Good morning. Hello. How are you? #558
Dieting, Back to work, Harry Potter qualms, snow, Red Rising books
Goo dmorning. Hello. How are you? We are, now, what? Five days into 2022? I am starting to think maybe we were sold a bag o’ goods. Seems pretty much like 2021 so far. Started the year on Zoom again. Covid is spewing its junk everywhere. People are stressed and hunkered down. I guess this year we’re probably not going to surprisingly take the US Senate tomorrow or endure an armed insurrection at the Capitol, so, you know, a wash I guess.
Programming note: My Plex is back up and running. Apologies to those who were trying to use it while it was down. I did a firmware update and it borked Plex, but it turned out it borked Plex because I was like four stable versions behind, so once I updated Plex it came back, thank god.
We’re OK over here. Jane is slowly learning how to breathe and take a pause when she wants to throw a fit. It’s not always working, but she is learning self control and it is a beautiful thing to see.
I’m back to 5-day weeks. Not super used to it and it is going to be hard. I might take a Friday off here or there, but I mostly need my vacation days this year, HOPEFULY, GOD, PLEASE, for a couple trips. Four day weeks are so much more civilized. Three day ones, all the better.
Spent the last days of my weekend finishing up all my annual tasks, and I got it done! Writing the posts from the last two days, doing all my paper filing, getting a bunch of Emma’s old stuff up on eBay (and sold!), remembering to turn offers off on eBay so I don’t get super annoyed about the whole thing. Reconciling my Discogs to my iTunes and cleaning up the tags on all the stuff I ripped last year before I sold it. Offloading my 1TB iMovie library (god it is insane that iMovie stores all your movie work in a single file) to cold storage. Synching and organizing all my Spotify playlists. Got my Homekit-to-minisplit AC controller installed and it is so awesome. Won’t forget to leave the AC on ever again. It felt to get all that done.
Plus! The GMHHAY manuscript, with Emily’s foreword, is back in Lisa’s hands. I am very excited.
I started my miracle drug two days ago. It’s kind of fascinating. I thought it was going to reduce my appetite, and it does, somewhat, but what it does even more is make me really, really full, and kind of sick, after I eat what used to be a normal amount of food. You catch on pretty quick that you should eat less. It also does seem to make the 16 hours of my intermittent fast (I am accompanying this drug with a diet) more tolerable, especially these first few days when I get used to it again. My weight has been through the roof, so take these numbers with a grain of salt, but I’ve lost around seven pounds in two days. That’s maybe 25% more than the first two days of a normal diet, after months of eating tons of absolute garbage becuase—and you may not know this—I tend to eat a lot of bad food when the world is depressing. Also we had two giant holiday dinners, and a bunch of baked goods and candy and shit. Anyway, so far, so good.
I know there’s a lot of legitimate complaints, and concerns around diet culture, and fat shaming and whatnot, and it’s something I’ve wrestled with my entire life. I do wish I felt better in my body when I was at the higher end of my weight, I wish I had that comfort and confidence. And I’ve tried, through the years, to attack it emotionally as well, try to get to that place. I’ve had some luck, but it’s been limited. I think in this situation, it seems pretty clear to me that I gained something like 40 pounds during a very stressful two years and that is not super good, and I should expend some effort trying to get that under control. It is somewhat concerning how much emotionally better I feel when I’m losing weight, compared to when I’m gaining weight. The two happen throughout the year at a ratio of, like, 1:5, so, you know, not exactly a great emotional health balance. But, of course, when I’m dieting I’m also eating a lot better, getting more exercise, so there are healthy reasons in there too. It is a balance. But I will tell you: in these last two years of insanity, I’ve felt better waking up and having lost weight than gained it, and that, alone, is reason enough for me these days.
