messiestobjects

Vitamins B(ald) & E(agles) Are Recommended By Crying Chief

    Eagles! Four of us drove up to Lackawaxen, PA several weeks ago to hit a spot where the Lackawaxen River meets the Delaware River on the New York border and bald eagles like to congregate. For the fish. It wound up being pretty exciting because I was thinking about how, growing up in the 70s and early 80s, the word on the birds was that they were disappeared, very rare, nearly extinct. To actually see them around now is exciting and probably worthy of some sort of American Indian quote about soaring hearts or summ'at, but no. We saw about seven of them. My pictures are lame though, because I need a better telephoto lens. Mine is cheap-o. Also, that's all I have to report. So the rest of this blog will be other bad bald eagle pictures, and a response I had to write for English class last year on an article in the NY Times by Michael Pollan. Yup, I'm scraping up the dregs.

    Michael Pollan artfully defines “food” as anything your great-great-grandmother would recognize as such, and his point is that in modern times the industry has drastically altered our perception of what qualifies as real food. Pollan says that part of the reason people have a difficult time eating real food is that when you walk into a grocery store the “most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over, the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming about their newfound whole-grain goodness.” He has a decidedly sneering attitude about such health claims, and with good reason; in 1977, George McGovern “prepared what by all rights should have been an uncontroversial document called ‘Dietary Goals for the United States’… calling on Americans to cut down on red meat and dairy products.” The red-meat and dairy industry bellowed, and this very practical advice was drowned out. In Pollan’s view and in mine, the food industry has since waged a campaign of misinformation about American health.

    In 2007, at 35 years old, 5’ 11” and 220 lbs., my doctor told me my cholesterol was high and wrote a prescription for Lipitor. Concurrently I had seen a specialist about my arms frequently going numb during sleep and was told that I had pre-carpal tunnel syndrome, meaning that it wasn’t full-blown and not too late to fix it with arm braces and some other types of treatment. I had a brief conversation with myself at that point that went something like this: “Self, you’re 35. You’re falling apart. You’re too young for this shit.” I decided that I needed to get in better shape. I never filled the Lipitor prescription because of my personal conviction that it is a junk drug, meant to treat a symptom but not the actual problem. I never wore the arm braces because I couldn’t bear the idea of starting down that path towards riding a jazzy with a big-slurp in Wal-Mart. I got a gym membership and lost 35 pounds in about a year. I slowly began changing my diet to whole foods, which became easier the more I exercised because I didn’t want to ruin a good workout with empty calories. I also started getting into vitamins.

    Pollan believes that separating individual vitamins and nutrients from food is missing the forest for the trees. I agree with this to an extent in that I strongly believe that vitamins are not a substitute for healthy food. However, since I began taking natural, non-synthetic vitamins in addition to my healthier diet and exercise, I haven’t had a single cold. I have felt a bit run-down on occasion, which I strongly suspect were cases of my body fighting off what would normally be some such common sickness. I did get bronchitis once, but it only lasted about two days which is unusual for such a normally debilitating condition. While I could attribute this to exercise and healthy eating, and I’m sure that’s a part of it, I know plenty of people who eat well and exercise and yet still get regular illnesses.

    While my evidence for the health benefits of vitamins is anecdotal and hardly scientific, I am wary of ending my vitamin regimen as Pollan, while offering much sage wisdom, had little in the way of science in his opinions on individual vitamins to offer either. My own feeling from reading various sources is that today’s farming practices have reduced the amount of minerals and nutrients in our soil, therefore reducing the health benefits of even the most naturally grown whole foods, which is why I feel that supplementing a healthy diet with natural vitamins is still important.

    Pollan seems to fall into the same trap that he warns us of, asking that we take so-called scientific studies done by nutritionists with a grain of salt and yet at the same time citing a study that says “in the case of beta carotene ingested as a supplement, scientists have discovered that it actually increases the risk of certain cancers.” The error in this stance lies in what he leaves out; that many such negative vitamin studies are done using synthetic vitamins. Synthetic vitamins have been shown in fact to be very bad for you, however when the naturally occurring forms of these vitamins are used in more honest studies, no such negative health consequences are found. Therefore it seems obvious to me that the hype surrounding the supposed danger of vitamins is simply more misinformation from the industry.

