That's me today. Every week I seem to swing between "manic" and "depressive" depending on how the most recent weigh-in has gone.
I'm not a person who really needed an enhancement of mood swings anyhow, okay?
Yesterday, in spite of my strenuous efforts to eat really, really well over the weekend, I discovered that I hadn't lost an ounce since my last weigh-in.
Okay, mostly I tried to be good. There was, of course, that incident with the half-pound of shrimp on Saturday, a food and an quantity that are perfectly legal under the diet but which were swimming in an amount of butter that probably constituted a week's allotment of fats.
And then, of course, there was the Cracker Accident of Sunday, 10:20 p.m. That's the one where a full day's allotment of breads stealthily jumped from the cracker box into my mouth when I was thinking about something else. After, I should confess, I'd already eaten my entire daily allotment of breads earlier.
Mostly I was good. Some of the time.
The problem with this diet (Yes, I'm going to go on and on about it so shut up.) is that it's so liquid. Each day, I have to drink 3 quarts of water, three protein supplements (in 6 oz of water each), a cup of consommé, and a cup of skim milk. Pardon the TMI, but I seem to spend most of my life looking for a bathroom any more.
I've now lost a total of 10 pounds. My original goal was to lose 25 but now I'm shooting for 20 and I doubt I'll be able to stick with it until I make that goal.
In addition, as I was telling someone earlier today, I have deep suspicions "stabilization" and "maintenance" programs.
Something tells me that if I don't keep weighing and measuring the food and doing the other stuff, the weight will come back, in spite of their promises to rev up my metabolism to where it was when I was 20.
I mean, I can see cutting back drastically on white flour products (the current "evil" in the diet world) and even portion control on other foods, but just exactly how long do I have to keep buying and drinking supplements? (Not that I'm really complaining about those. I mean, how else could I drink rich, creamy hot chocolate three times a day without gaining weight?)
But will an extra piece of toast forever make the scales jump up drastically the next day? Will I ever be able to just eat again, without counting every bite? Not over-eat, just eat without having to spend so much time thinking about it? I haven't thought this much about food since I was a poverty-stricken twenty year-old melting leftover slices of American cheese over broken pieces of spaghetti and pretending it was macaroni and cheese.
On the positive side, I really do love how my clothes are getting loser and how my face and neck look thinner, there's no denying that. I know I already look better. I really love it a lot. The thighs of these jeans were snug six weeks ago. Today they're loose. This is a good thing.
I just...I just want what I've always wanted. I want to be thin and toned with no effort. Without chowing down on celery sticks and filling up on lettuce twice a day to keep me from going completely mad and eating 3 ounces of chicken at one sitting. (Portion control is still a problem for me.)
I know. Thin people eat that way and that's why they're thin. I just don't think I should have to do it.
Anyhow, now that I've given up potato chips and my roommate has given up chocolate, I strongly suspect that we'd have been losing a pound or so a week even without a diet, okay? We each had a serious habit going. Without that, we'd probably have lost weight anyhow.
Okay, maybe not as fast, probably not a pound a week, but eventually. In a decade or so.
So what am I getting for my investment in this program? The Food N*z*s lecturing me on how an extra cup full of skim milk is going to make me gain weight.
Is this what I have to look forward to forever? Rationing skim milk?
I'd better change the subject before I start blaming the FN's on the weight I've gained over the last fifteen years. (In spite of how bitter I sound, I promise I'm not taking it out on them in person. That would be stupid and unfair. It's not their fault I can go through a bag of potato chips in one sitting.)
So...what else is new?
Well, first I have to take back my rude remarks about John Goodman on West Wing. He was excellent last week. It was a decent episode.
Also, we tried the new Rob Lowe show on Sunday night. It was a bit of a mess. Felt like they introduced about fifty people and ten subplots. Presumably it will mellow out with time but the jury is out on whether or not we'll be turning it on again next week.
We're also still debating Tarzan. Yeah, Mitch Pileggi is going to be one it, and that's a big plus. On the minus side, it's Tarzan and the concept just bores me.
