I'm a Jedi, like my father before me.

Achievement

Earlier this year, maybe March, I finally looked into the mirror and I'm like, "I hate myself." Particularly the highly misnamed "love handles." I've never considered myself slim or skinny or anything like that and for a while I was decently happy at what I considered a heavier weight. I had a big butt, but I had figure!

The love handles effectively destroyed the figure and I hated how much my stomach poked out, how big my thighs were.

I was still ok with my butt.

And I've never had problems with my boobs being too big...

Anyway, I said, "No more." I started on the Sonoma diet which morphed somewhat into an avoidance of most carbs and a focus on fresh veggies and low-fat foods. I raged. The pounds seemed to creep off so slowly it could have been fluctuations in water weight, the normal pound more or less you see on scales. I started biking in the summer. I did RAGBRAI and didn't lose a pound, probably because I was eating every two hours while biking. Lost a bit more the week after.

And the funny thing is, even though it took me months and months, it crept off.

I haven't lost anything real significant. I was at around 167 at my heaviest and I'm down to 142, so about 25 pounds. Biggest Loser wouldn't be interested and if any magazine is like, "They lost 25 pounds!" I'm like, no big deal. But that 25 pounds was a big deal to me. I lost my love handles. My stomach is a lot flatter, to the point it doesn't poke out of shirts. My size 12 jeans bag around my butt. My face is even slimmer, which I wasn't expecting, but I'm pretty happy about. And my bras still fit. Win.

Another thing I wasn't expecting was to have other people notice. I figured what was obvious to me in the mirror while dressing was safely hidden under fitted shirts and large sweatshirts. Apparently, I was wrong. Steve from Bike World noticed and asked my mom. This is a guy I don't even see once a month, and not at all during the winter.

So about two years ago now, I purchased a shirt I liked from Threadless.com. It was one of those that had fallen out of print and come back in and I requested it and when it was back in print, they sent it to me. I had picked size medium, but when I tried it on, it was just depressing. It was so awful I couldn't wear it. So I stuck it back in the bag thinking I'd send it back, but I never got around to it.

A few weeks ago, I pulled it out of a box while looking for something else and tried it on again. And it fit.

I call it my achievement shirt.

My original goal was 135, just so I had a number to work toward, but in reality I think that's about as low as I want to be. My other goals included getting below the BMI overweight threshold (yes, I was above it), and getting low enough that when I stepped on scales fully clothed with food in my stomach, I'd be below 149, cause that's the lowest threshold for plasma donation, as in I keep more of my plasma. If only I could donate it.

I'm not really trying right now. I've been around 142 for a while and I'm just trying to make sure I don't go back up.

And man, I feel sexy.

WildStar

I'm sure half of my viewing audience hates it when I talk about computer games. I'm looking at you, Mom.

But, there is a new one coming out and I am exCIted. (pronounced by going into falsetto on the caps)

My favorite genre is RPG, that being you have a character that you create and you level them up and get them gear and make them better while they progress through the storyline.

I love storylines. Closest I can get to a book that lets me live in it. And not those choose-your-own-adventure things where I find all the ways to die and have to reverse engineer it to find the good endings.

I died so many times in those books... I distinctly remember getting shrunk and then running on the scientist's arm and I was so small he didn't even see me when he went to scratch that itch and his fingernail cut me in half. That was pretty vivid to my nine-year-old self. In the other book I got eaten by a yeti.

But WildStar. New game coming out. It's sci-fi. There are spaceships and big weapons and weird gravity.

Here's a video telling you what WildStar is. And the part I love the most about it is that it regards itself in a very humorous light. I think there is some language in the video. Or implied language.

But it's like a cartoon! It's funny! And it looks like a lot of fun.

Ok, so I'm a geek or gamer or nerd or whatever is the least complimentary of those terms.

I'm going to go figure out if I want my character to be a settler or a scientist.

Freedom of Jeans

I think there is unjust discrimination against jeans. Where I work now calls for business casual, that being, not jeans. So, I have a pair of black pants and a pair of khaki pants and I hate them. They're straight-legged and formal-looking and... well, I dislike khaki. It's like daring me to spill something.

And work had this really smart idea to market a United Way campaign called "Dollars For Denim." Basically, you buy their $35 pin or their $45 shirt, you get to wear them with suitable "denim" on Fridays in October, November, December. So we're forking over money for the privilege of casual Friday. And that shirt is so worth it for the happiness I get from wearing jeans every Friday. Unfortunately, it's already halfway through November.

David's job has an office party, which declares "Business casual (no jeans)." I'm miffed. I normally wouldn't bother to change clothes after work, but I hate wearing non-jean pants so much that I do change, especially if I have another reason to leave the house.