More X-Rays For The Status-Updatedly Inclined

UPDATE: I just realized that I'd already wrote about the hand surgery in the previous entry. Totally forgot; was just excited about the new post-surgery x-rays. I blame prescription medication.

This is an MRI image of my knee. You can't really tell that it's a knee, or what is supposed to indicate what's normal and what's broken unless you're a doctor, I suppose. But it looks like a ghost face, which is spooky because I had my knee surgery and I now have a zombie in my knee named Ted. So meet Ted, everyone.

That's a side view, where Ted is less apparent. So anyway it looks like I've got several months of Physical Therapy ahead of me before I'm walking like normal and maybe jogging again. I can walk a bit now, but with a robot leg brace and a crutch. I'll probably have to wear the brace for 6 months or so; it's hard to get a straight answer out of these people. I think they don't want to discourage me with too much bad news. Wanna hear something funny? My cousin Kevin, who lives in Australia, was playing rugby this week and not only tore his acl, but his mcl too. Way to steal my thunder, Kevin. Jerk.

So I did also wind up getting surgery on my hand; the Doctor didn't think it had healed at all on its own after a week so he went right in. He screwed the fractured bone together with what looks like two wood screws and a metal twist tie.

That's going to make going through security whenever I can get back to work a real bitch. And it gives me a bit of the wiggins to think about the loose end of that twist tie just hanging out in the side of my hand flesh, but I'm using my hand almost normally nowadays so I'm happy. It's going to be a while before I can get back to chopping wood and lifting weights though.

Spoiler Alert! Surprise Surgeries Lead To A Detailed 'Rogue Moon' Book Report

I did wind up getting surgery on my hand; that's one of my before x-ray shots there. I don't think it's narcissistic to post it because it looks cool. See the break on the far right? That's my 5th metacarpal and I now have what looks like a drywall screw and a metal twist-tie holding the bone together. I can't wait to get my copy of those x-rays.

Top view. Thank the *FSM for keyboards, because I don't think writing by hand would be possible with that shattered thing. Did I mention that I'm totally high right now? I had my knee surgery yesterday, and today I am way drugged up on many many pain killers, which are not really stopping the pain so much as making me feel dopey, loquacious, and ready to write a post. According to my boss, who is awesome, I won't be working for a long long while. Which I think many people would be okay with, however I'm really going to miss the travel. But acl replacement surgery is a serious business, I'm told. Bending it will be out of the question for a few months. I'd really rather not spend this post complaining about how my life is going to suck and be different now with far less travel for a while at least, so I thought I'd do a book report post.

I recently acquired the seventy-ish books in the excellent Sci-Fi Masterworks series, which is a series of some of the awesomest sci-fi books ever. Some of my favorites are on the list, but there are many I've never read, and many many that I'd never even heard of. I've been wanting to read them for a while, but until my recent injuries I hadn't the time. Now, I'm all dove in.

'Rogue Moon' by Algis Budrys is bizarre. It was written in 1960, well before the moon landing, and part of what he did in the novel was to envision a future version of Man's eventual moon exploration. In Rogue Moon, we don't use rocket ships to get there, we use what is essentially a beam machine like in Star Trek, but with a few upsetting differences. What the transporter does is, it picks apart and reads every single atom in the object to be teleported and in this process, destroys it. It then sends an electronic signal with every single bit of information about the object's atomic structure to a receiver on the moon, which then breaks down local raw material (moon rocks, i.e.) and reconfigures the atoms from said material to match the signal's specifications exactly. What this means for a human transported this way is that he is actually killed by this machine, reduced to atomic slag. The copy of the human that is then assembled on the moon is so exact that his brain's electrical currents, neurons, etc. contain the exact personality and memories of the original.

The reason men are travelling to the moon in the novel is that there is an artifact of unknowable properties on some acreage on the backside of the moon which, when entered, becomes some sort of bizarre human killing game. If you move the wrong way in the wrong spot, you are killed in a horrible fashion. If you get through one area, the next has its own rules that will also kill you gruesomely. It is not known if it is a natural phenomenon, an alien artifact, a higher dimensional highway intersection, or what. Man's discovery of it is compared to a small beetle who inadvertently walks into a disposed tomato sauce can on the ground. The beetle can't understand why he gets trapped in there, nor can he know if someone has placed it there to torment him, or if it has merely been discarded and forgotten there having nothing to do with him, or even whether it is a natural or artificial construct. Beetles are ignorant of tomato cans and lack the intelligence to comprehend them, and humans are ignorant of this artifact and lack both the intelligence and the context to navigate it. It was impossible to study in any meaningful manner, until...

