My Bud Light billboard has changed over to Michelob Light. It’s the first beer billboard that has made sense to me beyond a guttural “Maybe I could have sex with that guy” reaction. The billboard says, “It’s not a resolution. It’s a lifestyle.” It shows a man jogging in the background.

There’s a girl version of this ad on I-15, which made me think, “God, I want abs like hers.”

Their website is useless, by the way, don’t even bother visiting it. You won’t be able to see the ad. I just took a picture of it instead. First good beer ad I’ve ever seen and they didn’t put it on their website…

I’m all worked up about an online argument with Michael Main about Rolling Stone and hip youth oriented bibles. The truth of the matter is that I’m continually tempted to buy one of those youth oriented bibles. I want to look at the passages and see how they explain away the misogyny and hatred. I secretly hope that they will have just the right words to make Christianity sensible in my mind.

Sure, Jesus’ message was sensible. Love thy neighbor. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. I just haven’t noticed a lot of Christians following those noble thoughts. Even the characters in the Bible have a hard time being nice and withholding judgment. How could that be explained in a youth oriented bible?

The problem is that the Christians that are quietly following the words of Christ are ignored while the judgmental Jesus freaks are shouting out their hatred. The best ministry is quietly following your beliefs and allowing others to notice how smoothly your life flows. It doesn’t come in flashy two page spreads in Rolling Stone magazine. I immediately equate hypocrisy with advertisement, so when Rolling Stone rejected the ad, it sounded completely logical to me. The idea of refusing to buy the magazine because they rejected the ad never occurred to me.

It made Michael Main angry and he blames their rejection on bigotry. He thinks they made a mistake to base their rejection of the ad on a religious stereotype. The article doesn’t even mention the word “God,” yet they rejected it. He thinks they should just come right out and admit that they did something wrong. His response took me totally by surprise. I am looking at the ad right now. Why would they want to put an ad in Rolling Stone? They want to sell bibles. It has nothing to do with Jesus or the Word of God. They want to sell bibles. That’s what any company wants to do: sell their product. I guess as a capitalist, I should be angry with Rolling Stone for rejecting their ad. Of course, as an American, I also believe that they have the right to reject whatever ad they want.

I don’t even freakin’ like Rolling Stone. I wouldn’t have bought their stupid magazine anyway. The bible on the other hand… Man, you can’t buy publicity like that. I didn’t even know that particular bible existed before this whole thing happened. Now, I’m thinking about checking out that bible. Zondervan Publishing should thank Rolling Stone for rejecting them. They got an article in USA Today because of them. I guess everything works out in the end. Zondervan gets lots of publicity without even having to pay for it.

These are all the states that I have visited. This thing reminds me of those stickers that you can stick on your motorhome showing all the places you’ve been. The real question is that with so much gray area, why do I keep going to Las Vegas over and over?

Create your own Visited States Map

I am a such West Coast girl! I need to get my booty over to the East Coast.

Every few months, I go on a Disneyland kick. Sometimes it’s the Haunted Mansion that I obsess about. Other times it’s the extinct rides. I remember going on a ride the first time I went to Disneyland. It was a science ride that shrunk us to the size of the atoms. In my memory, Stacey, my little sister, is with me, but she doesn’t remember this ride at all. In actuality, it was probably Travis, a cousin of sorts. He was actually young enough that year to make sense of this memory.

While we waited in line, Travis trembled. He was scared of being shrunk to the size of atoms. I explained to him that it wasn’t real and it was just a ride, but he didn’t believe me. Finally, I figured out a way to convince him. You could see the people getting smaller and smaller as they went into the huge microscope thing. The shrunken atom-mobiles had shrunken people in them, but they weren’t consistent. Every once and awhile, a mobile would go through without people, but the shrunken ones were always full. That was enough to convince Travis that it was just a ride. I remember feeling so smart that I was able to figure the secret out on my own and explain it to Travis. I felt like such a grown-up, calming him.

That’s all of my memory. If you would like a succinct description of the ride, see the Yesterland website. I don’t remember the snowflakes or the eye or any of the other things that people love to reminisce about this ride. It was called Adventure Thru Inner Space and Monsanto (the people who make Round-Up weed killer) sponsored it. Monsanto has sponsored a CGI recreation of the ride: Adventure Thru Inner Space Tribute Site.

You can buy a DVD that recreates the ride experience. There are a couple of online movies that give you an idea of what it was like. I can’t wait for mine to come in the mail because it has been 25 years since I saw it. This time, I won’t have to talk down a nervous four-year old.

You know you’ve been to Vegas too many times when you start to tell a story about Vegas and you don’t remember which time it was that you were there…

Not last time or the time before that or, I think, even the time before that, we were in Vegas. Stacey, Dan, Mike and I were exchanging hopes for the trip. I told them in a loud voice, “I want to go to The Gospel Brunch at Mandalay.” I heard mumbling from Dan and Stacey. Mike overheard them and laughed. “What? What did you say?” Stacey smiled at me. “Dan asked what The Gospel Brunch was.” Mike laughed again and I pressed her. “What did you say?” She smiled and said, “You’re trying to eat breakfast and people sing in your face about Jesus.”

They laughed again and I sniffed. “It sounded fun to me.” I thought of all that good gospel music that I wasn’t going to hear. I thought of all that halleluiahing that I was going to miss. I imagined people sitting at their tables, holding their hands up to the singers to “feel” Jesus and realized that my cohorts probably wouldn’t be able to enjoy it on the guttural level like I could. The Gospel Brunch sounded fun to me.

The Gospel Brunch came to my mind when I read Michael Main’s weblog. He just wrote an entry about Subway Evangelism that made my skin crawl.

