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Respect for Richard Simmons.

July 25th, 2005

Starting weight: 230 lbs
Target weight: 185 lbs
Current weight: 220 lbs
De-big-ulation process: 22% complete

I’m motivated by success — if I feel like I’m doing a good job at something, I like to devote more effort to it to see if I can do an even better job. If I’m doing a really good job at something, I try really hard to see if I can do that thing the BEST THAT IT’S EVER BEEN DONE IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD. The converse of this is that I handle setbacks really poorly, so I’m not about to start recording my own series of self-help CDs.

Luckily for me and my motivational style, the weight loss has been going quickly, even though I haven’t been able to run a tithe of the times that I’d like to. My self-appointed (and very much appreciated) coach Will Ronco has examined my workout log and helpfully suggested that I run more, though with my current schedule I’m despairing of success at that, and trying to think of solutions: If each Amtrak car is 90 feet long, times a 12-car train, eight round-trips jogging up and down the center aisle would be a 5K. But think of the bruises from newspaper readers’ elbows.

I promise I’m not starving myself: yesterday I had a burger on the grill for lunch and some salmon salad that Kate made for dinner. I’ve cut out a lot of the ancillary calories during the day: for the last year, I’ve had a slice of pepperoni pizza and a slice of hawaiian pizza for lunch, then as a snack going home a bag of doritos, etc. Oh, and one of those big cafe muffins for breakfast. Which if I entered into WeightWatchers now, the points values would roll over the meter like a seventies gas pump.

For no good reason, I tried the FitDay software last week. The best I can describe it is like Quicken for your food and activities, with a nice, streamlined interface and a real depth of reporting (my “overview” screen is above.) I think I’ll go back to the WeightWatchers web interface for two reasons, though: FitDay’s database of food isn’t quite as deep as WeightWatchers, and it’s a pain in the ass to have to save your wasabi pea wrapper and type in all the info from the food label. Also, I think it’s just a case of too much information. While it’s good to be able to know what percentage of my calories are coming from carbs, and whether or not I’m getting enough niacin to complete my RDA, I’ve got bigger, fatter fish to fry. WeightWatchers does a good job of hiding the complexity.

I’m boring myself (and, probably, you) with this post, so I will now tell a true Richard Simmons story. At age seventeen, I worked at a marketing company in Malvern, Pennsylvania that was one of the pioneers of the infomercial. They sold a countertop water filter, a hands-free phone, and most of all they had filmed “Sweatin’ to the Oldies” as a part of Richard Simmons’ “Deal-a-Meal” package. I worked in the customer service office, opening mail and handling returns. Many of the letters were addressed directly to Richard. Most were normal customer-service stuff, but some were raw outpourings of misery: “Richard, help! I’m so fat I can’t use an escalator!” read one. “Richard, I’m miserable! I can’t fit through the door!” read another. How do you react to that at age seventeen? You laugh, nervously. “Hey, here’s one from someone who can’t use an escalator! Er, ha ha ha! What should I do with it?”

Customer Service manager: “Oh, those? Those go in the ‘Richard’ box.”
Me: “Okay, and what happens then? Do they get thrown away, or something?”
Manager: “No, Richard reads them.”
Me: “…”
Manager: “And he answers them. Every month, Richard picks a letter out of the ‘Richard’ box, and he calls that person every month. For TWO YEARS.”

That was just a showstopper. Far from being a ridiculous joke, Richard Simmons turns out to be, well, a ridiculous AND COMPLETELY GENUINE PERSON. When he was visiting from California, he’d run up and down the halls singing (he really did wear those Dolphin track shorts all the time.) He was out and completely up-front about it, too, though, though he’d tease you mercilessly if he detected that you weren’t comfortable: when driven to the airport by Sweatin’ to the Oldies director Ed Shipley, he fell to the carpet and grabbed Ed’s feet, sobbing hysterically “Don’t LEAVE me, Ed! Don’t LEAVE me!” This just to embarass Ed, who was an ex-Navy pilot and fairly uptight about that sort of thing.

Richard’s energy, fearlessness, and generosity with his time was really inspirational, and made me feel guilty about spending clocked-in customer service hours making eight-hose hookahs out of water filter parts. Here’s to you, Richard! May your ‘fro grow ever larger!

PS. That wasn’t the last time that Richard made a scene in an airport; in 2004, he slapped a steel-cage-wrestling Harley salesman for being snide (the case was later dismissed.) Go get ’em, Richard!
I wasn’t expecting to rant so hard about this.

July 24th, 2005

My cousin Max Alexander wrote a response to this op-ed piece in the NY Times.

The original piece starts with an accurate, though obvious, observation — people who shop in growers’ markets tend to be pompous, rich, self-righteous, and vicariously entertaining. One trip to the West Chester Grower’s market will give you a month’s dose of (simultaneously) patchouli, spandex, and entitlement. Man, no wonder the Amish growers on the other side of the table look like they’re trying hard not to laugh the whole time.