An accidental discovery. A second receiver is built on Earth, in the same laboratory as the transporter in order that the destroyed man might continue his life on Earth, even if only as a copy. If a man is destroyed, and the resulting signal goes out to both receivers, there are a few seconds of confusion: The copy on the moon and the copy on Earth share perceptions for just a few seconds. In other words, the Earth copy actually sees what the Moon copy is up to because their brains are identical, and action-at-a-distance between them seems to be a consequence. But only for a few seconds as, once the copies adjust to their different surroundings, they cease to be identical and go on their separate perception ways.

So an idea is tested and the Earth receiver is outfitted with a sensory deprivation tank, so that the Earth copy is created directly inside of it. Since he has no overt incoming sensations, he is able to stay in sync with the Moon copy for a much longer time, though not indefinitely as even in a sensory deprivation tank the small differences in perception begin to break the connection.

However when the moon copy is sent into the artifact to explore, and when he dies horribly, the Earth copy is pulled screaming mad from the deprivation tank, and is unable to communicate what happened. So a certain type of man is needed, one who not only has a death wish, but who will not go insane after dying, coming back, and immediately reliving a new death horror every day.

Such a man is found... And then the character stuff is almost as insane as the plot. As I said it was written in the Mad Men decade and every single male character in the book hates himself, and hates everyone around him too. There is a constant war of sizing up, testing weak spots, and ridiculous posturing over one woman in particular who is an emasculating mega-bitch in her own right. The only exception is the only other female character in the book, whose only purpose is to listen to the main character's extravagantly long monologues about what makes himself tick and then inexplicably to tell him she loves him. She has no personality and in fact seems to have no last name.

It's here that I'll have to admit that I have not finished the book, but despite the extreme bafflement and irritation that I experience in trying to understand the childish mentality of fictional 1960's so-called Homo-sapien, I'm really enjoying it. A lot of writers from those mid decades seem to use very similar character ideas of people; using pop psychology in fiction was all the rage, and it seems as though it was usually about pissing contests, ego-trips, and makin' love to brainless women, man. Even so, the lousy mores of those old battles of the sexes can't obfuscate the overall bonkers yet thought-provoking plot. 

*Flying Spaghetti Monster

A Preachy One About Your Health, Because I Know What's Best For You.

 This book is my new Bible. I got it for my birthday from a certain special someone who is quite familiar with my rants about the inadequacies of modern living, and who knows intimately of my recent obsession with health. Not that I'm one of those dippy health freaks, but since I started going to the gym last year so that I wouldn't have to take Lipitor for high cholesterol and get carpal tunnel syndrome, I've become more aware of how much of a difference that a certain amount of health consciousness can make.

I started taking a few vitamins (a multi-vitamin, some extra C and B and some fish oil) not too long after I began losing weight, because we all know that it is really difficult to get all of your nutrients from food anymore. Especially in today's junk food culture, but what I'm learning is that even if you are a very healthy eater, there are very few vitamins and nutrients left in your fruits and veggies by the time they get to your table. I mean, I think we've all heard that. I'd heard it before, but it kind of goes under your alarm-o-meter what with all of the other things to be terrified about these days. But after reading this book I've decided to pay more attention.

In a nutshell, Dr. Shari Lieberman's case is as follows: Vegetables begin to lose their nutritional potency the minute they are born; The soil ain't what it used to be. Food gets its vitamins and minerals from the ground as it grows. And due in part to modern farming practices, our soil is depleted of selenium in most parts of the county and often has only marginal levels of zinc, magnesium, calcium, and other minerals. Without mineral-rich soils, it is impossible for fruits and vegetables to contain a rich supply of nutrients. Then, once they're picked, they really begin to lose steam. Most of them have been picked, then stored, then shipped, then stored again, possibly for weeks or months. After we buy them, we may store them again for a bit. Then you might cook them, or at least cut or slice them. Each of these steps causes further nutrient loss. And don't even get me started on processed food. You might as well be eating bacon flavored paper for all the vitamins you'll get out of them.