Ditto for Andromeda. Even with Nick Lea appearing, I'm not sure I can watch the show. The last time I tried to watch it it was such a travesty of the original, such a waste of the potential it showed in S1, that I developed a probably incurable hatred for it. Plus which, let's be honest, Kevin Sorbo isn't exactly a major acting talent. Probably not even a minor one. (I haven't seen anyone so wooden since I used to watch Highlander but at least in that show, the plastic-faced 'star' wasn't allowed to destroy the concept.)
On the other hand, Steve Bacic is supposed to be returning to the show, possibly as a regular. I adored him.
I loved everything about Andromeda but Sorbo, but he's one of those people who walks into a scene and kills every nuance and subtlety in sight, plus which he was instrumental in dismantling the original concept to go after the 10 year-old audience, so my dislike of him is a fairly major problem when it comes to watching the show.
Still. Bacic gives me hot flashes, so that has to be taken into consideration. I guess, before I make any other decisions, I should figure out when the show actually airs these days and one what channel.
Anyhow. That's all I have to say today.
Posted by AnneZook at 01:03 PMThis morning, the scale had some very good news for me, in spite of last night's blow-out at Black-Eyed Pea.
That's become one of my favorite restaurants. It's one of the only places where I can order two or three of the vegetables I'm allowed to eat unlimited amounts of, so I get a "full" meal. The key to this diet is portion control, but I'm having a little difficulty with that concept.
I don't like regular restaurants. They advertise, "mixed vegetables" with a lot of their entrees and it's always the same ghastly mixture of zucchini, peppers, and onions. Sometimes, just to be wild and crazy they throw in a couple of pieces of carrot or broccoli.
It works, though. The diet, I mean. That's the part to remember. I'm averaging 2 pounds a week and if I could just stop eating a couple of handfuls of crackers each evening, I'd be losing even more. I'm going to start cutting back on the starches today. If I can kick my weight loss up to 3 pounds a week, I'll only have to suffer um endure well, go through, three more weeks of the plan before I reach my goal. (Or at least close enough to satisfy me.)
In related news, when my roommate, the psychopath person who got me started on this diet, came home from work last night, I told her kindly (well, sort of) but firmly (very) that she was going to have to throw away the outfit she was wearing. It was hugely baggy. She's losing more weight than I am. She doesn't share my addiction to the crackers, you see.
In other news, my hair hasn't been quite as Annette Funicello for the past couple of days, which is a relief. I was starting to feel naked, walking around without a guy on a surfboard next to me. (Note: If anyone is thinking of getting me a guy on a surfboard for my birthday, please don't make it Frankie Avalon, okay? Something a bit more studly would be appreciated.)
On the other hand, I do have to admit that those three AF days were notable for the number of double-takes and flirtatious smiles they garnered from men. Apparently that heavily lacquered, navel-covered beach blanket babe had a sex appeal I never suspected.
Men are weird, aren't they?
And, speaking of men, is mine the last household in the fandom universe where Queer Eye for the Straight Guy isn't playing? I dunno. The concept just didn't attract me when I first heard about it and in spite of the buzz around it since the show debuted, I haven't regretted the decision. Everyone's talking about it. It's Changing Rooms meets Style. Big deal.
The season opener of West Wing approaches. The tension mounts. Will Bartlett return to the Oval Office? (Yes, until the show gets cancelled.) Will Zoe be killed? (No, because then Bartlett wouldn't return to the Oval Office.) But! How much will it suck? Stay tuned.
Over the summer I've become quite inexplicably attached to Will and Grace. That's going to cause problems since it conflicts with my regular Thursday night viewing of CSI. Thanks to the wonders of advanced technology, I no longer have the ability to view one channel and tape another, so I'll have to make a decision.
I don't have anything important to say today, in case you can't tell.