As goofy as the honky devil crackers that frequent the grower’s market might be, and as nerdy as their elevation of handcrafted raspberries is, the author of the op-ed piece then tries to build a case that low-end supermarkets, with their “antiseptic but nonjudgmental” aisles, are somehow better, representative of (as Max says) “Middle class thrift.”

WTF? Look, as any hippie can tell you, the gas burned to deliver produce from the four corners of the earth is one of the things future generations will look back at in amazement, like we do about the days of uncontrolled ocean dumping, or snake-thumping day, or whatever. I’d like to know what percentage of the oil America needs is used to power Sysco trucks — the vast distribution network that provides the feeling that south american grapes are a kind of a ubiquitous, omnipresent resource. Ye gods, American distribution networks are right up there with the East India Company in terms of a national presence with global impact. I don’t mean to suggest that Sysco is evil, only that the American middle-class supermarket shelf is a kind of analogue to the magazine retoucher’s product.

Those “antiseptic” aisles are running with blood, man. Blood!

Okay, now I have to go get a Sysco graham cracker from the cupboard.
Bragging, blogging, dieting, and determination

July 18th, 2005

Starting weight: 230 lbs
Goal weight: 185 lbs
Currently: 223 lbs
De-big-ulation: 16% complete

I’ve been doing pretty well on the Weight Watchers points — I use the online tool to track what I eat, which is the most valuable part for me. I would probably do just as well if I wrote everything down in a book using a pencil, but I wouldn’t actually *do* that, so it’s moot. I had ambitions to keep a journal (a diary journal, that is, not a weight-loss journal) since I was eight years old, but it wasn’t until the Internet came along that I actually started to write something regularly. Mark Twain talks about this in The Innocents Abroad, describing the writing saloon in the steamer Quaker City on the first few days of their trip, when everybody was writing ten pages a day:

Alas! that journals so
voluminously begun should come to so lame and impotent a conclusion as most of them did! I doubt if there is a single pilgrim of all that host but can show a hundred fair pages of journal concerning the first twenty days’ voyaging in the Quaker City, and I am morally certain that not ten of the party can show twenty pages of journal for the succeeding twenty thousand miles of voyaging! At certain periods it becomes the dearest ambition of a man to keep a faithful record of his performances in a book; and he dashes at this work with an enthusiasm that imposes on him the notion that keeping a journal is the veriest pastime in the world, and the pleasantest. But if he only lives twenty-one days, he will find out that only those rare natures that are made up of pluck, endurance, devotion to duty for duty’s sake, and invincible determination may hope to venture upon so tremendous an enterprise as the keeping of a journal and not sustain a shameful defeat.

Twain was writing with his tongue in cheek, since the reader knows that he, Twain, wrote half of the book in the two weeks following the end of the journey from sketchy memories. If Twain had the ability to brag and tell lies and get read on a daily basis, like bloggers do, I’m sure he would have considered the problem solved. (He liked to show off his prodigious speed on the typewriter, a new invention, but only on the single phrase he had practiced over and over: “the boy stood on the burning deck.” This, of course, is by his own cheerful admission.)

Anyhow, the ability to write regularly about my delardassification progress is helping immensely. Weight Watchers is warning me about the fact that I’m losing more than two pounds a week, but I’m not starving myself, promise. If WW offered outside links, I’d show you my food intake. I’m managing to run a fair amount — yesterday, when we arrived home, I found the second jog stroller waiting in a huge box. I assembled it and took it out for a spin, which Lydia quite likes. Though with the humidity, going for a run is like wrestling with a warm, wet, dishrag.

My plan is to stick to the Weight Watchers points plan as much as I can, and run 3-4 times this week, taking it easy and not worrying at all about my pace, which is glacial. Once I get ten workouts under my belt, I’ll start thinking about setting a target pace, or doing one of the Runners-World approved regimes, like pushing one minute out of five for a week, then pushing two minutes out of five, etc. Wish me luck! Encouragement gratefully accepted! Here’s a link to my workout log, so that those of my friends who are superhuman triatheletes can give me helpful tips: “I suggest you should run more often! For longer distances! Oh, and faster!” (As Will points out, this advice is best delivered through a megaphone, with a thick accent.)

PS: Apparently my great-grandmother Anna Thomas did have a nature made up of “pluck, endurance, devotion to duty for duty’s sake, and invincible determination”, since she was able to keep, and complete, a grand tour journal. It’s possible that she wrote it all in a hurry on the trip home, of course, switching pens after each entry. Both approaches have precedent in my family.
What I did on my summer vacation

July 18th, 2005

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Originally uploaded by tikaro.