Waitaminnit... am I a dippy health freak? How'd that happen? Well, just because you're paranoid.... yeah you get it.

She has a lot more detail in the book. She's quite a respected nutritionist, and her statements are based on studies and measurements of soil and veggie samples. Plus, you know, the real evidence for her case is all around us every day. America is overweight and unhealthy. Cancer is rampant and so are a host of other mysterious illnesses. Vitamin therapy has been shown to fight many forms of illness. I won't get into it, but if you want to find out more read the damn book for yourself.

So the upshot is this: The Recommended Daily Intake (RDI) or Daily Values (DV) amounts of vitamins that you see on food nutrition labels is a bunch of bunkum. Those numbers, in reality, indicate the amount of vitamins to take only to prevent the most obvious deficiency diseases, such as gangrene. RDI is the minimum wage of the health pay scale, in other words. By taking significantly higher doses of all of the basic vitamins and minerals, as well as certain others depending on your personal health profile, you can in fact prevent a whole host of illnesses and larger health problems. The important thing is to take high doses of all of them, not just one or two, as another important point she makes is that vitamins all work together and support each other. Deficiency in one can cause inadequacy in another. Dr. Lieberman calls it the Optimum Daily Intake (ODI). It's very hard to overdose on vitamins, impossible on some of them, but best do a little research yourself before determining what your own personal ODI is.

I've started taking three batches of vitamins a day, one with each meal. That's 3 full multi-vitamins a day plus extra supplements each of A, C, E, a balanced mix of B-complex vitamins, chromium, calcium, magnesium, fish oil, (for the omega fatty acids) and echinacea just for fun.

There. Now if that doesn't make me a total health freakazoid, I don't know what will. Ohh, maybe regular enemas! ... Nah, I drink Metamucil every day too so, I don't need to go that far. What am I, a Californian?

Commercials Make You Think Drivel Is The New Funny

I haven't had my own personal access to Television in maybe two decades. I despise TV, and have had nothing but disdain for it since... well I don't know exactly when, but at some point I decided that it was the devil. I'm not against a good show, mind you. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the greatest TV show of all time. Actually, Firefly is quite good too. And Angel. And those are great shows because Joss Whedon created them, who is a genius. So I'm not a total TV snob. I believe that film can be art, even on TV. But art on TV tends to get canceled quickly, unless you're lucky. But my philosophy has been, for the past few years, that anything that is actually good, I'll hear about it and can watch it on DVD someday. That's how I discovered Buffy; I never would have chosen to watch that show, thinking that it sounded like the dumbest idea for a show on Earth. Especially because the movie was so bad. But I knew some people who really liked it, so I borrowed a friend's DVDs and gave it a shot. I was able to watch all 7 seasons of it without a single commercial break... which is the point I've laboriously been coming to.

Commercials are the devil. I hate hate Hate HATE them. In fact, I've been known to scream at them in disgust. I don't feel that TV programming is what is responsible for dumbing down America, although there are certainly plenty of shows out there that I wouldn't wipe my bottom with. Hell, if I was a personal Nurse for a quadriplegic Stalin I wouldn't wipe his bottom with them. Well ok, to be fair, I'd never be a personal Nurse for any quadriplegic, Stalin or otherwise. Gross. I'm just not that selfless a person. But still, you take my meaning. Next to commercials, aimless channel surfing is the next in line for most mind-numbing thing ever. Anyway. I feel that commercials, and most popular TV shows, are a way of making people think that raving lunatic morons are funny, or even normal. Like those Wendy's commercials where the black guy wearing a Wendy's wig is trying to convince people that they have a constitutional right to a better burger. I know, I know, it's supposed to be funny. Ha ha we're just kidding buy our burgers. But something about it makes me want to commit suicide inside.