The Main Point – Subway to Heaven by Michael Main

I read Michael’s site because he’s a good writer. He’s a Christian in the best of ways. Just a couple of days ago, he wrote a wonderful article about the best sort of ministry (God and Guts) that made me nod my head at his wisdom. Then, just a week later, he writes an entry highlighting a bunch of Jesus Freaks that start a ruckus on the subway (imagine a fake fainting spell) and then preach the gospel. I was going to go into the comments and express my opinion angrily, but it looks like his other readers beat me to it. He was even nice enough to explain that he had posted it because he thought it was ironic that they would start out their ministry with deception. So, I’m not angry with him.

In the end, all I can do is sit here. Stewing about Jesus Freaks isn’t joyful, so all I’m left with is how I imagine Stacey would evaluate their ministry: “You’re trying to get to work and people sing in your face about Jesus…”

I think high self-esteem is overrated. A little low self-esteem is actually quite good…Maybe you’re not the best, so you should work a little harder.
– Jay Leno, O Magazine, February 2003

When I went to school, they told us that Self Esteem was important. We needed to think highly of ourselves in order to succeed. No matter how hard I tried, I was never able to really grow an arrogance. Only a crazy person would look at my life and think that there was not room for improvement. I sometimes think that no matter how well I improve, I can always get better.

I just read Scientific American’s article about self esteem:

Scientific American – Exploding the Self-Esteem Myth by Roy F. Baumeister, Jennifer D. Campbell, Joachim I. Krueger and Kathleen D. Vohs

Now, it seems, the pendulum is swinging the other way. Self Esteem has been researched in countless studies. After years of telling people that low self esteem was the cause of all the world’s woes, it turns out that they were wrong. There is little to no correlation between low self esteem and aggression, drug use or promiscuity. There is little to no correlation between high self esteem and excellence. The best the article could give me was this quote: “In the course of our literature review, we found some indications that self-esteem is a helpful attribute.”

Good thing for me, because I have been flunking high self esteem since the sixth grade. Now that it’s out of style, maybe they’ll have low self esteem classes where a gym teacher makes you balance on a Bosu Ball while the rest of the class points and laughs at your butt. I could ace that class.

“I don’t know how I opened up Midnight Special on DDR, but it’s unlocked. I don’t know what I did to unlock it.”

Mike responded in song, “Let the Midnight Special, shine a light on me.”

The two of us finished the chorus together and I didn’t bother reiterating that the song on DDR-U2 is a totally different song with the same name.

“What does that song mean?”

“I don’t know. I think it’s a…”

“Drug reference?”

“No, a reference to God, but same difference. Either that or a great way to get auto parts.”

“I thought the phrase ‘Midnight Special’ referred to a gun.”

“I don’t know.”

“I think in the 70’s and early 80’s there were these cheap guns, kind of like a revolver or something, that they would sell really cheap on ‘Midnight Specials.’ I thought that’s what that meant. I guess an auto parts store could have a Midnight Special sale too, I guess.”

“No, I think it refers to stealing parts, you know, like ‘Midnight Auto.’ You know, you find a car that’s the same make as yours and you steal the part you need.”

“I did that for a rear view mirror once for my Yugo.”

“You’re going straight to Hell.”

“Hey, it was impossible to get parts for that thing. Someone stole my rear view mirror, so I stole one back.”

“So the entire human race is one entity to you? Someone steals from you, so it’s ok to choose another person at random to steal from?”

“Well, when you say it like that, it sounds bad.” I was feeling guilty. I thought of that person in West Valley over twenty years ago coming out to his crappy red Yugo and realizing his rear view mirror was missing. I started singing the chorus of Midnight Special again and Mike groaned. The song was in my head and it was skipping over and over, playing the first line of the chorus in my mind and starting again.

“That song reminds me of that Twilight Zone movie with Dan Akroyd.”

“Yeah, I don’t think I’ve heard that song anywhere else.”

“Who sings that song, anyway?”

“I don’t know. Alabama?”

“I thought it was Creedence.”

“Who?”

“CCR, but it doesn’t sound like Fogarty.”

“It might be someone different in the movie.”

I planned on looking it up some time later in the day and emailing him all the information, but several hours later, I’m looking at the Google results and I’m just as clueless as I was this morning.

Was it Van Morrison, Creedence Clearwater Revival, ABBA or Paul McCartney? It was Creedence. But, is it a gun, God, drugs or felony auto part procurement? None of the above, apparently. According to The Prison Diaries of Sethuraman Srinivasan Jr, it’s about getting out of jail.

“Specifically, I’m going to explain what the Hell the title “The Midnight Special” has to do with anything. You see, I’ve heard unconfirmed reports that the old blues tune of the same name (it was covered by the Kingston Trio and Creedance Clearwater Revival, among others) was in fact written about this particular pokey. Seems that when the light from the midnight train coming down from Houston shined on an inmate, legend had it that he would be released. Hence the lines ‘Let the Midnight Special – Shine its light on me – Let the Midnight Special – Shine its everloving light on me.’”

Of course, I have been unable to fathom if this website is a work of fiction, an online journal or both. It looks like a primitive weblog (started in 2000) of a pretty interesting guy (he was on Jeopardy!). He teaches history at the University of Houston and in 1998 taught Southern History to inmates in a Texas prison (thus explaining his knowledge of prison-lore). Last entry is dated 2003 and I can’t find him anywhere else except quoted in history journals. After reading through his site, I’m wishing he would revive his blog in a more conventional format.

