what [successful blog another magazine runs] did to launch theirs, and copy it," and "Give me the company policies on setting up new domains, buying a blog-platform license, commenting, linking, graphics, etc., etc.," for which I'm fully expecting to get blank stares.

More on that meeting: We're supposed to set up the 2009 slate of articles, and then hear from two higher-ups their opinions of how the past 12 months have been for the magazine. The period coincides exactly with my tenure there and the lifespan of our most recent redesign. So all of these things will be examined for how successful they've been, and they'll be looking for on-the-scene testimony from that period. Unless someone else is going to be there from that era, that leaves me as the sole survivor. We do have some market research to help figure how we've been doing too, which came in the form of an inch-thick sheaf of paper I will probably end up reading during the delays at Newark and the actual flight to Central City.

This whole process could reignite my enthusiasm for the title and the job. If I'm pulled more into writing again, which I had to set aside at the beginning of the year as our staff evaporated. Should I somehow become a key to the blog project, or sucked deeper into the management of the website, I could request formal training for these things, which would fulfill one of the goals on my first performance review, or become a negotiating point if they fail to assist me in staying current with tech and software. At minimum, I'd get a couple more qualifications on the résumé.

I'm just hoping the feeling of hopelessness that the above letter expresses doesn't return amid this trip. When I shut down on an idea, I find it damn near impossible to fake enthusiasm for it. I may just have to smile through some of this shit and then try to make sense of it when I'm away from these folks. By the time I return on Thursday, I'll either have a greater sense of my direction at this place, or just go to work on Friday and write myself another rambling rumination on trying to amend years of indolence with a plan to find fulfilling work for the rest of my functional days.

Enough of Goddamn Michael Phelps Already

AS ONE OF THE 100 Americans who, by act of Congress, are maintained in a special reserve for those who don't give a red shit for the Olympics, I speak for the other 99 by saying, enough of this fuckin' guy already. He's got the eight medals. Good. Go retire and become a pitchman for Speedo or HTH Chlorine or whatevathefuck. He reminds me of smirking shill Jean-Claude Killy, as expertly skewered by gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. I urge you to plop down in one of those comfy chairs at Barnes & Noble — or just fuckin' buy the thing, it's an authoritative slice of Thompson's best work — with a copy of The Great Shark Hunt and read "The Temptations of Jean-Claude Killy." Then get back to me. Though I doubt Phelps will be paired at car shows, as Killy was, with then-ascending football star O.J. Simpson.

30x40: Week of 8/4/08 Progress

ANOTHER SUNDAY, ANOTHER SUMMATION OF my progress toward not having my heart explode like the Death Star before I hit 50 by losing 30 pounds by the time I hit 40. I've been on this plan for a full month. From a 7/7/08 peak of 232.5 lb., I lost 9.5 lbs. by the 30-day mark. Despite a little backtracking in the last and previous weeks, I continued to visit the gym 6 or 7 days out of 7, and fought off a cold before it got any worse. Saturday's weigh-in showed 221, 3.5 lb. less than my goal of 224.5, for a total loss of 11.5 lb.


I've learned a fair amount about what food, weight training, aerobic exercise, and sleep will do for me in the right combination. I'm still figuring that exact mix out, but I'm very proud of sustaining more good habits than bad through this period. It was important to launch this program positively and successfully, and to develop the way of living that will keep me alive and viable into my old age.

Not to sound too serious about this, but I've lived in a state of ill physical fitness and health (for obesity is a disease) for all of my adult life. I don't want to rely on pills, joint replacement, and home health aides to be able to survive into my retirement years, to say nothing of enjoying them. I've already wound the odometer forward on my joints and cardiovascular system by retaining so much weight for so long. The plan is not merely to arrest that degeneration, but to reverse it as much as possible.

Staying flexible in the very short term, but on programs that carry one from week to week, seems to be working. Some of the short-term choices I've made have illustrated how much I've moved away from my older ways of eating and living: Chik-Fil-A and Johnny Rockets can safely be considered emergency dining choices in the future, especially on weekdays. But if I am invited out to a cookout over the weekend, or to my parents' for dinner one weeknight, I can exercise control over the preceding day and eat wisely when I do arrive there. Given, of course, that I've met my daily committment to the gym schedule. Flexibility and accountability.

Regarding what I eat, I have hit a wall or two. I'm sick of one of my lunch choices, and I'm trying to get more veggies into my evening mix for fiber, nutrition, and fullness. I'll need to find ways to change things up, both there and at the gym, to keep things from becoming stale. Because no matter how close to my year's goal of a 30-lb. deficit, I'm going to have to live like this for the rest of my days. I've noticed that if I do slip back into some of the older ways, like the fast food I've mentioned, I regain the weight quickly. These aren't merely aspects of my life that are being put on hold. They must be gone forever. What indulgences I accept, at least for the short term, will be on weekends, amid otherwise healthful eating patterns and exercise, must be the rare exception. So I need to find variety among the good meals I eat during the mass of the week.

As I said, this is week to week, and here's what I did with last week's goals:

• 8 hours sleep/night
  
• 8/5: Waist measure
  
• More veggies in afternoon and with dinner
  
• Portion control: 1900 calories, 40/40/30 nutrients [protein/carbs/fat]
  
• Solid gym attendance

8 hours sleep/night: I was about 50/50 here. Note that this applies to weekends as well, as I've been trying to vist the gym earlier on weekend days, preferably at the open. The Sunday time may shift as the regular football season begins, because I like to watch the 1:00 game from the back of some aerobic device. But I can still do better on this goal.

Waist measurement: Dropped ¾" since the previous Monday. Unlike my weight, I'm not setting goals here; it's a complementary datum that will help me understand whether the number on the scale represents actual fat loss.

Veggies and portion control: Made some errors last week: frozen pizza and nachos for two dinners, mall food for a third. Easy to eliminate if I cue up good food earlier; I didn't have any plans by the end of those two particular days, so older habits crept in and I reached for something easier. There are easy choices that are a lot more healthful if I take some time, either over the weekends or over a little extra time each night, to prepare something that will do me some good. I'm out of chili now, so I need to make a new batch of that, which will also help make some of my lunches far better.

Solid gym attendance: Six out of seven days over the past week, including all four weight-training days. Monday was the loser again. This time, if a late dinner at the parents' leads to an even later bedtime, I'll wake up an hour later, make a cardio visit to the gym, maybe reward myself with a steam, and then do the two-day lifting split on Tuesday and Wednesday instead of Monday and Tuesday. Had I done this last and the previous Monday, I think I'd be juuuuust a little thinner. We'll see.

I'm going to retain this same set of goals, and make my weight-loss target an even 224, down one half-pound. For the past few weeks, I've overshot the goal, but I believe this has been due to poor protein and sleep follow-up reversing some of my weightlifting progress. I've got big expectations for this week, as it'll be the last complete week in New Jersey before I spend two-plus days in Central City for work. Between the indigenous cuisine, and the fun of spending a few hours in airports, I need to charge into that trip in top form.