It snowed the other day. It was beautiful and perfect and I wanted at least another foot of it, I wanted it to stick, I wanted to get snowed in, to never be able to leave. I’ve got a lot of baggage around snow, not surprisingly, from growing up in Fairbanks. We had a hundred and sixty inches of accumulation, on average, per year, with an average of 24 snowstorms a year. But I’ve realized recently that a) snow’s a lot more fun when they don’t send you out into it to go to school or work and b) it’s a lot more fun when it’s like, 30 degrees than -30 degrees, and c) it’s a lot more fun when it’s only one, maybe two snowstorms a year.
Jane was very excited about the snow. I wish it had accumulated enough that we could have gone outside and taken her sledding.
Been obsessed with these Red Rising books that my friend Jenna has hipped me to: to the detriment of practically all other activities in my life. I’m on book three now. There are five of them and I don’t think I’ll really be able to concentrate on anything else until I am done. They are the exact opposite of the plotless sci-fi of which I have been dreaming. They’re the exact oppsosite of the Wayferers series by Becky Chambers, that perfect paragon of plotless sci fi. I suppose the closest analog is The Expanse, though they make those books seem slow and non-violent. It really is a fairly relentless, brutal pace these books take. Plus they got those, like, ten-minute chapters with mini cliffhangers at the end of each one, making them impossible to put down at bedtime, and it was really messing me up for a while, but these last two nights I’ve managed to put them down and get to sleep on time, and my god that really was a monumantal human accomplishment someone give me a medal.
I watched that 20th anniversary Harry Potter special on HBO. I wasn’t going to, because JK Rowling is a hater, but after a conversation on New Year’s Zoom about it, I became morbidly obsessed with how they were going to handle her. I knew they didn’t “invite” her to the reunion, but they did use some archival footage. It was weird, though. They didn’t really need the archival footage at all, she didn’t really add much to the conversation. And they conspicuously labeled it “2019 archive footage” so, I guess people like me would know she wasn’t invited. Still, though, her presence loomed large. And, really, when she was on the screen, I felt so upset and uncomfortable, it really was quite unnerving. It was also… I mean I suspect they tried to bring her up less than they would have otherwise, but people still sure mentioned her a whole lot, and no one tried to say anything, like, “then again, she sure turned out awful, didn’t they?” There was one point where Robbie Coltrane was talking about how surreal it was how long these films would endure, how in fifty years, people would be watching them, and I was like “I dunno, man. I can already feel their hold on culture waning, for all we know, maybe they’ll end up like, Andrew Dice Clay or Normam Mailer, these people who had huge holds on our culture that we are just… forgetting. And if that does happen, I think we know why it’ll be the case,” and I feel like he had to be thinking that. It was also weird watching Emma and Rupert and Daniel talk about it all like an Harry Potter is unmitigated good, when you know each of them are thinking about this constantly.
I dunno. A couple minutes here and there I got kind of emotional and missed Harry, and that just made me sad. The fact that there’s a new Dumbledore movie coming out in the next few months, and she’s both a (screenplay) writer and a producer on it means that she is still in control of the Wizarding World Cinematic Universe so, I think, for me, I still can’t really get behind it. I’ll probably watch (for free, somehow) the Dumbledore movie and it’ll make me really sad.
Here’s a new moody and quiet playlist for you. Been into the Chameleons again lately, god, they are so good, I am very excited for that tour this year. The new Brandi Carlile can do anything. Also been really into this Low song from like 20 years ago from a split 7” with the Dirty Three and I used to listen to this song, like, every day at some point in the 90’s and maybe that said something worrisome about me. There’s a new Grandaddy song? Not sure what that’s about I will have to investigate more.
It’s good to be back. Been a while since I wrote a nice, long, personal entry of what’s going on. Feels good.
All right, well I hope your 2022 is going okay. I know it’s a hard time right now for a lot of people. Hard times are hard. Hang in there. Hugs. Talk to you guys soon!
Is the weight loss drug the one you inject? My stylist Jeff has been on it for a few months & he's had great results.