I guess I believe him. There’s not much else competing with him as far as an explanation. I liked it better when I believed it was a gun. I guess I believe guns will set us free far more than the light from a train. How screwed up is that? I have no faith in superstition, violent tendencies and I was willing to steal auto parts from innocent victims. Sometimes I wonder why I’m not in prison.

After looking at this site:

Repent America

I’m wondering if Jesus would have incurred the wrath of these folks when he sat down and ate with the tax collectors and prostitutes…

Here is an interesting article about the psychology of shopping, setting up shop and getting customers to spend their money.

They have ways of making you spend

They love the Apple store. Who doesn’t? They hate the grocery store. Who doesn’t? They have interesting things to tell you about resisting the urge to splurge.

I’ve talked before about my belief in randomness. I believe there is a lot to be learned about ourselves and the randomness of the universe is one method of figuring out what’s going on in our heads. White Noise is a movie that starts Friday about another method for gathering randomness.

Michael Keaton plays a man who wife has disappeared. He believes that she is speaking to him from beyond the grave through EVP, electronic voice phenomenon. It’s an interesting premise and something I could write and entire book about, so I’m excited to see the movie. I have never used EVP to gather randomness, but I love to read about it and listen to the recordings. There’s even a company in Utah that will come to your house and record hours of empty air and analyze it for you.

EVP reminds me of the Reverse Speech phenomenon. People will take recordings of spoken or sung words, reverse them and they pick out phrases in the reversed speech. David John Oates, founder of reverse speech, purports that these reverse messages are always the truth. He says that we can subconsciously understand this reversed speech and it explains those times when you can tell someone is lying to you.

With both of these, I tend to think that the voices heard have more to do with the listeners than with phenomena. In both disciplines, they raise the volume and speed up or slow down the recordings in order to find these “messages” from the beyond or the subconscious. They manipulate the recordings so much that finding something is almost inevitable. Many times, others can’t hear the “messages” unless they are told what to listen for.

As far as viable methods of study, I think they are both bogus, but I do think they hold an interesting window into our own psyches. I believe that the reverse messages found in George W. Bush’s speeches have nothing to do with the president and everything to do with the person who “found” the reversal. I believe the phantom voices found on tape recordings of “haunted” houses in the Salt Lake Valley have nothing to do with spirits and everything to do with the ghost hunters. I think reversed speech or random tape recordings would be a great way to find out more information about yourself, but only if you are the one looking for “messages.”

That’s why White Noise intrigues me. Is it a movie about a man slowly driven to a point of insanity by his own obsession with phantom voices in a tape recording? Is it a movie about a man who eventually comes to terms with the loss of his wife by fixating on what he imagines is her voice? I have a feeling that I have thought about this subject far more than the writers of the film and I may end up being disappointed. Oh well, it’s always a crap shoot when you go to a movie.

I finally figured out why I love Ballard Street. It’s a comic that is offbeat and strange. There are no real punchlines, but it makes me happy every day that I read it. Partake of the splendor here:

Ballard Street

I love Ballard Street because the characters are so emotional. Their faces fill with pride at their strange accomplishments. Their brows furrough with anger at the disputes. They shiver in anticipation of the next bad thing in their lives. They bounce with joy at their odd activities.

The characters of Ballard Street are living on the edge. They are filled with their respective emotions and they seem like they are going to burst with it. That’s why I love Ballard Street.

Here is Chapter Twenty-Six:

(Continue Reading…)

We are almost done with the year and I need to think what I want to do with resolutions this year. I am constantly in a state of working on my goals, so Jan 1 shouldn’t be a big thing for me, but this year, I feel like setting some resolutions. I want to get to my goal weight this year. I want to finish Looking for Christ this year. I want to pay off the IRS this year. I don’t know where I’m going to come up with all the money, but I would like it to show up in my life and I want to put it all on payments to the IRS. Maybe my book will sell and I’ll get enough for a book advance to pay off the IRS. That would be really nice. I could just pay them off in one fail swoop. If there was any left over, I would like to buy a house, but that’s not nearly as important to me as just paying off the IRS. Hell, while I’m dreaming, why don’t I dream that Looking for Christ is a runaway best seller and I make millions of dollars from it. I pay the IRS, I buy a house, and I sock the rest away in an interest bearing account. I go on a book signing tour and end up on national television where I become a sudden star. Out of nowhere, suddenly, Laura Moncur’s face is on every magazine and talk show. I can just keep dreaming, but as the wise Dr. Frank-N-Furter said, “Don’t dream it, be it.”

Resolutions aren’t about dreaming. They are about commitment. I am very reserved about what I commit to. That word is so powerful that I really don’t like to say that I’m committed unless I KNOW I can do it. Even when I half-heartedly jumped into NaNoWriMo, I was committed to finishing it. I know I kept telling myself that even if I don’t finish, I got a lot more written than I would have had I not done it, I knew that there was no way that I wasn’t going to finish. I had come too far and watched myself achieve too much to not finish it.

Knowing that I can do so much is such a strange feeling to me because the truth of the matter is that I haven’t been able to write much fiction all month. I know that I can write 3000 words a day, yet I can’t write that much every day. When I write that much, I need to rest. When I write 50,000 in a month, I end up needing to rest almost an entire month. This month has been frustrating for me because I know that I can write 3000 words a day. Not writing for a month is really hard. I don’t know.

What am I committed to doing this year? What will I do, no matter what? Well, I’m getting to my goal weight. There is absolutely no stopping me now. I am going to get there no matter what. I am wholeheartedly committed to getting to a healthy weight once and for all. I can put that one on the list. As of my last weigh-in at Weight Watchers, I weighed 170 pounds. I intend to lose 40 pounds and weigh 130 by October 1st of next year.