So having said all of this, I finally caved and got cable. I did this because, earlier this year I was happily enjoying my HDDVD player when BAM! Blu-Ray won the High Definition battle, making my HD collection obsolete. No more new movies in that beautiful, pristine format I had so recently become accustomed to. Believe me, you have not seen Unforgiven, The Shining, or 2001: A Space Odyssey until you've seen them in HD. I could have made the switch to Blu-Ray, except that the cheapest player is still around $400, the discs cost like $30 to $40 a pop, and a few other reasons that you probably don't care about, but I do. HDDVD players were around $200, and the discs were usually around $20. Sigh. But so I got cable, because they offer some channels in HD, and I was really wanting to watch some stuff in HD again.

I haven't had it on much since I got it, since I don't actually spend all that much time watching TV anyway. I tend to watch a movie with dinner, and that's about it. But I've enjoyed a few things... I got to watch The Lost Boys in HD, and the other night I tried out the HD pay-per-view channel and saw The Golden Compass. Very nice! But last night, something happened which made me decide that cable in my house is a short lived phenomenon. Spiderman was on TNT HD, and I was all excited because I'd been curious what that looked like in HD. When TNT plays movies, they have commercial breaks. A commercial for a Stouffer's TV dinner came on. I was already irritated by the spate of obnoxious pandering-to-the-lowest-common-denominator commercials I'd been forced to sit through between segments of Spiderman, and the worst part is that they tend to play the same 10 commercials on every break, just in case you'd forgotten about their stupid product that nobody needs from ten minutes ago. Oh, I also have to say that the worst commercials to sit through (Well, they're all horrible. It's so hard to chose the worst, actually, that anytime I complain about any commercial it's going to be the worst.) are the chain restaurant ones where they show you large pictures of gross greasy things that come in food-like shapes and are supposed to be appetizing, but are in fact unbelievably nauseating, and are the worst reason to have HD channels.

(Keep in mind that these pictures, as disgusting looking as they are, are not even what the food you order will actually look like in reality. The actual food always looks limp in comparison to the ads. Gross and grosser. Blechh.)

So this Stouffer's TV dinner commercial came on. And it combined just about everything I could possibly hate in a commercial. It starts off with a shot inside of a moving car; Mom and Dad are in the front and three noisy brats in the back, eating some sort of take out and all looking generally miserable. Then the voice over comes on and says, "When did this become our idea of a sit-down dinner?" Several big gross photos of greasy Stouffer's TV dinners later, and a satisfied family sitting down at home to eat them, and I was screaming, frothing at the mouth, unleashing a stream of obscenities at the TV as though I had just been told I had to wipe Stalin's immobile ass. I mean, seriously, Stouffer's TV Dinners have the audacity to lament the disappearance of a sit down family dinner, and try to convince you that they offer a product which solves said dilemma!!? This is what is going to end us, I swear. The problem is is that people just pretend like it's no big deal to have to witness such towering banality, that it's just a commercial and of course it's dumb but it doesn't really affect me. But it's not true. People, you have no idea how much it affects you. Seriously, try not watching TV at all for a time; try turning off your cable for say 6 months. Then go back and watch some... you'll be appalled at the drivel you're made to swallow.

You might think that you can control it. You know, flip to another show while commercials are on, or mute it or whatever. But I'm telling you, having cable in the house is no different than keeping heroin in the cabinet for medicinal uses when William Burroughs is your best friend and drops by all the time. I don't have any TV addict friends who drop by to get a TV fix, and TV is an addiction I gave up long enough ago that it tastes like ashes to me now, so I'll keep it around for the moment, until I can find a better HD solution, but please. If you ever realize that I've relapsed into couch potatoism, please come over and punch me in the head really hard. I'm begging you, intervene. I think I'll be fine, you know. I gave up smoking and fast food. I'm sure I can keep away from idly turning on the TV for no good reason. I have plenty of methadone, I mean DVDs to get me through the more difficult moments. I'm just saying, you know, TV commercials are worse for you than smoking, fast food, or heroin, so I'm a little more nervous about it.

Place Keeper Place Keeper, Make Me A Post, Find Me A Place I Can Call All My Own

So in the tradition of Bridget Jones' Diary, I've been wanting to start a sort of stat list on certain numbers that are important to me these days. I'm not a girl, I swear. That book is really funny. You do NOT have to be a 30-something desperately single British girl to laugh at that book. The book I say, not the movie. The movie was kind of dumb. You're not allowed to make fun of me until you've read it. I also like The Gilmore Girls, what of it? Wanna fight?! I'll kick your Vin Diesel wannabe butt. Do tough guy posers still wanna be like Vin Diesel? Or is there a new poseur out there for them to cloak their inner inadequacies behind their idolatry of?