The ConFroH have been rather quiet the last couple of days. Feisty Frieda still isn't speaking to me and as you can imagine, I'm losing a lot of sleep over it. The Terminatrix is getting past it, but one of her better qualities is that she doesn't hold a grudge. Alvin is sick to death of both of them and every time the Terminatrix called yesterday, he demanded to know what she was bitching about this time. Since she was, in fact, perfectly civil, I was unable (and, honestly, unwilling) to feed his ire.
At the moment I'm supposed to be writing text for a web page to explain one of the primary benefits of our product, but most of my brain is wondering why we spent three months beating these concepts into the heads of the ConFroH if it wasn't so that they, the people we hired for marketing expertise, could write this stuff?
Hang on, I tell myself. Three more days, then the pressure will be off. Alvin and the Terminatrix will be out of town for three days, I don't expect to hear from Feisty Frieda, and life will be good.
Posted by AnneZook at 12:02 PMWell, the upshot of yesterday's meeting, to make a long story short, is that the Consultants From Hell came in here breathing fire and fury about how badly we were treating them and how it's none of our concern how they run their business. And then they bitched Alvin out for taking the print job to a company that would do it right, rather than letting them "fix" it by taking it back to the same place that wasn't able to offer what we wanted in the first place.
Oh, and they also both made it clear, yesterday and in a phone call today, that I owe both of them big time and that I'd better remember that and in the meantime, they're both pissed off at me.
Ah well. That's two names I can strike from my Christmas card list. A clear 74 cents in savings on postage alone.
I may wind up having to strike off Alvin, too. He got a little pissy with me this morning when he wanted to do a post-mortem on yesterday's meeting and I refused to join him in ragging on the ConFroH. At this point, he clearly thinks it's an "us against them" situation and that I'm being one of "them."
The heck with them all. I am so over working with children. I blame the ConFroH mostly, because they're taking everything personally and getting all emotional and failing to act professionally and all of the other things that women are stereotyped as doing in business. But I blame Alvin a little. At least, today I do, now that I have the feeling I'm becoming a ping-pong ball between the three of them.
On the bright side, I've started having panic attacks again. If they keep up, I can go back to the doctor and get the little, pink pills and I won't care about anything any more.
Anyhow.
I got my hair cut on Friday. Rather dramatically. I took off about six inches. It's a nice change. (I was more enthusiastic about it before the Weekend From Hell followed by the Monday From Hell.)
(Hell figures largely in my life right now.)
On the other hand, last night was weigh-in night, and I lost another pound (since last Thursday), so it looks like all of that celery and tuna fish are paying off! Hooray! Only ten pounds to go!
But I've decided to hold off on dissing the appalling plan they have to add a right-wing perspective to West Wing until after I've seen a few episodes. I mean, it's already bound to suck to a certain extent, what with being taken over by someone who came to fame writing Law and Order or whatever show that guy used to write. (Well, maybe it's not guaranteed to suck, but I'm in a pretty bad mood today and I still think John Goodman was an appalling piece of misplaced stunt casting although I do know people who rave about his acting ability so I could be wrong but I don't care at the moment.)
What else?
I've lost 10 pounds in the last five weeks, which is pretty darned good. Check.
I chopped off 75 percent of my hair and now bear an appalling resemblance to Annette Funicello. Check.
West Wing is gonna suck and I'm not happy about it. Check.
The next person who offers to help me find a job is going to get punched in the nose. Check.
Mitch Pileggi is going to be on the new Tarzan show (as the bad guy) and not even that is enough to really convince me to watch it. (Well, I hadn't discussed that before, but I don't see there's much to add to it.)
Much to my dismay and irritation, Nick Lea has been cast with a recurring role in that piece o'sloppy crap, Andromeda so now I have to decide whether or not to start watching it again but, again, I don't think I have much else to add to that sentiment.
I'm in a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad mood.
Posted by AnneZook at 03:11 PMFrom hell, I tell you. We have hired the consultants FROM HELL.
For those of the two of you unfamiliar with the background, let me set the scene.