I am committed to finishing Looking for Christ. If I don’t get this story out of my head, I will go mad. I am going to write a chapter a week until it’s done. If there are more than 52 chapters left in this book, then it’s too damn long and I need to start editing. I am fully committed to getting a chapter a week out the door in 2005 until the book is done. I already have an idea ripe and ready for outlining for my next book. I need to get that ready and in place for NaNoWriMo next year, but I’m not even sure if I’m willing to commit to NaNoWriMo next year.

We owe the IRS so much money that I really don’t see how I can dig myself out of it. I don’t know what to put on my list of resolutions about it. I don’t know where to start or what baby steps I need to take to get out of it. All I can see is making payments on it every month, but that just feels like a drop in the bucket. Enough drops will get it paid off, eventually, so that’s what I can commit to. I am committed to paying $2500 a month to the IRS every month in 2005. If I can pay more, I will gladly pay more, but for now, all I can imagine is paying that much. Even paying that much makes us watch our finances closely. I guess all I can do is my best, even if it is just a small installment.

That’s it. I can’t commit to anything else. Those three things are all I can focus on. One more thing would send me over the edge and overextend me to the point where failure was guaranteed. When I look at it, they seem like lofty goals: lose all the weight, write a book and pay a huge debt. Yet, I can see how to do each one of them and I have no doubt that each of them is very doable.

Last year, I gave some lame excuse about how I’m always working on my goals, so I don’t need to make New Year’s Resolutions. I did that and here I am, at the same weight I was last year and owing the same amount of money. If I had put it in print what I was going to do and published it to the whole world, I think I would be at my goal weight by now. So, here is the whole story:

Laura’s New Year’s Resolutions: By January 2006,
I will weigh 130 pounds.
I will have finished writing Looking for Christ.
I will have paid at least $2,500 a month to the IRS.

I’ve talked about robots alot (Artificial Intelligence, I, Robot, I, Robot Reloaded) in the past. I don’t know why I want them to exist, but they are so cool to me. Honda has some movies of their brand new ASIMO robot. Not only can it walk on two feet (amazing!), it can go up and down stairs (rock on!) and it can RUN! They say it runs at 3 KM an hour. That’s almost 2 miles an hour, which seems slow, but when I weighed 236 pounds, I could barely walk 2 miles an hour. I think it’s amazing and the videos are fun to watch!

Honda ASIMO Videos

It just made me feel like I would be able to see robots in my future. I would be able to interact and communicate with a brand new life form of our own creation. I have all but given up seeing aliens in my lifetime, but a different species of our own making is something that we are so close to that I feel like I could reach out my hand and touch it.

This is the best idea for a cheap date that I have ever heard of in my life. It would really only work with married couples, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this were a really fun thing to do on a blind date.

Courtesy of Michael Main: The Bargain Hunt

The show on BBC America that he’s talking about, Bargain Hunt, sounds like a really fun show to watch. I wonder if I have that channel? I seriously haven’t bothered checking the channels for months. I turned on VH-1 for a half hour or so last week, but my television viewing has dropped to almost nothing. I wonder if the show is worth changing the TV from Game Mode (for the Xbox) back to TV Mode.

From Boing Boing: “The Arkon LavNav is a nightlight that clips onto your toilet seat. It senses your approach in the night and glows gently (no blinding 100w bulb at 2AM) — green if the seat is down and red if the seat is up.”

I’m a little clumsy in the middle of the night. Can you just imagine how the toilet would look when the light fell off the lid and into the toilet? I can’t flush it. I’d have to reach in and get it. Yeah, I think I’ll leave this one to the early adopters and risk sitting on the toilet without the seat.

Arkon’s website seems to have a multitude of choices in gadgetry. Motion activated soap dispensers that would spew soap on my cats when they walked by. Personal air purifyers that would blow that strangely smelling ionized air at me. PDA mounts that would allow me to see what songs are playing on my Tungsten while I’m driving (ok, those look really cool).

Over the Christmas holiday, I read The Da Vinci Code. I had been told that it was a cheap Foucault’s Pendulum rip-off. At first glance, it might appear that way. Both books start with a murder in a museum. Both books are conspiracy theory stories in which the characters are searching for The Holy Grail. Both books drag everything under the sun into the conspiracy including Mickey Mouse. That, however, is where the correlations end…

(Continue Reading…)

It looks like I’m going to get my White Christmas after all. It snowed on Wednesday night and it has been too cold for the snow to melt ever since. It makes me happy in a child-like way. The snow is powdery, so it’s no good for snowmen or snow balls. It’s just right for skiing, but I’m not that type of girl. I’m sure Snowbird, Brighton and Park City are active with skiers. If they aren’t, they will be right after Christmas day. This sort of fluffy goodness is what made our mountains the site for the Olympics. It just makes me happy that we have snow instead of yellowing grass for the holiday.

Considering my new focus of attention, my personal blog has the potential of becoming the “Laura is Losing Weight” blog. More and more, I want to write about new exercise things I’ve found or exciting ideas for eating healthy. That, however, is not why I started this weblog.

This site is where my writing goes: my fiction, my feelings, my ideas, my opinions. If I devote this blog to health and fitness, it’s no longer totally me. The incongruous juxtaposition between a rant about the gym and the next chapter of Looking For Christ is too much for me. I’m not much of a person to compartmentalize, but Health and Fitness is one thing that is getting big enough to take over.

So, Mike and I started Starling Fitness. It’s a daily blog about Health and Fitness. All my entries from here that are pertinent to this subject have been copied over there. If I write something intensely personal there, I’ll mention it here. Mike did all the programming and style sheets for it and he has done an amazing job of it.

