Apple Foot

Promotions

At the meeting when they announced my friend's (deserved) promotion, I looked down and saw a hole in his sock.

Prompt: Foreign Language Poetry

[from Figment.com] Poetry Remix: Find a poem in a language you can't understand.  Do not look up the translation, but read it through out loud, sounding out the words and experiencing it as it appears to you on the page.  Now write your own translation of the poem.  Do not look up the real translation until you are COMPLETELY finished OR don't look it up ever and just enjoy your new poem as it is!

Vandrer-Liv (HC Anderson) (source)

Gaardhunden gjøer — dens Tænder ere saa skarpe.
En Qvinde træder i Forstuen ind,
Ak, Armod sidder paa Kjole og Kind,
Hun synger og spiller paa Harpe.

En ussel Hest bag Gjærdet søger sit Foder;
Hist holder Vognen med Dyne og Skuur,
Der sidder Manden i Guds Natur
Med Barnet, som skriger paa Moder.

Han kysser lidt og kniber til Forandring;
Snart kommer Qvinden med Penge og Brød,
Saa dier hun Barnet paa sit Skjød,
Mens Manden bereder til Vandring.


Wandering Life (a spurious translation from the Danish)

The watch dogs glower - their ears see far.
The peddler comes in from the cold.
O, if a man is kith or king,
Still the dogs howl.

In our cubbyhole, the dogs guard the fire,
and so as Danes or Swedes might say,
They protect their own Mother Nature.
Not a barnicle, nor yet a mother,

I have kissed him in dreams and foggy rains;
Against the coming cold dreamed of pennies or bread,
Seen the dogs bay at my doorstep
While alone I wander til waking.

[Google's translation may not be much better.]

Seasonal

Today I wondered if April flowers had brought May showers.

If only I were bolder

Four or five guys in the pub for lunch, reminiscing about their fraternity, where they played Dungeons & Dragons as a drinking game.

I am so turned on.

Overheard

...in what used to be Boston's Combat Zone: "It's much sadder to be a surfer than to be a porn star."

Modest Expectations

Now that I'm almost to the end of my week off, I'm starting to feel anxious. The problem is, when people ask me what I did with my vacation, I don't have anything interesting to say. I didn't travel, go to museums, take a photography class, or visit friends and family. This was an underachiever's vacation.

The one thing I did that might be worth the telling? Last weekend was reunion. That's where people ask what I'm doing these days, and I'm forced to admit I'm doing the same thing I was five years ago. I don't have children or an advanced degree, I haven't written any books, I've not even changed jobs/employers.

I'm struggling with whether or not I'm OK with not having done much. Am I only worried about how people will react, or am I disappointed in myself? Strangely, I'm more OK with not having much to show over five years than I am with not having done much for a week. Even though it doesn't exactly make a gripping story, I have made some improvements in the last five years. I paid off my student loans, moved into my own apartment, lost 45 pounds, etc. I feel like a better, nicer person than I did even a few years ago.

I'm trying to work up a pat answer for the 'What did you do on your vacation?' question. The truth is, I bought new bras, gave platelets, and saw a movie (X Men, which I'd describe as mostly fun). I should probably emphasize Reunion, which fits most people's definition of "doing something". Or maybe over the next few days I should try to write a novel or go to a museum or something important like that.

Local point of view

"Wellesley? I used to live in Wellesley, on Linden Street. That town stinks! They don't have any liquor stores."  --a bum in Copley Square, on seeing my new t shirt

Aging

In the last couple months, I've seen several people I went to school with, but don't see regularly, and it's suddenly struck me:

I'm middle-aged.

Empirically, I understood that, based on my birthdays. Somehow, though, my self-image stopped aging at about 27. I have about as many grey hairs as I did at 12, so that didn't clue me in. I had to see former classmates to fully appreciate that I, too, am over 40.

Since I've been losing weight, I've been feeling a little less ugly, which also means I feel less old. I took a couple photos of myself today (only one of which was serviceable), and I don't think I'm looking as good as I thought I'd looked. (Parse that sentence!) Actually, that hair dye looks ridiculous on someone my age.

Because all your friends do: 2010 In Review

What did I accomplish in 2010?