For eight years I worked for the Boss From Hell, the Terminatrix, a disorganized, chaotic maniac whose only saving graces were that, (1) she produced sales, and (2) she honestly had no idea how abusive she was and would have been shocked to the soles of her feet had any of us been able to actually get her to see her behavior objectively.
I liked her, honestly, on a personal level. We always enjoyed having dinner or whatever. It's just that she created the most dysfunctional work environment I've ever seen, and I've seen a few. Seventy people in the building and some days it took almost every single one of them to keep her from coming apart at the seams.
Another saving grace of that job situation was Feisty Frieda (not her real name). Someone I worked with well, who was easy to get along with, good at her job, understanding, and one of only about four people in the world able to get in the Terminatrix's face and make her back down.
So, eventually I quit. (Okay, I quit at least eight times, once for each year I worked there, but finally, after the Terminatrix had moved on herself, via selling the company and raking in a few million dollars for her stocks, I managed to make it stick.)
Anyhoo. I took a six month sabbatical to regain my sanity, then started job hunting. Feisty Frieda, with whom I'd stayed in touch via having lunch about once a month, came forward and announced there was a perfect job for me at the company she'd moved on to, and with the nicest, kindest, least-chaotic boss in the world. All of which proved to be true, okay?
I don't blame Feisty Frieda that the company, a start-up, closed almost exactly a year later. All of the management were nice guys. Mostly too nice to survive in the cutthroat world of start-ups. Also, they'd made the mistake of building the core of the company around a really innovative technology idea and when the Investors realized what they had on their hands, they sold the company and recouped their investment, plus a healthy profit.
Anyhow, Feisty Frieda got me a job when I really, really needed one, and I love her double just for that.
This job? Guess who recommended me for this one? The Terminatrix herself. Praised me to the skies until Alvin had little choice but to hire me. (Heck, if I'd heard her glowing review, I'd have hired me, and I know better.)
So, the two women with whom I worked (and learned much) for eight years, each of whom has been instrumental in getting me another job since that time, get together, form a company to provide marketing and sales assistance to small companies. My new firm is one of their two clients.
And they're screwing up right and left.
Not content with refusing to treat me like a client, instead of like the gofer she bossed around for 8 years, the Terminatrix lays down the law to Alvin right and left, and frequently refuses to do things the way he wants things done.
Feisty Frieda is almost as bad. She treats me fine, but for some reason, she's really rude to Alvin, who is a nice, easy-going kind of guy but who can be pushed too far.
They both get pissy about being asked to re-write marketing material when it's inaccurate or just not well done. When we re-write it ourselves, to make it, you know, actually talk about the products we're selling, they get mad and complain about the work we create for them.
Neither of them listened to our version of what we wanted the new website (still under construction) to look like or what we wanted to say on it. We finally gave up and decided we could re-write the text ourselves at any time, so we'd just do that once they were out of the way.
Is this any way to treat a client? I don't think so.
The latest is the Print Job From Hell where we received a pink, orange, and black, pixilated vinyl banner with grommets to mount it on free-standing poles or maybe hang it from street lights at a craft fair when we wanted a black and red, silk-screened, matte plastic banner with velcro on the back to stick it to a trade-show booth. I won't even get into wondering why in the hell one of the letters in the middle of a line is clearly in a different typeface and about ten points smaller than any other letter.
Nor will I rant and rave about how she tried to blame it all on me, when my only contribution to the project was agreeing to pick the completed job up from Kinkos so she could leave town for a long weekend. (I did not, actually, pick up the job because I had a hair appointment. Alvin did. I did, however, spend the entire weekend on the phone between him and the actual designer, trying to figure out how to fix the mess.)
I had more bile to share, but they should be here momentarily (for a meeting that Alvin asked them to show up for at 11:00 this morning) and I want to get this posted.
Maybe tomorrow I'll have time to do a follow-up and even write about some important things, like my diet, my new haircut, and my opinion of the direction West Wing is going to take this year.
