Friends

• 18:57 RT @beer47: A London restaurant unveils the world's most expensive bottle of beer: su.pr/2GnUF8
• 20:57 Ayup. bit.ly/36Iqk6
• 07:50 My old @xtracycle (now Sarah's) is featured on their website. bit.ly/3fqHZH - photo at top.

I ended up with a little more than 500 words yesterday, with about 130 before midnight, and the rest before 1am. I went to bed at around 1am, watched a little bit of a very old (2000-ish) David Caruso movie (which, I'll admit, I didn't try very hard to follow the plot of-- it was more 'aww, look, he wore sunglasses in this movie! How cute! zzzz'), and then crashed out. I'm wickedly sore today, and while I'd planned on going to the write-in, I have pretty much decided that I'm going to chill at home and do what writing I can here. I want to hit 2500 today, so I can keep my 2000-word lead on the 'you should have this many words written so far' recommendations.

So, meme, for which I was tagged by robinskij:

FIRST: If you've been tagged, you must write your answers in your own LJ and replace any question that you dislike with a new, original question.
SECOND: Tag eight sexy people. Don't refuse to do that like a pansy.

I like pansies. And I honestly haven't been keeping up with LJ well enough to know who hasn't done it, hate tagging people who've already been tagged, and I have too may friends who are also doing NaNo and thus probably won't even read this if I tagged them. *g*

Who sleeps in bed next to you?
C, and usually Koga and Kisuke sleep on the bed with us. Occasionally Ichigo will sleep on the bed, too.

What did you last eat?
Pancakes, scrambled eggs, and a sausage patty.

What kind of books do you read?
I'm a reading slut. I read everything, from fluffy romance novels to popular fiction a la Dan Brown, to hardcore sex-filled paranormal romance a la Keri Arthur, to fantasy staples like Mercedes Lackey, to things that push my boundaries-- things I don't generally "like:" westerns, hardcore sci-fi (with a lot of science). I also read a lot of non-fiction. I'm currently reading a book by Paul Ekman, and two books I saw on Stephen Colbert (Low Impact Man and the Year of Living Biblically).

If you could be anywhere right now, where would it be?
Atlanta, visiting davidmadly

When is your birthday?
It just passed. November 13th. And thank you all again for the lovely birthday wishes! :D

Name one odd item within five feet of you.
A tiny black cast-iron cauldron... or the stuffed beanie-baby wolf.

What's your current fandom / obsession / addiction?
Lie to Me

What did you really want to do today that you didn't?
I haven't accomplished my writing goal yet... but there's plenty of day left.

What's your favorite holiday?
Halloween

What websites do you always visit when you go online?
Google (for research), gmail, livejournal, facebook, City of Heroes forums, Windy City Gridiron, Sports Illustrated, Bloodhorse, ESPN.com... Oh! Buc'Em blog. Aaaand one other site I'm just not going to mention. But some of y'all know about it. >:)

If you could have any pet, what would it be?
Other than the catmonsters and the dog, I'd like a farm where I could either have a horse or be close enough to share a lease.

What do you want right this minute, off the top of your head?
To know the rest of the plot to my book, and be able to write it better than I am at the moment.

Where is the place you like to return in order to calm down / relax / etc.?
My back porch

What's one thing that terrifies you that nobody else gets?
being buried alive

What color is your cell phone
silver and black, at the moment, but I really want a case for it... in red.

Are there any bits of childhood that you miss?
The healthy body

What is your favorite kind of weather?
Days like yesterday: clear, the sun is warm but there's a cool breeze, and it's not too hot.

What's on your playlist at the moment?
Mostly Amethystium and stuff like that, except that Dave Matthews' Band "Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King" is awesome writing music, and I love that album so much. I could write to DMB all day. And I really need to download the list of artists that I've been putting off going to our subscription site and downloading stuff from, because I have been waiting for Shakira's new album to come out. *twitch* I love her new song. I know, I know. But whew.

Current Mood:

blah

Among the species discovered recently in Papua New Guinea were tiny bear-like creatures, frogs with fangs, fish that grunt, kangaroos that live in trees, and what is probably the world's largest rat (with no fear of humans). Scientists from Britain, the United States, and Papua New Guinea announced the findings in September, among more than 40 new species from a jungle habitat a half-mile deep inside the centuries-dormant Mount Bosavi volcano crater. [The Guardian (London), 9-7-09]

Current Mood:

uncomfortable

• 19:12 My left nipple hurts. I blame T. #
• 19:17 Hanging in my clean apartment for a bit. Then, Men Who Stare at Goats with @darkmane. Whee! #
• 23:52 How 's this for a party theme: Comfort Food & Comfort Boobs--bring your fave comfort food and fave boobs! #afteraglassofwine #

Unfortunately, Leo Grin the diligent researcher still conflicts with Leo Grin the reflexive hack. ( When is he not just an actor? )

Which is damnfreakin hard because it seems plastic is used in packaging every-fucking-thing! 

In the last 24 hours I've had to throw away packaging like: Cereal box inner plastic liner.  File folders wrapped in cellophane.  Curtain rods have styrofoam cushioning and hardware in tiny baggies.  Hamburger on a styrofoam tray in cellophane.   Cellophane around birthday wrapping paper.  Clamshell packaging this, cellophane around that, styrofoam around the other....GRAH!!!!