I’m really happy how this is all turning out and I am right on schedule for that October finish. I’m just going to talk about it over there instead of here. Hope to see you there!

It has been foggy in Salt Lake. The engineers are complaining, but I feel cozy and enclosed. The airport has had delays, which is the last thing they need during this busy season, but I am staying in the city with no flight plans for the holidays. Last weekend, Mike, Stacey, Dan and I went to a movie at Jordan Commons. When we came out, the clear evening had become foggy. The Christmas lights looked fuzzy and soft as if someone had put Vaseline on the lens of our lives.

It has been so cold that I fear that we will have no snow for Christmas this year. We had snow earlier in the year, so I’m not feeling Scroogy, but it looks like we will be graced with yellowing grasses and foggy air for the holiday instead of clean skies and a crisp white covering over our city. Thus is Christmas in Utah. Half the years, we are buried so deeply that we are stranded in our homes. The other years, we are roasting in fifty degree weather or freezing below the snowing temperatures.

The funny thing is that I like the fog. I like the snow. I like the sweltering fifty degree winters. I like the horrid temperatures below freezing. I like them all. I still complain when I am cold or hot, but on the whole, the weather is one of the things binding me to the city with steel bands. I like the passing of the seasons, even if they are unpleasant. I know that a new one is around the corner in a few months. I always have something to look forward to. I fear that if I moved to Hawaii, I would feel as if time stood still, waiting for a winter that never came.

I need this quiet, dark, cold time. There must be a hibernating creature deep in my DNA longing for the cold and fog, because this weather feels wonderful to me. Have a very foggy Christmas and a slushy New Year!

“Have you read the Da Vincio…”

His voice trailed off, but I knew what he was talking about.

“No, I haven’t read The Da Vinci Code .”

“I was watching something on The History Channel about it…”

I could tell that he wanted to talk about a book he didn’t read and conspiracy theories he has only had a passing glance of. I went through my conspiracy theory phase in the early nineties, so I had no patience for him.

“I heard it was a cheap rip-off of Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco. I read Foucault’s Pendulum, so I didn’t bother with The Da Vinci Code. Foucault’s Pendulum was written in Italian and translated rather poorly, so maybe that’s…”

The phone rang and I answered it professionally even though I was in mid-rant. We never got back to the conversation and in retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t get to finish. I was about to talk about Portuguese, Latin and Italian. I was about to tell him how I regretted that I didn’t write the translations in my book so that my friends could read it. I was about to tell him about Dylan’s rant, “Bring me the head of Umberto Eco!”

I just looked up The Da Vinci Code at my library’s website. They have 10 books and 49 holds. Anyone who has stepped into a Barnes and Noble in the last year has seen the huge display of Da Vinci items. Apparently, The History Channel even has a show about it. All that popularity makes me recoil from it like a Britney Spears concert.

Yet, at one time, I was so intrigued by the idea of conspiracy theories that I was willing to slog through Foucault’s Pendulum. I looked up the Latin. I muddled my way through the Portuguese. I did my best with the Italian. I consumed the Templars. I was intrigued by the Kabala. I even chuckled at the thought that Mickey Mouse had a part in it all. I didn’t go all Illuminati or anything, but I enjoyed the ideas for a brief month or two in my life.

I liked the ideas in the past. Why do I recoil from them now? Is it just the popularity of them that makes me dismiss them with a “cheap rip-off” jab? I’m feeling guilty now and my words from this morning sound callous and hollow. I guess I should read the book. It’s not like it’s going to tax my intellect like Umberto’s did. I could probably read it over a weekend. I’m not waiting in line behind 49 people, though. I better buy my own copy.

I made Silver on Yourself! Fitness today. That opened up the Alpine Retreat exercise space and let me use the Techno music. I really liked the Alpine Retreat. There was a mountain biker that drove by in the background a couple of times and a hot air balloon gently floated over the water. I don’t know why those little extras make things more enjoyable for me, but they really do. It reminded me of being up at Snowbird. The Snowbird Ski Resort has a nice open space where they have Oktober Fest and I imagined I was up in the Wasatch mountains exercising.

By the way, if you don’t exercise for a week, she does give you a lecture about consistency. When you start exercising regularly again, she gives you a lot of positive feedback. She has told me two corny jokes. Yesterday, I wasn’t too happy about exercising, so I chose the “You’re lucky I’m here” selection. She responded, “Kind of like my date last night.” This morning, she asked me if I’m always this animated and then said, “I am, get it?” You know… because she’s computer animated… Yeah, I didn’t think they were funny either, but she never tells jokes when I’m exercising. That’s the important thing.

On another note, tomorrow is my second DDR-U2 workout with Sinistar, the editor of DDR4Health, on Xbox Live. We are meeting at 7am Eastern (5am Mountain), so if anyone wants to join us, we have room for two more people. We play the songs on Light for 30 minutes and let the computer choose them at random. I’m excited for this workout. It gives me something to look forward to during the week.

I am really enjoying all the exercise options that are available to me. I still have both gym memberships, but I haven’t used either one in a long time. I’m getting workouts that are just as intense as I would at the gym, but I don’t have to leave the house. I can just hop in the shower afterward and get ready for work. Something about not going to the gym bothers me, though, and it’s not the fact that I’m paying for something that I’m not using.

I think that being at the gym is a positive influence on me because there are people there who are uber-fit. Having someone to look up to and strive to be like is really inspirational. The brown-haired girl from the Bosu Incident could have been one of those people. She was able to perform every exercise that the teacher asked without a flaw. She was really good and really fit, but instead of being a role model, she brought back every junior high nightmare in one vivid flashback. Even though the brown-haired girl isn’t at 24 Hour Fitness, I’m reluctant to go there.

