Tuesday

Today was fairly successful. I finished my taxes (hurray, refunds!), picked up lights from my friend Kris for the Vote For Equality interview I'm shooting on Thursday (I'll have to explain a bit about that at some point, I guess), and went to the gym and did the elliptical for a nice long chunk of time. And I ate ok. Again, not spectacularly, but I'm on my way to reviving the nice balanced diet I had there for awhile. The key I think is eating your 5+ servings per day of fruits and vegetables- it's hard for me because I don't like most raw vegetables, so I have to cook them, and often I am just too lazy. But this will be a thing of the past soon, I hope.

I'm super tired so the only other thing I'll say is that I promise to never, ever while I am blogging about losing weight call the whole ordeal "my weight-loss journey." They say this on The Biggest Loser (one of my guilty-pleasure reality shows) all the time, and I cannot stand it. I get that losing weight is all about creating better eating and exercising habits, etc, but COME ON. The phrase is just a little too loveydovey for me. Gag.

It annoys me in the same way that I am annoyed when I'm working at preschool and they don't allow peanut butter in the building anymore because there are some kids who are incredibly allergic to peanuts. I get it, theoretically, but again: COME ON. It should be noted, however, that these two things aren't really connected anywhere except in my mind.

Well, oops.

Ok, so I didn't go the gym today. I ate ok but not spectacularly. My excuse is that I had a meeting with my friend Robin about a music video we're trying to make, and then he was like "hey, want to watch Mildred Pierce (HBO's new miniseries)?" And obviously I did, so we did, and then it was 8:30 and while I usually DO go to the gym late-ish at night, I was also too hungry to go without getting a headache. All of which is a long-winded way to say: today I sucked, but I will go tomorrow.

Set on Sunday provided not the WORST food in the world- there were at least veggies to go with the typical Mysteriously-Ethnic-Food-Flavored Meat. And with very little craft service to speak of, I think I came out ok in the end. Yes, I did have a baked potato when I got home, but now I don't have any potatoes left, so that's the end of that, for awhile at least.

Which sucks, though. There's nothing I love more than a baked potato with lots of cheese and butter... unless it's my mom's scalloped potatoes, which have lots of cheese and butter baked INTO them. Oh man, we had the best scalloped potatoes at the Bellagio buffet in Las Vegas. Not as good as my mom's, of course, but amazing just the same. I let myself have two servings because there were no desserts I could eat and I paid $40 for the damn buffet.

There were also good scalloped potatoes in Scottsdale at Don and Charlie's, the famed baseball memorabilia steakhouse. There should be a law that vacation food doesn't actually add to your body fat content.

So, here's to a better tomorrow, in which I will go to the gym AND finish my taxes! I would finish them tonight, but my mom went to bed and I need her to explain things like what the hell all of it means. Stupid freelancing.

An experiment

So, I decided, just now, that I'm going to try an experiment. I'm going to try, between now and May 1st, to write about my ongoing and ridiculous struggles to lose weight. I've been really bad about it in the last couple months, mostly because I've been really depressed, and it's a cyclical thing where when I'm depressed, I just want to sit around rereading Harry Potter, and then I get more depressed that I haven't done anything all day and no one seems to care that I exist. Plus, I'm really good at being in denial- the whole "well, I'll go to the gym tomorrow, but today I'm going to sit around rereading Harry Potter." And then I don't go tomorrow. So, I figure maybe if I'm sort of holding myself accountable for it by writing about it every day or two, it might help with motivation and also with not being in denial. At least I hope so. I have to do something different, and this seems like a good start.

I'm not going to tell you all how much I weigh (because it's embarrassing) or how many calories I burned or any of that boring stuff. I'm just going to report back on whether I went to the gym and ate well. It'll give me a reason to write more, too, and I can segue into other stuff from the boring crap.

I don't really expect to lose a ton of weight in just 4 1/2 weeks, mind you, but again, it seems like a good start.

So tonight, I went to the gym. Not for too long, or as long as I used to stay, because it closes at 8pm on Saturdays and because I'm easing back into things. I did the elliptical, which I like because it doesn't mess with my asthma the way a treadmill would. If anyone can explain to me why a treadmill makes me out of breath and the elliptical doesn't, that would be great- it makes no sense to me, I just know that I live in fear of treadmills. They remind me of running laps on the field in elementary school, and Mike Axtell lapping me as he completed his 4-minute mile. Jerk.

As I was leaving the gym and Nice Bald Manager Guy was closing the gates, he said "Keep it up, you're doin' good!" Apparently he failed to notice that I haven't been there in over a month. But at least SOMEONE thinks I'm doin' good, even if he was just saying it... I need the encouragement.