(flip side is I haven't been able to calm my family's appetite for plastic shopping bags...a low hanging fruit.  :-\ )

Current Mood:

frustrated

So I was going to wait until the 29th to start my one year push to perfect myself in every way, since on November 29th 2010 I will turn 50 years old. But then I said to myself, why wait until the 29th to get rolling- why not start now?

In reality, at this time in my life, things are pretty darn good. We have a nice house, we both make good money, we are both healthy... but I don't want to be "just healthy"... in the back of my head, or perhaps in the front of my head, there is this voice that says I should be the same body-wise that I was in my halcyon days. I define my halcyon days from about age 24 to age 37... I had a near-perfect body, I could go to killer aerobics classes for up to 2 hours at a time without even getting winded... I could still play basketball with younger kids and hold my own.

So what has happened to me as I get to middle age? Well.. I guess I have gotten to middle age. I know my body is not the same as when I was in my 20s and 30s, but that doesn't sink in. I see that my body is different when I look in the mirror... I have gotten thicker over the years... I am not as lithe and slim as I once was. I have more muscle, but that bogs me down at times. And of course I have body image issues from a long time ago... all through high school and college I was skinny, and that image still haunts me... so I went through a period where I killed myself in the gym, got to a size where I could be powerful and still have the athletic prowess I always had... but now, my body doesn't respond like it used to. I'm sure that my metabolism has slowed down... but I think I should now be able to rely more on my brain than on my body to get me where I want to be.

I'm thinking about starting off today with a fast. I just feel the need to shock my body into this new place. Don't get me wrong- I like being big. I like going into Bally's and being the big guy who can flex it up. But a part of me wants to be that step aerobic god again... I went to step class last Tuesday for the first time in maybe 8 months.. and I only did about 30 minutes of an hour class and I was hurting. The muscles you use in a step class are totally different from what I use during my weight lifting... and in the past, I'd say I was 60% aerobics and 40% weight lifting... now I'm around 85% weight lifting and 15% aerobics.

I was talking to a guy at the gym the other day who had hip surgery about 8 months ago... he's in his mid 50s, and he was one of those guys who was in amazing shape, loved to do 2 hour workouts... I asked him why I hadn't seen him at the gym lately, and he told me even though his hip was "OK", he didn't have the fire and passion for the gym that he used to. And part of me feels that way. I've been in the gym 4 or 5 days a week for 20 years... and I've been going exclusively to Ballys for the last 15. WHen I lived in Steubenville, me and my workout posse used to go to Pittsburgh just to take killer aerobic classes, or to several other gyms besides our own just to get a different feel for working out. Perhaps I should look to somewhere else besides Ballys, maybe Ballys is the root of my problems :-)

And I think my workouts have changed over the years because now I go most of the time with Tammy. She likes to get in and out in an hour... I never used to work out like that. I would go maybe 4 times a week max, but I'd do a minimum of a 90 minute workout, sometimes going 2 1/2 hours. But of course then I was single, my family was my workout group... now I'm settled down, we have a house and 2 cats... the responsibility of real life has perhaps made me change who I am over the years.

All that being said, I am going to be more cerebral about my body... not relying on workouts to get me where I need to be. I certainly need to be more organized with my after work time. I hate to be so anal about it, but maybe that's the only way I can do things now.

And so it begins. Cardio only today for my workout, but I'm going to do more stretching from now on... and I really need to get this eating thing together. I think that's my primary short term goal. I'm usually at my best when I don't partake of dairy products and bread. But I think even more than that, pasta is my killer. I LOVE PASTA. I always have and always will. But because I'm not burning calories the way I did 15 years ago, that's just fuel that turns to fat. I am trying to avoid writing down everything I eat, because that is tedious and unless you know the calories and grams of fat from the container, I have to go searching for the numbers. And I don't want to do one of those online charting things- I want to be smart enough to know what goes in my body on my own.

I know I can get back to where I want to be. It's all a matter of willpower. It's all in my head.

My friends and I have left Livejournal alone lately; tumblr and twitter seems to allow us to do all this stuff a lot more easily, at the expense of the wordcount. The luddite in me worries: the biggest fear I have is that the emergent culture of microblogging (where our attention spans have shortened to the point where anything over two paragraphs is answered with 'TL:DR') will ultimately limit thought and expression on a wider scale.

As the invention of the ballpoint pen caused a worldwide decline in the art of penmanship, our new methods of communication could leard to verbal and literary articulacy becoming a dying art, too. Unlike grandpa shaking his fist at mobile phones and pudding pops, I think this is a legitimate concern; the less we can articulate big concepts, the less we can even think about them, and synthesise new ones. As other commenters have said, our TL:DR culture fulfils the same function of 1984's 'newspeak'; a self-imposed Orwellianism.

Though it's easier for humans to communicate now than in any point in history, generally the users of digital social media choose to stifle the exchange of ideas through peer pressure, too: introspection is sneered at as being 'emo', any lengthy discourse is 'TL:DR'. The aforementioned seem to be a right afforded only to those who create a pedestal for themselves, not the online proletariat, the average user- who has as much room to talk as anybody.

I'm as guilty of this as anybody; perhaps even more, since I'm not as full of words as the people I admire- but to me, it seems as if with TL:DR we're rejecting our own evolution, choosing to hide in the sea despite the legs we've been given.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/christmas/soldiercards.asp