I haven’t worked out the whole gym thing. Maybe the gym isn’t right for me, even though I have found inspiration there. I don’t know the answer to this yet, but I’m still working on it. In the meantime, you’ll find me exercising at the Alpine Resort on Yourself! Fitness. There are no brown-haired girls there. Maya’s my personal trainer and she never makes fun of me.

My weight loss story is not the story people want to hear. People magazine runs articles about people who lose 100 pounds in five months or people who lose half of themselves in half that long. The populous likes to hear stories about the obsessive compulsive guy who lost weight by eating nothing but rice cakes. They want to hear about the lady who put on a pair of tennis shoes and ran herself thin in record time, eventually winning marathons. My story isn’t nearly as glamorous.

I joined Weight Watchers January 17, 2002. I remember the day because my life really hasn’t been the same ever since. My habits have drastically changed since that day a month before the winter Olympics. What was I thinking? I joined Weight Watchers right before I went to Hawaii for two weeks. I went to Hawaii. I went to Weight Watchers in a Catholic church in Ka’paa. I lost weight on that trip and I didn’t feel like I missed out on anything Hawaiian. I tried all the food, I just logged it in my food journal.

What was I thinking? I’ll tell you. My friend, Stacey Staley, was looking good. She had always looked good, but she had confessed to me a few months earlier that she was the biggest she had ever been. She was wearing a size 14 and I would have killed to fit my size 24 ass into her fitted slacks. Still, she had been unhappy with her appearance. Several months after her confession, she looked amazing. I mentioned it and she whispered to me, “I didn’t want to tell anyone. I joined Weight Watchers and I’ve lost twenty-five pounds.” I was amazed. She ended up losing forty pounds, getting to goal and earning Lifetime with them.

Two months later, I noticed that my sister (also named Stacey) was getting thinner. She had always been more fit than I was, so it wasn’t amazing to me, but I asked her what she was doing. She confessed to me that she had joined Weight Watchers at work. She said that she really liked that she was able to eat at any restaurant. She said I should come because they were starting a new class at her work in January.

After fighting with every diet on the planet, I was tempted by the freedom to eat anything as long as it fit within my points range. I had tried the Atkins Diet, which ended in a bread binge that lasted for months. I had tried Body For Life, which was abandoned when the program didn’t allow for the pain that a new exerciser was going to feel. I was ready for Weight Watchers.

I knew two people who were looking fabulous because of Weight Watchers, so I joined with my sister’s at work program. I was disgusted with my appearance. I was ready to do whatever they told me to do because whatever they had was working. It worked for Stacey Staley and it worked for my sister. My sister was cut from the same cloth as I was. If it worked for her, it would work for me. I joined blindly and followed all of their rules. Forty-five pounds dropped off me with relative ease.

That’s the glamorous side of my story. I lost forty-five pounds in about four months. It was so easy that I was planning on being at my goal weight within the year. But here we are nearing my three year anniversary, and I’m not at goal yet. For awhile, that was really discouraging for me. I felt like I should be at my goal by now. Even though I had lost all that weight, I felt like I was a failure because I wasn’t at my goal yet. Each month that went by made that goal seem so much further away.

It wasn’t the plan’s fault. It’s not like I was staying within my points range and the weight wasn’t budging. No, I couldn’t blame it on Weight Watchers. My weight loss stagnated because I wasn’t following the program. Sure, I would follow it faithfully for a couple of weeks, but then the binges. I had allowed the bingeing to return to my life. I made excuses just like everyone else does. I could list them right now for you, all the excuses that I made for myself. They sounded so valid when I made them, but now they seem empty, like an abandoned hermit crab’s shell.

So here I am. My butt fits easily into those coveted size 14 jeans. I find myself in the strange situation of being where I wanted to be and finding out that it’s not enough. I know Weight Watchers told me that it was not enough, but back when I started with them, all I wanted was to be as thin as Stacey Staley was when she started. Now, I’m there and I realize they were right. My weight needs to be between 109 and 131 just like the little chart says. Losing forty-five pounds isn’t enough for me anymore.

Last Saturday, I was back on track. Last Saturday, I started Weight Watchers again just like I did back in January of 2002. The only difference is that it is so much easier for me now because I know exactly what to do. What is she thinking? Starting a weight loss program right before Christmas? Why doesn’t she just wait?

Nope. Can’t wait. Not one more minute. Not one more second am I going to wait. I can enjoy Christmas and eat healthy. I know this because I’ve done it for the last two Christmases. I can live like this for the rest of my life because this is the healthy way to go. I have cut the bingeing out of my life. That’s the only thing that I needed to do. I just needed to quit making excuses for the binges. You know the excuses (it’s Christmas, we’re on vacation, we’re camping, it’s a party, it’s the weekend, we’re celebrating, ad infinitum). They are crushed under my feet like that empty hermit crab shell. The shards splinter and spray around me and I am released from them forever.

If I lose at a healthy rate, I will be at my goal by October 1, 2005. That seems so far away, but I refuse to do anything unhealthy and losing faster than one or two pounds a week is not healthy. You’ve seen me do amazing things. I lost the first half of my weight without a glitch. I wrote 50,000 words in my novel in a month. I’ve written almost every day in my blog for over a year. I can do amazing things and this is the next one on my list. I will be at goal by October 1, 2005. This year, I’m going to be a vampire for Halloween and knock your socks off. Hope to see you at the party!

The fiber optic lights on my small Christmas tree pulsate at a rate that could cause seizures, but my contacts have been carefully placed in their proper containers. I am blind, so the lights are soft round balls of color to my eyes. They look almost fluffy.

