i just got some peanuts from the vending machine.
in a grand turnabout of the muppet mindset and philosophy, i've decided to start on the south beach diet. when i was little i was about right, and i plumped up in middle school, got about right in early high school when i played basketball, then plumped up again because i loved my mother's cooking, then swung from 20lbs overweight to 25lbs underweight in college, and have been steadily creeping back up since getting a sedentary job and marrying someone who cooks really well. in principle, i despise most "diet"-y things because they fly in the face of common sense; people ate this stuff for centuries, but now it's bad? and why, if this stuff is so much better for me, am i plumping up again now that i'm eating it? well, in reading the south beach book i've learned that the low-fat trend is actually throwing out the baby with the bath water and substituting bad stuff for good stuff. bread, pasta, and potatoes are bad. (actually, refind white flour and sugar, and things made from them.) those are my staple foods, so this is rather unnerving. i've also heard from people on the atkin's diet (a rather old plan only recently gaining notoriety, much akin to my high school class thinking bob dylan's "everybody must get stoned" was a new single in 1992), but it seems rather extreme to cut out all carbs.
so, the south beach thing makes sense from a practicality and simplicity standpoint, which i like. i've long maintained that the stress of counting calories and fat grams undoes any good effects of dieting. in my dad's case, he has the best cholesterol of any of his friends when he was eating sausage and eggs for breakfast every morning; when he tried altering the diet a bit for other reasons, his cholesterol shot up and he had to give up that breakfast. hrm. i think i will send him my copy of the book, and tell him to skip all the repetitive marketing fluff and read the important scientific points.
but all of that isn't the point here. that's just context. because of all of that i'm having to learn to eat all sorts of things i have long hated, like salad and nuts, to complement the things i really like, such as meat and cheese, and to replace the things i can't have for now and can't have much of in the future, the potatoes and pasta.
so i've trained myself to like the caeser salads at the outback. hey, if i have to have a salad, i'm not going to go with a particularly healthy one. ;-)
and peanuts. i have always hated the texture of peanuts, they kinda squeak on my teeth in a way like fingernails on a chalkboard. (that metaphor will be lost on our children, now that chalkboards are being replaced by dry-erase boards.) but i need a snack food in the middle of the day, and peanuts are the only things in the vending machine that are not stuffed to the gills with sugar or refined flour.
so, i just got some peanuts from the vending machine. they're very salty, which is good, but they feel like styrofoam on my teeth, which is disgusting.
while lamenting this on my walk back down the hall from the vending area, i happened to stop next to one of the abstract cloth-and-oil framed pieces that are littered throughout the new building. they all have the same theme, but appear to have the no-two-snowflakes-are-alike philosophy. i looked a little closer to see what the actual fabric was, and was a bit annoyed to see a hextile halftone pattern, an artifact of four-color screening from industrial web-printing reproduction, such as is used in color magazines.
the art pieces on our walls are not just crappy pictures. they are pictures of crappy pictures.
somebody else, somewhere else, is looking at the same pictures.
nothing is real. these pictures are not real pictures. i am not the real muppet. i am like a river, the same, but always changing. my children will know my older self only through pictures and stories. who will i be tomorrow? will i like myself? will i think tomorrow i was an idiot today?
then i thought, it must be monday.
Mon May 3 12:58:23 EDT 2004