Posted by AnneZook at 03:28 PMWell, yesterday's weigh-in was...uneventful. I didn't lose any weight, but I didn't gain any, either, and that's probably all to the good considering the dietary sins I committed on Tuesday.
With a family birthday to celebrate this weekend so I'm just bracing myself for the fact that Sunday and Monday both are going to be a total loss as far as weight loss. I mean, no loss. I mean...well, you know what I mean.
Monday we've both taken the day off and we're taking a bus up to Blackhawk to immerse ourselves in the wild and wooly excitement of low-stakes gambling. I hope they've got the same nickel machines we found in Reno. I have to say, being the shallow type, that it adds some thing to dropping your nickels in if you know that a big enough win means the little guy on the display is going to do a strip-tease for you.
Other than that...I'm working. Still. Some more. Bleah. As a refreshing change from writing procedures for docs to use to evaluate conditions I don't precisely understand, I'm writing information sheets about our programs for such procedures. I've gone from winging it, to winging it about winging it.
I've been loving seeing the West Wing Season one episodes on Bravo, but then two days ago I discovered that they're bringing S1 out on DVD in late November, and now I'm wondering why I'm still bothering to tape these every night?
(Also I'm wondering if Bravo is annoyed that the money they paid to repeat these is going to be hard to recoup since die-hard fans will buy the DVDs, but I don't care so much about that because my opinion of Bravo went drastically downhill when they started advertising that, "reality behind the reality tv" series. I used to think of them as a station that offered slightly more intelligent, edgier programming. Cashing in on the mindless idiocy of "reality" television doesn't qualify as intelligent. Okay, so they have the same need for ratings as any other station, but I reserve the right to be bitter.)
And, speaking of idiots and fandom (Well, we were. Sort of, anyhow.) it occurs to me that the internet might actually succeed in killing fandom or at least driving it back underground. Now that the babbling idiots and sock puppets have taken over and are making jackasses out of themselves in every public way and forum they can discover, maybe it's time for the real fans to go back off-line? We could go back to mailing our stories to each other, writing letter-zines, and throwing the occasional low-profile cons for face-to-face interaction. Whaddya think?
(I'm finding writing this blog to an audience of zero pretty entertaining.)
Posted by AnneZook at 03:23 PMIt's been a while since I posted. Heck, I'd almost forgotten about this blog until I spotted it in my bookmarks at home over the weekend.
So, what's new?
It's been a busy summer. Not, unfortunately, busy with "summer things" but busy work-wise. As friends can attest, I've had little time to spare even for e-mailing over the last couple of months as I buckle down and try to do my fair share to get this company off the ground and self-sufficient. We've got 3-1/2 months left to start supporting ourselves or I'm back on the unemployment line with several million other people who have been enjoying the fallout from the economy's "jobless recovery."
Other than that, I've gone on a diet, an occasion mostly notable for it being the first time in a decade I've actually taken serious action to lose weight. For the past couple of years I've been using the "think system" of dieting. I thought about it quite a lot. Unfortunately, no weight loss resulted.
Anyhow, at a semi-annual doctor's office visit in late July, I was stunned by the news of a 5 pound weight gain. Stunned. Shocked. Nauseated. 5 pounds? In five months? That did it. I was determined to take off 25 pounds by February (when I'll have my next physical).
It was, I suddenly realized, the single current goal of my existence to get back to the same weight that used to make me avert my eyes when I passed a mirror.
My standards have fallen considerably in the last 20 years.
By dint of much effort, I managed to take off two pounds but I could feel them hovering there in the wings, waiting to pounce back on my butt the second I relaxed my vigilance for a moment so when my roommate discovered this diet, and lost over three pounds in her first week, I whipped out my checkbook and signed myself up.
Owing to a number of factors, mostly involved with my own reluctance to actually follow the prescribed diet, my weight loss was confined to a dispiriting 1/4 pound or 1/2 pound per weigh-in. Last week, I finally got serious about it and between Thursday and yesterday (Monday), I took off three whole pounds! That brings my total weight loss to nine pounds. 16 to go and for the first time, I actually think I'm going to make it.