Being blind always seemed like a detriment to me, but now, I pity the perfectly sighted. My cheap little tree looks like a wondrous joy of light and flickering. I want to reach out and touch the fluffy lights, but they don’t exist. They are merely tiny specks in the real world. In blind world they are large, round and almost feathery.

Only the blind can experience this. I am amazed at the beauty and call Mike to see, but he can see too well. He takes off his glasses and squints his eyes, but they are just lights to him because he is not blind.

I forget how blind I am sometimes. The gas-permeable contacts go into my eyes within minutes of my waking and stay there until right before I sleep. My eyesight has been aided since the age of ten on that beautiful day when I got my first pair of glasses. The world was suddenly sharper. I could see things that I never knew other people could see. Each leaf on the tree was visible and flapping with the breeze.

The MOUNTAINS! Oh dear Jehovah, the mountains! I could see every crevice, crag and gulley. My lovely mountains of soft billowy snow were transformed into a crisp backdrop worthy of any episode of the Brady Bunch. The white blobby clouds looked like cotton fluff and angel hair.

In that instant so many years ago, I realized all the best in the world that I had been missing. I remember taking my glasses off and comparing the two images, filling in the details. After years with corrected vision, however, I had forgotten. The beauty and softness of the world when I was blind was lost to me that day and replaced with the crisp details and never ending minutia.

When I am blind, the world suddenly becomes smaller and softer. The lights loom largely over me with hazy halos. My reaction time is slowed, so my walking is slower. The world closes in on me when I am blind. I had forgotten how cozy it could be.

I just found a website devoted to exercise gaming called DDR4Health. I read it all day today and because of it, I added quite a few things to my Amazon wish list. Most of them are too expensive for me to contemplate purchasing right now. They’re just there to remind me of all the cool things that are out there. Here’s a quick overview of the things that are just setting my mind afire right now.

GameBike

Think of it as a huge controller for your console system. It works with PlayStation and they sell an adapter for use on Game Cube or Xbox. Pedaling the bike causes the game to accelerate. According to the documentation, it doesn’t make a difference if you pedal quickly or slowly, you just need to pedal to make it work. I think this would be a great controller to use with Project Gotham Racing. So what if you are pedaling and steering a bike instead of driving a car? It would make all that game time productive.

FP Game Runner

This thing looks like a cheap treadmill connected to a controller. It connects to your computer for first person games with a USB connector. It doesn’t work with any of the current gaming systems (computer only). When I saw it, I thought to myself, “Hmm… I could take apart a normal controller and solder the connections to a cheap treadmill from the thrift store.” I wouldn’t recommend this item because it is so expensive. For that kind of money, you could get a heavy duty treadmill from Nordictrack that goes up to 30% incline at 10 mph.

KiloWatt

It’s another huge monster controller for your console system. It is compatible with Xbox and PlayStation. This is a strength training machine. It is meant to build upper body strength, but the FAQ state that you will notice improvement in your quads as well. Apparently, it’s a huge machine that you manipulate instead of pushing buttons. I wasn’t interested in this one as much because it’s so colossal.

The Journey to Wild Divine

This is not an active game. It’s a biofeedback tool to help you meditate. I thought it was really interesting since getting me to calm down is nearly impossible. I keep thinking that I’ll learn to relax someday. When I saw this, I thought, “Maybe then I could relax.” I keep trying to buy relaxation instead of realizing that the best thing I could do is just complete some projects and write some chapters. This program looked cool, though.

Even though all of these things look like they aren’t quite ready for prime time, what sets my mind afire is the idea that they are the start of a wave of exercise gaming options. I can imagine a future where every house has a gaming machine that attaches to their game console. It works cardio and strength training and makes the games exciting and challenging on an entirely different level. Of course, I could always just go outside and play like my grandma always used to say…

Fixed some microphone problems. Still recorded on MusicMatch. Mike adjusted the levels on Sound Forge and was able to edit out one phenomenal speaking error. Other than that, this is about as good as it gets without entering a recording studio.

Looking For Christ Audio: Chapter Two Download

15 K MP3 file recorded at 64 kbps – 32 minutes 11 seconds

This audio track is MP3. It was recorded with MusicMatch (at 160 kbps) and I haven’t learned how to adjust the microphone level so that it’s loud enough to hear without cranking the volume up all the way. If it were meant to be perfect, then I would record it in a professional studio and the dog’s claws wouldn’t be clicking in the background.

Perfection is overrated…

Looking For Christ Audio: Chapter One Download

13 K file – 28 minutes 52 seconds

Update:

Mike put this track through Sound Forge, fixing the volume level a bit and removing the dull hum in the background. To speed the download process, we made them 64 kbps instead of 160 kbps. Since he fixed the volume and noise, we didn’t lose much by reducing the quality and it will download a lot faster. He can’t fix all the little speaking errors, however…

I have so many things to talk about that I put on hold for the last month. Everything looks like crap, though. I know it’s the Demon of Perfection spitting all over my ideas, but I haven’t been able to get it back into the box yet.

I got DDR Ultramix 2 for the Xbox, but I was so busy this month, that I have only played it once. Before I started NaNoWriMo, I had been so excited for its release, but now, all of that seems so silly and superficial. Why can’t I bear to put the game in the controller? Well, I can’t play the songs on anything higher than beginner, which isn’t really a workout for me, so playing the game is just playing the game for fun. I can’t have fun, I have chapters to write.

I told myself that I was going to take a month off and not write a word for a month, but my fingers have all of these muscles from writing every day and they get restless if I leave them with nothing to do. I wrote over 14,000 words in two days. I can’t expect to go cold turkey, can I?

