SIGNS OF SPRING (finally).

The endless winter finally stopped and there's signs of spring. Now, if I can just get myself motivated to do some walking....

IS THE SCALE MY HOLY GRAIL?

I don't know who the artist is. I bought this years ago and it hangs on my wall.

There have been points in my life where, should I have died in a traffic accident and somebody had to clean up my effects, they would have thought that I was a member of the Nicole Richie Fan Club. Not at all; yet, why the photos of her on my fridge and in my datebook? An examination would reveal that they tended to originate in articles of the genre "Deadly Diets Revealed". You've all seen the stories as you line up to pay for your gas or groceries. You know the magazines I'm talking about.

.

Once upon a time, people had missions. Some would crusade in search of the Holy Grail. Many others set forth in rickety boats filled with rats on a voyage that took months. Think of a ship that had no indoor plumbing and people were stacked atop each other like cordwood. They had dreams of a better life and of freedom from persecution. They were driven by hope and guided by the North or Polar Star. So, what has my guiding light been reduced to at times? A scale. Numbers on a pair of jeans.

.

I know the thinking is illogical and wrong but my mind still goes there at times. It goes there a lot.

.

When we focus on achieving the wrong goals there is a price to pay at some point. The last two decades had an emphasis on the accumulation of goods and wealth. As a consequence the entire world economy is now collapsing. People like us are losing their homes and joining the ranks of the unemployed. The emphasis on the superficiality of looks is driving people into relationships that can not withstand the arrival of the newest, shiny model on the market. So much for "til death us do part and in sickness and in health." Replace that with "until some hot looking nanny comes along." Girls will select friends based not on their merits but on their genes.

.

I think this craziness has just made a lot of people give up on their weight. The ideal is so unrealistic that people fall into the all or nothing thinking pattern and start to compulsively overeat. After all, the images we look at aren't of real people. They are altered creations which do not even bear any real resemblance at times to their human counterpart. Our view of food is so skewed that it gets to the point where it has nothing to do with the satisfaction of fulfilling actual hunger or enjoyment of the fare. The food is junk. It's empty, fast food that's crammed in there to satisfy some other unfulfilled need.

.

And I guess it's that void that we have to fill with something meaningful. Not procedures which leave us freakish in an attempt to find eternal youth or hitting one spinning class after another so that we look like the hamster on the proverbial wheel.

.

I want food to mean sitting down with a friend in a nice restaurant and freely enjoying the taste, the ambience and the company. I want my life to have made a difference to at least one other person or creature. I want to one day be free of the caloric encyclopedia in my head which remembers everything yet cannot remember my mother's birthday. And damn it, I want to take Nicole Richie off my fridge like I really and truly mean it!

DEAR ABBY AND EMILY POST...

A note on the photo. I took this right after I graduated from highschool while on a student language immersion program while in an airport waiting room. A bunch of smoke suddenly came up and the people working there said that "They hoped it wasn't one of theirs." We then had to get on a plane. It's not great quality, but that's a plane in the background (with the smoke behind it) and a hangar to the left of it.

`
`
`
`
`
`
`
`
`
`
`
`
`

.....If you read any of the advice columnists in newspapers or magazines, a lot of them involve questions about neighbours. Well, mine would have been a new one. Never mind the barking dogs or unruly children. My neighbour has moved so I can blog about it now and not offend should he by chance come upon this.

.....What would you do if your neighbour disclosed that his very good friend was a terrorist? Oh, excuse me---an accused terrorist? My friend was talking with my neighbour and in so doing my neighbour admitted that his friend was currently facing trial for a bombing which had brought down an airplane that had killed well over one hundred people. My neighbour also brought to light a little known fact that his friend had interests in a hotel in a tourist area near the town where I live. I can see keeping that bit of knowledge hidden. It tends to keep the customers away.

.....There's an old adage that you can't pick your family but you can pick your friends. It does say something about you. What kind of a person would choose to hang around with somebody who did that? I had always been polite to him in the past, especially given the fact that I felt he had been unfairly targeted. There had been a letter in the local paper about his electronic's repair which he ran out of his basement. I had seen the police there. I felt that it was related to his ethnicity and what I often called the "vanilla wonderbread" mentality of some of the people born in this town.

.....Things began to get odd, however, and it seemed like a scene out of the film"Arlington Road." I have OCD when it comes to certain things. One time he told me he was from Kuwait. Another time he said that he was from Saudi Arabia. He had a wife with two little girls. Before I knew it, they were gone and there was a new wife.

.....The strangest event of all was when the trial finally took place. The day it ended, my neighbour was gone. He had never had the house for sale and had never talked about it. He left the country literally in a flash. The new wife? He left her too. He told the new owner that he was in Kuwait, yet when something needed to be finalized, the phonecalls came up as originating in Pakistan. And perhaps it is sour grapes, but those in the electronics business said that he wasn't qualified in the trade. All very odd.

.....So, what would you have done? I continued to be polite. I am reserved with most people at the best of times. But I could never get the image of those people falling from the sky out of my head.

A VIRUS (ME) + BROKEN PARTS (COMPUTER) = NO BLOG

I think I'll save the computer company rant for some other time. Let's just say that each time they send me an update, the computer runs worse. In fact, it no longer burns CD's or reads simple texts like it did when I got it. A while ago, it needed a simple part. This town, being the great metropolis that it is, lacked it. I bought the wrong one and hey...if anybody lives here they're welcome to it. I then meant to drive to purchase the right stuff but then something happened.

I never get sick. But, I was waiting for the plumber to show. I had worked nights and at two in the afternoon I decided that I had best get to bed. I had to go into the crawl space to turn off the torrent of hot water. When I climbed back up I felt odd. Suddenly, I felt like the guys on the Apollo missions must have felt when they got sick in space. There was no gravity and no direction. I hit the floor and had to crawl to bed where I felt nauseous and where I stayed for the rest of the day. When my friend drove me to the clinic two days later it turned out that I had picked up a viral infection which had caused a fluid imbalance in my inner ear. I wasn't allowed to drive and I wasn't allowed to go to work. It's a good thing I had a lot of sick leave in the bank.

Anyways, I am now playing catch up. The house is a mess. I had to track down the plumber who had forgotten about me. In the meantime, I am surprised the neighbours did not report me as having a grow operation. The windows in the bathroom were totally steamed up. I decided to take advantage of the situation and hung clothes in there to steam out wrinkles and perk up plants. It looked suspicious.

The car repairs ended up being more costly than expected. And kitty took off the other day too. I opened the door to feed the stray, who happens to be his Dad. The cat inside is feral and quick and since my balance is still not 100% he slipped by me. I didn't sleep for two days worrying about him and feeling guilty. Finally, he came back. One good thing in a run of really crappy events.

So, I have ammunition for blogging on bad behavior in Doctor's offices but I need to catch up on e-mail.