We’re back. Pennsylvania is an odd analogue of Trinity, right now: all the mist, twice the heat, but no fog horn.

While we were up there, we also visited the geocache we placed on our honeymoon.

On Monday, when champion babysitter Afton watched Lydia, we put on orange survival suits (like being mugged by a marshmallow), and climbed into a zodiac to go whale watching. We saw a lot of them. Lydia had the time of her life, too, and made lots of friends.

Kate had worked really hard before we left to plan meals, with the result that we actually had an organized, restful, and well-fed vacation, and only ate out when we wanted to. It’s funny: if you read “my mom planned vacations like an amphibious assault”, you don’t think twice about it, but you don’t think (or read much) about the process of a young mom LEARNING to plan vacations like an amphibious assault.
In Newfoundland

July 14th, 2005

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Originally uploaded by tikaro.

We’re in Trinity, Newfoundland on vacation. Lydia is having the time of her life — riding around in the backpack, making new friends, and laughing at the ocean: “a pool! a pool!”

There are many whales here, unlike previous times when we’ve come up too late in the year for them. There are also rocks in abundance, plenty of mist, and nice c-o-o-o-ol weather. Also, drawers full of knitwear in the house.

So Kate grabbed a Kaffe Fasset jacket, I put on an ascot, and we went and had ourselves a fake Rowan shoot. On account of the rocks and mist, you see.

She didn’t want to seem conceited, so she didn’t include some of the dishier photos of her, but I have no such scruples.
Gonna fly now! Flying high now!

July 7th, 2005

Starting weight: 230 lbs
Goal weight: 185 lbs
Currently: 227 lbs
De-fatassification: 6.7% complete
So this morning, I got up, put Lydia in the baby stroller, and strapped on a constellation of electronic devices: My FS-1 Fitness Speedometer, a radio-linked foot pod accelerometer, a radio-linked heart rate monitor strap, and a Garmin eTrex Legend GPS receiver. Hey, any excuse to pretend I’m Ivan Drago.

A very slow 50 minutes later (30 minutes jogging, 20 minutes walking), Google Earth had a nice picture of my course, and the bad news that my watch is being outrageously optimistic about my distance (I have to recalibrate it from actual-runner mode to shuffling-newbie mode.) My heart rate (in red) was not in imminent-death territory, and my pace (in blue) was the part where the watch was telling me big white lies. 10 minutes, my ass. My 15-minute-mile ass.

Due to an eBay accident, I now own two Baby Jogger strollers — the one given to me by our very nice neighbors whose kids have outgrown it, and the one that I accidentally won for twenty bucks in Michigan because I didn’t read the “local pickup only” part. So the Michigan one is getting shipped after all (actually, not a bad deal even with the shipping) and I have the choice whether to give back the donated stroller (rude and unnecessary), re-sell the Michigan stroller, or possibly create some sort of Voltron Jogging Stroller Zord. Now that would be a montage. Honey, where’s my welding mask and my montage music?
Are you “fed up” with seeing the huskies walk off with the best of everything?

July 5th, 2005

So begins the famous Charles Atlas comic-book pitch: “The INSULT that made a MAN out of “Mac.” Which is kind of funny, since as a husky, well… I have very little to complain about in life, but my weight bothers me. It bothers me a lot.

Now, this is not a plea for reassurance: I don’t have terrible self-esteem, I’m luckier in love than I had ever hoped to be, and being a daddy has realigned my priorities so that I really don’t mind chasing a toddler around a swimming pool at an extended family barbecue, all pale and love-handle-y. I’m aware that I’ve got other things going for me: at a trial therapy session five years ago or so, the psychologist listened to my worries and fretting and summed up with “well, I don’t think you need to be so worried. You’re young, you’re intelligent, you have [long pause] …a fullll head of hair…” (That was my first and last session there.)

But, to be blunt, I don’t like looking at pictures of myself. Which is why I keep a stock of pictures around that are outdated, obfuscated or not photographs at all. And I have a habit of hiding behind the baby, which nobody minds, really, but I’m tired of averting my eyes from the bathroom mirror when I get out of the shower, you know? Particularly because no matter what, twenty years from now, I’ll probably look at pictures of myself and think “What a handsome young buck! What was I wasting so much time worrying about?”

But that’s the thing about our hangups, isn’t it? We take all our disappointments in life and pin them on the one thing we can’t seem to control. I know that I’ve listened with amusement to the radio commercials where the bald guy is listening to his fully-haired friend describe his yacht and daily jacuzzi parties with a team of supermodels. These guys are twins, intimates the commercial, with pellicular vigor being the only thing standing between baldy and a Hefner-like existence. It’s easy to laugh at that magical thinking when it’s not your issue. But. I’m incredibly lucky, incredibly fortunate, yet if I’m not busy counting my blessings, I feel like I’m only, say, 60% happy with myself. Why? Because of my inability to lose forty pounds for six years. How dumb is that?