That's what this blog entry is about. Me celebrating the unusual occurrence of the scale actually moving down each time I step on it.
I mean, it was time I lost weight. I can tell, because when I informed friends and co-workers that I intended to lose 25 pounds, not one, single person consoled me with, "oh, you don't need to lose that much." (I'm just saying, okay? As far as I'm concerned, a friend owes it to you to insist that you need to lose less weight than you think you do. If any of you guys go on a diet, expect me to be callous and insensitive in return, okay?)
I have one of those brains that's not convinced of the value of anything that doesn't take time and cost money. I weigh-in twice a week, a nuisance since it takes at least 45 minutes to make the drive from my office, and the protein supplements (which are, by the way, delicious) cost me around $40 a week. To offset that, there's all the money I'm saving on potato chips and chocolate bars, so my total food bill really isn't much different than it was before. I'm also having to eat fish, a substance I haven't touched since I got food poisoning from it in the late 70s, but that's a different subject.
They swear that by the time I finish, they'll have my metabolism revved back up to where it was when I was 25. I was pretty stoned when I was 25, so I don't remember much about it, but I do know I drank a lot of beer and didn't get fat, so maybe that will be a good thing.
As long as they rev my butt down, I don't care that much. I'm learning to accept that I can't eat the way I did when I was 20. I'm bitter, but I'm learning to accept that I'm getting older not exactly a teenager.
Still, it's working so I'm not complaining. (Well, yeah, I am, but I complain about everything.)
I think about my butt every time I reach for the refrigerator door these days. Not that that makes a difference or anything, but I spent years working on the "think system" and I'm not really willing to give up on it entirely.
I have little to say about fandom. My apologies to anyone who might have stopped by on the off chance that I had something to share that might be of interest to the public.
I understand there's the usual kerfuffle about the demise of fandom but as you all know, I gave up on it quite a while back. Rape fantasies written by people who have never had sex and have only the sketchiest idea of the mechanics, much less the emotions of the act. Stories written by people who have seen one episode of a show, or just the previews, or even who have never seen it but who liked the fanfic someone else wrote. S&M stories written by people who would file a lawsuit if they received a harsh look from a partner. Interminable WIP written by people unable to string together a coherent e-mail, much less to construct the kind of detailed plot required to carry 200,000 words. (Such a decision can only be confirmed by the revelation, shared with me recently, that someone actually wrote a story where HP had sexual relations with a snake while being unaware that said reptile was Snape's animagus form. Seriously, people. Put down the keyboard and get some therapy, okay?)
Some have recently expressed surprise to me that there's a move afoot to suppress, even abolish slash. Since there's been a body of fans who have wanted this same thing since the year dot, I am unable to share their surprise.
The same people who will write a story postulating that the male lead of a series would willingly rape his female co-star and that she would subsequently realize that she loved him and live happily ever after with him in a vine-covered cottage find slash to be an inappropriate and distasteful expression of human love and sensuality.
The stupid and narrow-minded are always with us. (If for no other reason than as an object lesson and a warning of what we might become if we don't nurture a spirit of acceptance of our differences, which is clearly something I have a bit of difficulty with.)
Others have marveled that some long-time (relatively speaking) slashers are speaking out about their determination to have no more to do with the genre. I attribute a lot of this to 'stories' like the one cited above.
Slashers were always the ones who cared most deeply about the characters. It was the slash lists where you got the detailed discussions of motivation and the debates about the conflicts of opposing personalities. It seems only natural to me that it's the slashers, then, who are most deeply wounded by the puerile thing that slash fandom has become and who are, in consequence, speaking out the loudest about their determination to eliminate it from their lives.
No doubt I could say more, I never run out of opinions, but the truth is that I'm no less pressed at work today than I have been for the last eight weeks, so I'll stop for the moment.
Y'all have a nice day.
Posted by AnneZook at 11:10 AM