First of all, I now floss every day. I know that sounds trivial, but I've been meaning to get around to that for 15 years, and after last year's periodontal deep cleaning, I decided to get serious about it. I used the "don't break the streak" method of Jerry Seinfeld (via Lifehacker) to get rolling. I think I've missed <5 days this year.

Then I decided to try group therapy, joining a group for people with social phobia. I'm not sure how that's working out, to be honest. It's not quite as skills- and goal-oriented as I'd imagined (although, God help whoever tries to make me formulate an actual goal), and I've discovered that a lot of things that I used to agonize over bother me less than they used to anyway. Whether this is because I now avoid activities that make me uncomfortable, and whether I avoid them because I genuinely don't like them or I avoid them because I'm phobic, I don't know. Also, to some extent, I have in recent years begun to take the philosophy, "I'm too old for this shit," by which I mean that I don't worry myself with some of the extreme fuss and angst I used to put myself through in order to, say, go into a shop and ask for assistance. I'm not sure if the group is helping me at all, or if it's just my natural growth. Probably I should figure that out, as it's costing me fifty bucks a week.

I have long been upset by my weight. I found it so upsetting, and the topics of weight loss and exercise seemed so complicated, that I have been unable to do anything about it. Last summer I convinced myself that I could keep a food diary for a couple weeks. I didn't commit to any other action, in order to keep from feeling overwhelmed, anxious, and depressed. I figured I could commit to tracking data. I found a web site with basic food diary functions and created an account. As part of creating an account, I was forced to enter my current weight, activity level (sedentary) and a weight loss goal (at the time, staying pat was not an option offered by the database, so I selected 'lose 1 lb/week'), so that the site could generate a target daily calorie intake. I am not very good at estimating amount, size, or quantity, so using a food diary forced me to pay attention to how much I was eating (previously I sort of figured if it had vegetables, it was a good dietary choice, and how many calories could there really be in CPK's sun dried tomato fusilli?). By the end of the first day, I was horrified. I had no idea how many calories I should be taking in, and even less idea how much I actually was taking in. I was so stunned that I decided I had to start doing something, so I began trying to keep to the site's recommended daily calories for losing 1 pound/week. The site also has a simple calculation of the percentage of your diet which is protein/carbs/fat, so I started trying to get more protein and less carbs, too.

I do not own a bathroom scale, and I think that's probably best. Considering how weight can fluctuate on a daily basis, I would make myself crazy with daily weigh-ins. Even a weekly weigh-in is potentially discouraging. I weighed myself on my parents' scale when I visited them at the end of July. I had a doctor appointment mid-September, and weighed 8 pounds less. I wasn't too excited about this, because scales can show different weights, weight fluctuates a few pounds during the course of the day, etc. At Christmas when I was at my parents' again, I weighed myself on their scale. I lost 30 pounds since the end of July.

I was very excited by the weight loss, and proceeded to weigh myself daily for the duration of my stay. I probably put on 2-3 lbs over the holidays, but still--30 pounds! Needless to say, I'm looking to continue this progress in 2011 (since I'm still roughly 80 pounds overweight).

My year was also pretty enjoyable at work, if only because we hired a geek who I adore both personally and professionally. Since he has some self-esteem and actual skills, I doubt he'll be working at our agency for much longer. I'm bummed about that, but on the upside (c.f., the social phobia thing), I made a friend this year.

Sometimes they are watching

One of the things that inhibits social phobics is the idea that other people are watching and judging harshly. For a few years, I've had this super spiffy pedometer that I've never used. I'd never set it up, in part because setting it up requires you to know your "stride length", which means walking 10 steps and then measuring the distance.

I've tried to come up with schemes for doing this somewhere/when that no one will see me (like, the park down the street at 11pm), but yesterday I just went ahead and did it on the front walkway of the apartment building. I was feeling pretty good--"See, AppleFoot? It only took a few minutes, and now it's done, and no one noticed or cared!"

So I went last night to a burger joint/sports bar up the road and got a cheeseburger. I do this every couple of weeks. One of the waitresses stopped to let me know that she just moved into the basement apartment in my building, and she looked out her window to see some woman measuring something on the front walk, and then she realized she recognized the woman. And what was I doing with the measuring tape, exactly?

Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. And, just because you're ridiculously self-conscious, doesn't mean people aren't watching and thinking you're weird.