ARCHIVE: A Good Day with a Spot of Sad News

*** This entry was originally posted to LiveJournal June 23, 2008 ***


Today is a good day.

AND, today is a sad day.

First, the good stuff:

Monday morning is my weigh-in time. Every Monday I get up, use the restroom, kit off, and step on the scale. As an aside, this is why I like doing my program at home using the online tool. I don't have to worry about how heavy my shoes are that day or how much change I have in my pockets. No shoes, no pockets, no . . . you get the idea. Anyway, my scale varies from one reading to the next, so the procedure I've used since I've started my program is to take 10 successive readings and average those numbers. Sometimes the readings are very consistent with each other, and sometimes there is as much as three pounds difference between the high and low readings. But the averages I come up with have shown to be consistent with the readings I get on other scales, so I trust them. Anyway, even though I wouldn't have called this a stellar week on my program (especially over the weekend), I did post a modest loss. Better yet, it was EXACTLY the amount of loss I needed to hit 50 pounds of cumulative loss. So as of this morning I am fully and officially 50 pounds lighter than I was when I started my program in February of 2007. Sweeeeeeeeeet. And while my losses in the last few weeks have been modest (less than a pound per week), I have lost weight in 7 of the past 8 weeks. I'll take those modest but consistent losses over up and down bounces any day.

Today I also took the last of my half-dose Wellbutrin tablets. So I can take the every-other-day reminder out of my calendar, and my weaning down process is done. After today I'm officially off anti-depressants. I think I'm still doing just fine. I've noticed some mild irritability that may or may not be attributable to going off the meds (some things, such as traffic, have always made me irritable), but it's been the sort of thing that I've noticed right away and have let go before it has boiled out. At least, I believe I've done that; Catherine has said that she has noticed no difference and that if she didn't know I was going off the pills she wouldn't know that anything was different. This is good.

I get to see Catherine tonight and to hang out with her and her boxing friends. Instead of JUST meeting them for the after-class dinner, I'll go down, take the conditioning class while she's doing kickboxing, and THEN go to dinner with them. It'll be fun. They're great people and I've really enjoyed getting to know them over the time that I've been with Catherine--which, by the way, is coming up on three years now. That conditioning class kicks my @ss, AND it's good for me.

Now, the sad bit. I got in this morning and saw the news that George Carlin is dead. So passes yet another icon. This is officially getting old.

For me, the best humor is humor that's wrapped around wisdom and insight. George Carlin was the epitome of this. Of course, he could also be funny even when he was just being silly and/or crude. I love that balance and juxtaposition. So thanks for being a source of laughter and thought for as much of my life as I've been old enough to be aware of you, Mr. Carlin. And here's to your memory and your legacy. I will miss your work, and if I'd known you personally I imagine I'd be missing you right now, too.

Here is a quote of his that was used in the article I read. Apparently it's from a 2004 AP interview. I love this:

"The whole problem with this idea of obscenity and indecency, and all of these things — bad language and whatever — it's all caused by one basic thing, and that is: religious superstition. There's an idea that the human body is somehow evil and bad and there are parts of it that are especially evil and bad, and we should be ashamed. Fear, guilt and shame are built into the attitude toward sex and the body. ... It's reflected in these prohibitions and these taboos that we have."

So let's all do something taboo, prohibited, obscene, indecent, and/or patently sexual today (and every day, for that matter) and relish these glorious, messy bodies we have and this glorious, messy human condition in which we find ourselves. And let's jam shame, taboo, AND superstition right up society's most inglorious and messiest collective orifice!