I think jeans can be sharp. I think jeans can be classy. And they fit me better than stupid khakis. Well, they did. Now my jeans are a little baggy. But while I love jeans, I hate jean shopping. Or pants shopping, really.

But anyway.

Why this arbitrary jean hatred? Why are they considered so informal when they are the pant choice for a majority of Americans in a majority of situations?

In fact, I think most of current fashion guidelines are arbitrary. Why do we think suits are the only option for males in politics? Why do we think skirt suits look good? People say a guy in a tux is hot... I think a guy in jeans is hot.

Maybe I should have been country. 'Cept I don't like the bling.

And I think the people running for president should wear jeans. I hate suits.

Do you not know the honored history of jeans and Levi Strauss?

From Wikipedia:

A young man named Levi Strauss emigrated in 1851 from Germany to New York to be with his older brothers, who ran a dry goods store. In 1853 he moved to San Francisco to establish his own dry goods business.

In 1872, Jacob Davis, a tailor who frequently purchased bolts of cloth from the Levi Strauss & Co. wholesale house, wrote to Levi asking to partner with him to patent and sell clothing reinforced with rivets. Davis' idea was to use copper rivets to reinforce the points of stress, such as on the pocket corners and at the bottom of the button fly. After Levi accepted Davis's offer, the two men received U.S. Patent 139,121, for an "Improvement in Fastening Pocket-Openings," on May 20, 1873. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeans]

American history, right there. And jeans just look better on everyone.


What about hats? Used to be you couldn't go outside without a hat. Now you can't wear them for business casual. And fedoras even look classy.

If I ever became a dictator, my first act would be to declare jeans as valid for business casual. Viva la revolution!

Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow

Normally I keep my opinions on books to Goodreads. However, I've had a bit of a problem recently: Goodreads is linked to my Facebook and for some reason, I cannot get things that connect through Facebook to, well, connect.

So Ender's Game came out recently. I decided to reread the book as a precursor to actually continuing the series and before watching the movie. Ender's Game, if you missed it, is a sci-fi book by Orson Scott Card, who is an excellent author. Ender's Game is the story of a young boy (six, when the book starts) who get accepted into battle school to prepare the smartest kids of the next generation to defend the world against a threat that has attacked twice in the past: the Formics, better known as "buggers." Ender is their best hope for the next commander of their forces, but to be able to get him to the point of leadership, they feel the need to manipulate his training and force him to understand he stands alone.

So we watched Ender's Game, the movie. And the idea behind the climax, the game, was the same. But I just read the book, and so I noticed everything different.

Some changes I don't mind, some I understand. Ender was six when he first went to battle school, but the actor who was playing him already had his voice starting to change. I think it loses some of it's impact. It's not just a pre-teen or teenager we're talking about, it's a six-year-old. However, the book spans years. It's a bit harder to do that in a movie. Anderson, one of the teachers who discusses Ender frequently with Graff, was changed to being female. And black, but I guess I never really knew Anderson wasn't. What bugs me more is that Dap, who calls himself the kids' "mom" in the is rude and mean. And Bonzo, who is supposed to be almost beautiful for a boy, a boy Ender looks at and thinks, "I can follow that face..." Bonzo is SHORT. Like half Ender's height. That also bugs me.

The movie was too rushed, I think. You don't get the sense of development, manipulation, psychological growth, and so on. David pointed out it would be better as a mini-series.

And then I read Ender's Shadow, which is about Bean. In Ender's Game, Bean is another smart kid who is small, just like Ender, but some time later, and he has more of an attitude. In Ender's Shadow, it's almost like a fan-fiction rewriting, even though it was Orson Scott Card who did it. What I mean by that is that it's taking the story from the first book, and trying to fit a different story in, one that didn't exist prior. I think Bean was just a normal, albeit smart, kid in the first book. And this book turned him into something else. Some of his dialogue was already written, and the second book added slants. Something like "Nobody goes to Command school until they're sixteen!" he said, grabbing hold of Colonel Graff's hand. Graff shook him off. In Ender's Shadow, it adds something along the lines of how he wasn't sure if Graff caught his sarcasm. I'm still trying to figure out how that motion and phrase can be sarcastic. It undermines Ender. It says they try to transfer command to Bean in the end, thinking Ender had frozen.

And on the other hand, it builds Ender up. Bean still follows him, even though he might be smarter. Bean respects him.

But it's still one of those things I think about at night when I'm trying to sleep and I think, "That's not how it was originally!"