Of course we all have a tough guy we admire, though, so perhaps I'm not being fair. If I had to pick a tough guy I admire, it'd be Clive Owen in Children of Men in fiction, or that guy whose nephew had his arm bitten off by a shark a few years back in reality. He jumped in the water and chased down the shark, beat it up and dragged it onto shore, killed it and got the arm out, and they were able to successfully re-attach his nephew's arm. He beat up a shark. That guy is cool, and will never ever have problems with the ladies. True story, I swear. It happened at least a decade ago if not longer though, and I've been unable to find any reference to it online, but my friend Scott remembers it too, so I'm not making it up... unless it was one of his lies that he told for entertainment purposes back in the day and over the years we both forgot it was totally made up, like his famous story of the last great legal Stroudsburg gunfight showdown (yes, Western style) on lower main street in front of the McDonald's in the 70's.... hmm. I'll have to get back to you on this.

Anyway, my stat list:
Motorcycle odometer reading - 1504 miles (it had 3 miles on it when I bought it)
Weight - 194 lbs! (I weighed 212 lbs last September)
Stamina - 40 minutes at 5.8 mph on the treadmill (Last September? 5 minutes at 5.5)
Books published by someone I know - 1 (before May 27th 2008 - 0!) (Big fat congratulations, Julie!) (Everybody go buy a copy at Amazon and leave a review!) (NOW!!) (Or, you can also find it on the New Fiction table at Borders and other fine book chains) (By the way, really good publication party the other night J. Well done, great toast. Good food. Very entertaining conversation.) (I need a tattoo where I can see it in the mirror, now.)

Well anyway, I was supposed to have been in Alaska all last week... I had a job in Anchorage that I was supposed to fly directly to from Chicago, but it got canceled at the last minute. SO, bummer. That would have been a really good post. Which is why, of course, you're stuck with this self-conscious place keeping post instead. I consoled myself this week by catching up on other things. I've added 7 new galleries to my smugmug page... I'd been really slacking on uploading my recent U.S. travel pictures, mostly because I had a hard time finding them interesting enough to bother about. But when I went back and looked at all of them, I decided that there were in fact some good ones that I could be proud of, even if they're not quite foreign travel quality. So here they are: Neosho & Branson, Missouri, USA, St. Louis & Hannibal, Missouri, USA, The Clinton Museum in Fayetteville, Arkansas, USA, 3 Border Towns In Mexico, The Coral Castle, Homestead, Florida, USA, Seattle, Washington, USA, & Chicago, Illinois, USA. Or you can just go to the main page. Or not. I think that the best ones I already posted here, so, whatever.

Am I Alone In My Visceral Reaction To Bush's Monkeyface?

"Eating everything you want is not that much fun. When you live a life with no boundaries, there’s less joy. If you can eat anything you want to, what’s the fun in eating anything you want to?"
-Tom Hanks

I've recently lost about ten pounds. I've been going to the gym since September, not exactly regularly due to work travel, but whenever I'm home at least every other day if not every day. The first three months or so were kind of slow going... my stamina on the treadmill got incrementally better, but I maybe lost a pound or three during that time. Then, in the last month and a half or so, it began to drop rapidly. One time I weighed myself, right before I went to Fort Lauderdale, and I was at 204 lbs. When I got back from being down there for a week and not getting any real exercise, after my first workout I weighed myself again, and I was at 198. Then, once more due to work and other unforeseen drama in my life, it was two weeks before I was able to hit the gym again. So this past Monday I weighed myself and I was still at 198, and yesterday at 197 & ¾! It seems as though I've hit a certain mark in my exercise where my body has finally started to believe that I'm really serious about the whole thing, and has decided to pay attention. Sweet!