I ate ok today. I was on set for part of the day, which always makes eating well a huge task- sets are littered with things like soda and candy and chips and basically anything portable that a crew can grab and go. That doesn't translate well to losing weight- it's one of the main reasons I gained so much weight at AFI. I'm on set tomorrow, too- for the whole day this time, not just a half day like today- and I'm kind of dreading it. This also means I won't be able to go to the gym tomorrow... but Monday and Tuesday I have off, so hopefully I'll make up for it.

A plea: PLEASE email and bug me if you notice I haven't posted or something. I clearly am not very good at doing this on my own.

Oh, and I'm going to start going to Weight Watchers again too. It helped a lot the first time I did it, and then they changed the stupid system and I got confused and fell off the wagon. I might change to Monday night meetings instead of Tuesday night, though- I can't face Carl The Kindly Old Man when he weighs me and sees that I gained back the 12 pounds I lost last year. I will kind of miss Carl, though, so maybe when I am back on track I'll start back on Tuesday nights. Tuesday is Glee night with Steve though... hmm.

So thanks for being there, guys, and I hope this isn't too dull for you to follow. I don't want to lose my 3 readers.

Whoops

Disregard what I said in the last post- Watson kicked ass in the second two Jeopardy shows. I guess the computers will become our overlords. C'est la vie.

elementary, my dear Watson

Tonight was the first of a long, drawn-out Jeopardy game featuring Watson the supercomputer, developed by IBM to... play Jeopardy, I guess. He was playing against the "two greatest Jeopardy players"- but the weird thing was that he wasn't very good. I mean, he was good, and for awhile it looked like he was going to win, but he ended up tied with one of the Human Being Players. Then there was a little segment about how the group of scientists programming Watson at IBM had a hard time making him understand the various phrasings of Jeopardy questions. Which made me think...

The whole point of supercomputers is to be smarter than humans, right? And everyone is potentially concerned about how someday the supercomputers might get so smart that they'll take over the world a la 2001: A Space Odyssey. But how can a computer be smarter than the people who program it? It was a little like Watson was Amelia Bedelia, always taking statements at their face value, making cakes out of sponges when requested to bake a spongecake, etc.

It was kind of comforting, to see the computer be so bizarrely out of tune and to watch the Human Beings match wits with him. Not that I REALLY thought computers were about to take over the world, but you never know.

i guess i'm that girl

That girl who is really bitter about Valentine's Day, that is. The thing is, I am not bitter about the idea of Valentine's Day- I think it's kind of sweet. I'm bitter about being single and apparently perpetually unattractive to men, combined with the marketing and overemphasis on sweets of Valentine's Day. And my grandmother Mere Mere died on Valentine's Day, so it's always a bit of a weird feeling.

But most of all, I am bitter about those friends of mine who are in relationships and take it upon themselves to send Valentines to their friends, their poor lonely friends who are probably drinking themselves to sleep on Valentine's Day. I don't know what compels these people to do this, but seriously, friends in relationships: IT'S REALLY CONDESCENDING. DON'T DO IT. WE HATE YOU AND WILL SEND IT BACK LACED WITH ANTHRAX.

That is all.

somebody get me a dream manual, stat

Two nights in a row now, I've had very disturbing dreams involving Steve possibly being gone. Gone as in missing or dead. They are freaking me out.

In the first, I was at a bar on Halloween, in my Pippi Longstocking costume, with friends from middle school. Steve apparently owned the bar, which was in my neighborhood in San Francisco. A guy with a gun came in, and starting shooting everyone. I hid under a table with Shonda Thomas (who I wasn't even really friends with in middle school) but the shooter saw us and shot at us, a wound which then miraculously disappeared. Afterwards, I couldn't find Steve, and was panicking until he walked in having been looking for me, perfectly fine and un-shot. Big hug, Independence-Day-when-Jeff-Goldblum-and-Will-Smith-did-not-die-in-outer-space-style, and I woke up, very worried.

Last night, the dream was much more vague and I just had a general sense that Steve was missing. It involved a Gchat conversation with Marc Lummis, who kept reassuring me that Steve was probably fine, wherever he was, and a lot of phone calls, and then he popped up, having been "in the desert."

I don't understand this. Obviously I have some weird subconscious thing going on where I am worried about Steve, but I don't FEEL worried about Steve in any way. Steve is a big boy and one of the most cautious people I've ever met- he knows how to take care of himself perfectly fine. Of all my friends, I probably have the fewest reasons to worry about him. So this begs the question: WTF, subconscious?

I suppose there are two possibilities: either these dreams are prophetic (God forbid), and I really SHOULD be worried about him and perhaps install a GPS device in his neck, or I am preemptively dealing with the day when I don't live in the same city as Steve and I am separated from someone who has basically been my best friend since I've been in LA. I guess it's a good idea to start dealing with that now, but I'd really prefer that it didn't take the form of nightmares.