Scheduling: My Bane

Maybe it's the winter. I don't usually realize how much I get SAD until the summer hits and I wake up one morning thinking, "Life is good!" when the sun is shining and it's warm and green and the whole world seems open. I woke up this morning at seven and it was dark and cold. The sun was just rising around seven-thirty. And it's going to get worse and colder and darker. I tried to think of what one of those annoying optimists would say: "Well, now everyone gets to enjoy the sunrise because it's later in the day!"

Makes me want to throw a shoe at the nearest optimist.

But the winter depresses me. I start seeing a cold, gray world of continuing inevitability. The rat-race, people walking walking walking with umbrellas, the same roads they've walked every day and will continue to walk, seeing the same tired faces they've seen every day, eating the same lunch at the dingy diner or in stained Tupperware in a florescent-lit office break room.

Last winter I had a freak-out moment with the house. Like it was a ball on the end of the chain that held me here, down to earth. This winter, I have a job and in thinking of my schedule, see it repeating Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, over and over and over, living for the weekend just to have it end and start over again. Some people like schedules and reliability and predictability. I think I kind of hate it.

Back to that Myers Briggs personality test. I'm an ISTP. The P at the end means perceiver. One place asks, "would you rather things in your life to be decided and set, or do you like to stay open to whatever options might come along?" Truity defines it as "responsive, spontaneous, flexible, and active."

Oddly Developed Types says "Now that school is permanently out and the 8 to 5 workday is abolished for good, the Artisans will be free to roam the radioactive wastelands hunting mutants, fighting zombies, and generally having the time of their lives."

My fall wanderlust is kicking it and I want to throw off everything that's holding me down and go live the life I imagine!

Then reality kicks in and I don't know where I'd go. To the Halloween event at Worlds of Fun? Just kick off and go. England. South for the winter. But what sort of lifestyle supports my imagination?

David thinks it is writing, after I described my perfect job as having short-term events that I could do when I wanted and not take any more assignments when I didn't.

I don't know. Both of us are perceivers. We both live in the moment, procrastinate, and like the idea of just picking up and going somewhere spontaneously.

We need to get rich.

Post-Apocalyptic Thoughts

My current fad is post-apocalyptic fiction. Well, not even fiction. Maybe just more the idea of fiction. Unless someone has some good post-apocalyptic fiction they want to recommend?

Currently I'm making due with cyberpunk, defined by the Reddit page as, "High-tech, low-life." I describe it as the seedy criminal side of sci-fi. Reading the second book in William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy. So far, it doesn't flow as well and isn't as artistic as Neuromancer, the first book.

But anyway.

To get in the mood, here is a cover of Imagine Dragons' radioactive by Lindsey Stirling. In post-apocalyptic theme.

I can't ever decide if I like this better than the original or not. Original has bass drum. Cover has...well...awesome. And no weird puppet arena.

I have had Radioactive play in my head for the last three months. Still cool with it.

To continue on the theme, I got into the Myers-Briggs personality test. I like personality tests. I am an ISTP (introverted, sensing, thinking, perceiving). Which means I'm Harry Potter on the Harry Potter chart. And a cat on one of the animal ones (no, I did not try and manipulate the results to get a cat).

But the best thing I've found so far is called Oddly Developed Types. It starts off with the basics, not a whole lot more information than the Truity. Thing about the Myers Briggs is that they say people are better at understanding themselves than the test is, so you can probably figure out what you are by just reading about it. I match ISTP pretty well. However, Oddly Developed Types decides to have some fun and they come up with all these different scenarios for what happens to your type after the apocalypse.

I am a Vigilante. I spend the first year of nuclear winter in a basement playing video games that hone my reflexes so I can kick mutant and zombie butt once I get out. Then me and the other Artisans (SPs) wander merrily about doing our own thing, like we've always wanted to. The SJs (Guardians) have bunkers, cities, and caves. The NFs (Idealists) mostly become self-actualized and turn into beings of radiant light and go to another plane, where they will fight shadowy beings of darkness. And the NTs (Rationals) will mostly abandon the planet before it happens, but you know they probably caused it too. I read my page. And then the page for the Artisans. And then David's page (ENFP). And then the page for all the Idealists. And then all the main group pages. And then I started at the top and read all of it. It was like reading a story in second person. It was funny and clever and makes me wish I thought of it first.

I'm still trying to figure out what I want from this phase, which is really an extension of the zombie phase (which I partially abandoned after finding the first two episodes of Walking Dead to be more gory than I liked). And maybe it's because so many people talk doom and gloom with all the Syria and government shutdown and so on, it starts to feel a little bit like the end of the world. And I cope with things by making fun of them.

And I'd be a monster hunter. How cool is that?