My diet probably also has something to do with it. I've been %90 faithful to my 2007 New Year's resolution to give up fast food, and I buy lots of whole wheat products and vegetables at the grocery nowadays. I still indulge in the occasional pizza of course, but I never buy chips or other junk food any more except for Tostitos (which they now have a whole wheat variety of!) and salsa. I use Olivio instead of butter, and buy organic milk. I've cut waaay back on my cheese intake also, mostly because I was paranoid about my cholesterol levels. I haven't eaten more than a pint or two of ice cream in the last six months. I take a bevy of vitamins in the morning and I drink Metamucil with dinner every night. And then I take some more vitamins.

This probably sounds annoying to you. I sincerely apologize. Before I got all health conscious, I hated people that exhibited this sort of behavior and then that's all they would talk about. But what I want to say about it is that I've learned some extremely valuable things by doing the gym thing, and they're not even all fitness related. But this first one is: Exercise and diet are mutually reinforcing.

When I first started going to the gym, I didn't really care too much to change my eating habits. I just wanted to get on the treadmill and work off those extra calories I'd eat the night before. I mean, I cared a little, because I'd just been told that my cholesterol was too high, but overall I still ate what I wanted. But once I'd been doing it for a few weeks, I found that when I went to the store, I'd pay more attention to those food content labels. I found that I actually wanted, for the most part, to avoid junk and high fat foods that I loved, because I'd been so good about working out that I wanted to control my calorie count in order not to undervalue all that hard work. The diet thing actually came very naturally... at no time did I ever feel that I was giving up food that I couldn't bear to give up. I never had to plan to diet... it just happened rather organically. Except for my Fast Food resolution. But even that made sense at the time because I'd just come back to the States and was indulging in all the bad stuff I'd missed while I'd been away, and I knew that if I didn't put the kibosh on it quick I'd be looking like the inbred lovechild of Mayor McCheese and the Grimace in no time.

I've learned loads of other things at the gym, but I'm sure they're all clichéd... More energy, better moods, blah blah blah. I mean, it's all true, but everybody's heard all that before. The only surprises in the whole enterprise for me have been that whole unforced desire to diet thing I just said and also the fact that losing weight happens quicker and more abruptly than one might have thought. Granted, it took me five months to get to that point, but once I finally did, cool. But there's one more thing, fairly unrelated to health but very interesting.

My gym has about 12 big TVs up on the wall in front of the cardio machines so that you can walk, run, bike, or do your elliptics while watching whatever mind-numbing crap is on whichever TV station. Each of the machines has a little channel box which you can plug your headphones into so that you can listen to whichever one you choose. Anyway, I always listen to my mp3 player, but I'll watch the TVs without sound anyway as it helps to distract from the pain of jogging. But yesterday they had CNN, FOX, and MSNBC news on at the same time, and I noticed that all three of them were running the same story at the same time; the one about Bush's latest bribe to us. You remember; he bribed us with a tax rebate when he first got into office, in the hopes we'd like him and not make too much noise when he later unveiled his diabolical plans to destroy the world, and now he's doing it again in the hopes that we'll all go "Oh see? He's not so bad." Jerk-off.

Anyway, that's not my point. My point was that I was watching these three major news networks broadcasting this story simultaneously, and not only the same story, but the same news blurbs under the talking heads, the same exact camera angles, and the same commercial breaks. Different commercials, though. At first I was kind of not too freaked out by it, because it's a big enough story that sure, they're all going to be there at the same time. But I'm on the treadmill for 35 minutes, and the stories continued to triplet each other, even the less important ones. Some news from Iraq, the Roger Clemens on steroids thing. For my entire 35 minutes on the treadmill, all three of those news networks parroted each other exactly, I swear to God. It was very upsetting. It's like they are so confident in their ability to slop feed us whatever nonsense someone is telling them to without anybody noticing or caring that they weren't even attempting to keep up the appearance of being different news sources anymore. They were all using the same camera guy, for God's sake! The guy typing up the word blurbs at the bottom of the screen is working for all three major news networks! I wonder how long before they convince everybody that they may as well conglomerate into one big news agency since their news is identical in importance, content, and spin, anyway. And how long before it's just el Presidente giving us his daily benediction, because if he doesn't say it, it's not worth knowing.

I do have to say though that seeing Bush's monkey face on the TV while jogging is really good for the heart rate. I instantly get angry and that adrenaline rush of hate really gets me going.

Oh, Happy Valentines day! I love you.