I left them all in a bind in the last chapter. Simon was sick with a fever and Herod’s soldiers were on the road behind the swell. What is a swell? I imagined it to be a kind of rolling hill like you see in movies set in Great Britain. We don’t have hills like that. We have huge, lurking mountains or flatness. Of course, they aren’t in Great Britain or Utah. They are dunking Simon in a lake that may or may not exist in ancient Israel.

See that? See that last paragraph? That’s why I need to take a break from writing fiction. The problem is that when I try to go back to my regularly scheduled blogging, the Demon of Perfection gets all medieval on every idea I have.

The worst of it is that I feel like I’ve run a huge race and there were only three people at the finish line cheering for me. I know there have been over a hundred of you reading my chapters every time they’ve shown up. Those numbers on the stats just don’t cheer loudly enough to hear all the way here in SLC.

The Utah State Library for the Blind never got back to me, so I sent them a $300 check. Twenty hours at my current salary is less than that, but I think I called to St. Lucia about twenty times a day last month. I’m also working on recording my chapters as MP3s so that anyone who is blind can listen to them. Voice work is a nice break from writing fiction.

Maybe I’ll feel better tomorrow.

I picked up Yourself! Fitness a couple of weeks ago. I have really enjoyed exercising with Dance Dance Revolution Ultramix on my Xbox, so I thought that this game might be interesting. I had no idea how much I would like it.

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Blogging seems so different now. I just took a look at all the Friday Fives that I have missed over the last month and I really can’t bear to answer the question, “If you were a shoe, what would you look like?” Even now, I’m tempted to answer the question. I can feel the answer welling up within me, but the Internal Bullshit Detector that I installed to get through the month of writing nothing but fiction until I hit the 50,000 word mark keeps bitch-slapping the answer until it whimpers something about Saint Bartholomew.

“He was skinned alive, you know…” it quietly mutters, hoping the words will keep the Bullshit Detector from hitting it anymore. “He’s usually depicted as a bloody figure carrying his own skin. Charming, huh? Don’t you think it’s strange how scared the Christians are of the Wiccans when the Christian symbols of holiness are so gory?” The Bullshit Detector raises its hand as if it’s going to hit the idea again. “Show some respect!”

I don’t know how to uninstall it. I hit the Add/Delete Programs button on the Start Menu, but it’s not listed there. I don’t quite remember installing it, but I must have done it. No one else has access to the mainframe of my mind. I’ve actually found the Bullshit Detector useful over the last 30 days. Maybe it’s in the Startup folder and I just need to put it back into the list of programs to be clicked on only when I need it instead of continually running in the background.

It’s there right now, trying to transform and mangle the words I write into something useful. “Maybe Ambigo could be feeling like this. Maybe Petros is trying to document everything that has happened and is having writer’s block or something…” It works very well. I didn’t have writer’s block the entire month. I just had moments when I was so tired I couldn’t move my fingers. Fortunately, Stacey, Dan and Mike took me to Vegas and my fingers got a good four-day rest right in the middle of the month when I needed it most.

It was so helpful having that voice in the background at all times. “What does this have to do with the task at hand? Is it research? No? Well, it certainly ain’t writing fiction! Get back to work, slacker.” The Bullshit Detector speaks with a southern accent in a really loud voice. I think it’s an amalgam of that drill sergeant from An Officer and A Gentleman played by Louis Gossat Junior and Nell Carter from Gimme a Break when she was mad at the girls and not the loving nanny that she was most of the time. It’s neither female nor male. It’s tough as nails and it’s telling me that I am completely off my rocker if I think I am going to post this as a blog entry.

Maybe it’s not a Bullshit Detector. Maybe it’s the Demon of Perfection that has haunted me since I first started writing way back in 1979. Miss Veater reading my essay about Great Britain in front of the whole class and telling them that what I wrote was exactly what she was looking for is not enough. Mr. Godfrey reading my poems in front of the class and not making fun of them was not enough. Getting my work in the literary magazine was not enough. Being a member of the staff of the literary magazine was not enough. Publishing my thoughts every day was not enough. Writing 50,000 words in a month was not enough. Yes, that’s what it is. I’ve received another visit from the Demon of Perfection.

Dammit, I thought I had that thing locked in a box. How the hell did it escape? Good costume, though…

I am so tired. I feel like I should write something today, but all my words are gone. I’ve spent far too much time with the saints this month and not enough time with the sinners. Razor magazine has an article called “21 Sins to Commit in 2005.” I think I’ll read that and see if there is anything interesting for me.

I made it! I just verified my word count with the NanoWrimo people and I’m done!

Thank you, Michael, for proofreading my chapters! Thank you, Mom, for reading the first few chapters and giving me some encouragement. Thank you, St. Lucia, for giving me hope in the beginning when I needed it.

Me sleep now…

Here is Chapter Twenty-Five…

Chapter Word Count: 1929

Monthly Word Count: 50,634

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Here is Chapter Twenty-Four…

Chapter Word Count: 3343

Monthly Word Count: 48,705

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Here is Chapter Twenty-Three…

Chapter Word Count: 2822

Monthly Word Count: 45,362

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Here is Chapter Twenty-Two…

Chapter Word Count: 2730

Monthly Word Count: 42,540

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Here is Chapter Twenty-One…

Chapter Word Count: 3338

Monthly Word Count: 39,810

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Here is Chapter Twenty…

Chapter Word Count: 3399

Monthly Word Count: 36,472

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Here is Chapter Nineteen…

Chapter Word Count: 2900

Monthly Word Count: 33,073

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Here is Chapter Eighteen…

Chapter Word Count: 3158

Monthly Word Count: 30,173

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