Now, I hear you saying (because half of my blog’s readership is made up of parents): “Forty pounds is a lot of weight, John. Aren’t you setting yourself up for failure?” Well, maybe: but I did it once before. In a four-month period in junior year of college, I treadmilled my way from 216 to 185. That was college, of course, and my set-point may be frozen in place now. But in the three times that I’ve managed to stick to Weight Watchers for three weeks, I’ve managed to start and keep momentum that makes me think that I might be eventually successful — no matter how long it takes. I haven’t blogged about it before because, well, everybody hates trying and failing.

Well, screw that! I’m nailing my colors to the mast!

Alright, ladies and gentlemen, here’s the digits: in college, I was 185 pounds. At 185, I strutted around Mexican swimming pools in a pair of size 32 Birdwell Beach Britches and once — I am not making this up — overheard a group of Texan lifeguards daring each other to come over and talk to me. Hell, if that’s not a reason for picking an arbitrary target, I don’t know what is. I have no desire to attract Texans, but I’d like to do some Birdwell-strutting around the backyard pool for my very own lifeguard.

Last Friday, I was (okay, deep breath, blogging my REAL WEIGHT) 230 pounds, which means that I, like other thirty-something middle-management fatties, have to stick to the boxy style of golf shirt (curse you, Ben Sherman, and your switch to darted torsos!), and have doctors to waggle their eyebrows and point to the red-shaded right side of the BMI chart. (“Are you aware that you are morbidly oh-bess?” said an Indian physician to me at a checkup six months after visiting the bald psychologist. Dude. I equate “morbidly obese” with apron fat, which I am nowhere even near, thank you very much. I didn’t go back there, either. But I don’t want to start having heart trouble while Lydia is still in college.)

So my 10% Weight Watchers target goal is 207 pounds, which will then become my new base camp. I’m off to a pretty good start; I managed to stay within my point plan over the holiday weekend, and I ran a 5K race with Lydia in the stroller yesterday. I maintained a glacial, steady, 14-minute pace, but I was talking and feeding cheerios to the baby the whole time, so overall prognosis is good. So I’m hoping that with diet and exercise, I’ll be able to post numbers, charts, graphs, etc to this blog in the next couple of months that don’t make me grit my teeth in embarassment. Wish me luck! Encouragment gratefully accepted! Alternatives to whole-milk lattes cheerfully considered!
As a kid, this is what I hoped adult life would be like all the time

July 5th, 2005

Here’s Kate knitting in the sidecar this weekend. Holy cow, did I feel like a god-damned hipster.
Weekend Update: Guerilla Drive-In Beta 3; Kieran Downes visits

June 29th, 2005

My good friend and ex-colleague Kieran Downes drove all the way down from Boston to visit us last weekend, which delighted all members of the family. Kieran had just completed motorcycle safety school, and so we got a chance to go for a couple of motorcycle rides [save file and open in GEarth]. Kieran rode Kate’s Honda CB360T, which is a great bike but kind of cantankerous. Like a skittish pony, it has to be driven firmly and at high RPMs, which is not the “ol’ paint” experience a beginner wants. But Kieran did great, and (despite the lessons taught to us by years of television) did not go zooming off on his very first ride, up off a tilted flatbed ramp and into a truck full of chickens. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Kieran also distinguished himself by bringing homemade chocolate chip cookie dough, which he baked during the Guerilla Drive-In showing of “The Great Escape” on Saturday night, and passed out precisely at the time when Steve McQueen, James Garner, and the other guy give out the moonshine on the fourth of July. Which was pretty damn awesome, with no risk of gin blindness.

The AM Transmitter worked better than I had hoped: we managed to broadcast reasonably clear — and loud — audio through seven or eight radios scattered around the yard, and the surround sound really upped the ante. All we need now is some kind of gas-powered popcorn machine and a way to mount the whole shebang in the sidecar, and we’ll be 100% in business.

Kate has been enjoying the sidecar, and this weekend we’re gonna go buy a new helmet for her. Motorcycle helmets sitting in the garage either develop a kind of pervasive mustiness, or (as is the case with my old Shoei), a sort of Pungent Fratboy Baseball Hat, about which the less said the better. So: new stylish helmets all around!
Google Earth

June 29th, 2005
Holy GOD Google Earth is awesome. It’s like what I imagined The Mysterious Future would be like as a kid. It’s built on top of Keyhole. The nice thing about it is that you can share links to places. So, for example, if you have Google Earth installed, you can just click on the links to see:
If you have nothing to do for the rest of the day — or even if you do — go check it out. Seriously.

PS. You might have to save the .kmz files to your desktop, then double-click and open with Google Earth — it’s not quite as point-and-click as it could (and hopefully will) be soon.