Feel better about yourself NOW!

No matter who you are, one thing is almost for certain: there just aren't enough hours in a day. There's not enough quality time with loved ones, not enough focus to finish every project, not enough willpower to eat right. So how do you stretch the dollar that is you to cover everything? How do you achieve the impossible? How do you get to a point where the predominant feeling as your head hits the pillow is one of accomplishment and satisfaction? Let me now share with you just two of many tricks that I've come up with to transform yourself from a dreamer into a doer:

Trick #1: Eating Healthy

You know what you are supposed to eat. Fruit, vegetables, easy on the meat, very little sugar, blah blah blah. You know when you grab that doughnut that it means you'll have to go to the gym later. You know that instead of going to the gym you'll go home and eat ice cream. You know that tomorrow morning you'll top it all of by eating not one but a pair of Pop Tarts for breakfast. And you feel bad about all this. But it's inevitably going to happen. Unless you are one of those strong few who force themselves to take ACTION! What "take action" means here is you get on a strict regimen of healthful eating that includes, among other things, a system that assigns different point values to food items depending on how healthy or unhealthy they are. This is a neat system. However, I will not delve into its intricacies because I am going to plug my rival system instead! It is called CAUTIOUS CARL'S I AM SKINNY PROGRAM, and it has revolutionized the way I (feel about the way I) eat.

CAUTIOUS CARL'S I AM SKINNY PROGRAM or CCIASP works with points just like that other one that makes you feel so bad for not doing it. But CCIASP will not make you feel bad! CCIASP is your baby, CCIASP is you! You are allotted a certain number of points per day. These points can be adjusted at the beginning of each day depending on whether you feel like adjusting them. You must work within your allotted amount of points; no going over! When you are faced with a food item, you must determine how many points it is going to cost you if you eat it. This is done by carefully scrutinizing the food item and then assigning to it the number of points you feel it is worth. It's that simple! Here is an illustrated example:


So if you want to drink 3 liters of Black Cherry Shasta, just make sure that the contents of that bottle are worth fewer points than you have left in the day. And judging by this diagram, you're having the Shasta for breakfast, so you should still have plenty of points to work with. It's really quite simple! And in case you accidentally go over on your points for a day (which realistically will almost never happen, because you are in control!) then you can just borrow a couple of points from the next day's point allotment! Piece of cake! Which, by the way, you should never have to feel bad about eating again!

Trick #2: Staying Well-Read

It's hard to read. Not the mechanics of it, you should be able to actually read words, otherwise you would be having quite a time figuring out what all of this is. But to find the uninterrupted large chunks of time that will allow you to get any meaningful reading done can be difficult. We have a lot going on around us all of the time, and the absence of an "on/off" switch on a book certainly doesn't make it seem any more appealing! So when I am worrying about not having read enough, I use a simple trick to put myself at ease. Whatever activity I am engaged in, I finish the activity by uttering these words: "That was a good read." So if I'm watching a movie, as the end credits begin to roll, I stand up, stretch, and say "Well, that was a good read!" If I've just finished playing a video game, as I'm powering down the console, "That was a really fine read." Then I tell the next person I bump into that I've just finished a nice book. Just pop that little fact right into the conversation!

So, if you had been watching videos of cats falling out of windows and attacking babies and making weird sounds on YouTube*, you would wrap it up by saying, "That was a good read," and then tell the next person about the book you'd just finished. You can easily dress up the content of your activity to make it seem like the content of a book, too. For example, with the cat videos you could tell someone that it was a novel adaptation of the broadway play Cats (which is itself loosely based on an actual book). If the person asked you who the author was, you would simply tell them you'd get back to them and then excuse yourself. There's nothing to it! You can be finishing three books per day in no time!

I sincerely hope that these tips have helped. I know that they've done wonderful things for me. Thank you for your time. And remember, if you were meant to have a perfectly trim, healthy body and a near-perfect reading comprehension level, you would have been born on Krypton!




* here are those videos, to help get you started on your reading for the day:





Not a bad read. Not a bad read at all.

Never go drinking with an Irishman.

I got a bit of a shiner on my left eye tonight! I got it from this guy I know, and with whom I had started the evening on pretty good terms. Then about an hour later, he gave me this:


He and I were playing basketball with a few other guys, and on one play I tried to cut to the hoop as my teammate zipped the ball in to me, anticipating that I would finish at the rim in this manner:



And I would have finished in that manner, and made Phil Jackson and the whole city of Chicago get all excited and smiley, but I got punched in the face first. What actually happened was the guy took a swipe at the ball to knock it away, but I caught the ball before it entered the area into which he was swiping. So instead of the ball being there to get swiped, my eye was.

The reason you should never go drinking with an Irishman is that his accent might be hard for you to understand, leading to a situation in which each of you thinks the other agreed to be the designated driver, which will pose serious problems once it's time for the two of you to drive home. Especially if he decides to drive and you are here in the Colonies. We drive on a different side of the road than they do, you know.

La Bassine

I like blogs. This may come as a shock to those of you (I know there's at least one of you!) who read my post about twitter. No, I'm not adverse to social media. I'm just against the social medium that encourages concision at the expense of being at all clear. It's called twitter. Blogs, on the other hand, are complete. They may not always be as direct as a tweet, but at least they are complete. I'd rather blog than tweet. I guess I'm just old-fashioned.

I was down amongst the weblogs reading a weblog post by a friend whose weblog I follow. I will call him Sven, since that seems to be how he refers to himself in the Blogosphere, and that is where we are now. Sven wrote cleverly about the dilemma brand-new parents must face in the hospital when wanting to be sure that the newborn they are about to take home is really the one that was made from their bodies. In a comment I was writing on the post, I found it necessary to use the word "bassinet". As you can see, I know how to spell that word. But I didn't when I was commenting on Sven's post. And that is the catalyst for today's story.

I didn't want to seem ignorant in my comment, so it was essential that I spell "bassinet" correctly. Naturally, I turned to Google. Man's best friend. The China of the worldwide web. Now, we're going to dig deep into my psyche right here, so put on your gloves and masks. I doubt I'm alone in this computer searching practice: when I am searching a name or word on any search engine, I rarely type in the entire name or word. Especially when the spelling of the name or word is my primary concern. For example, if I was searching for J.K. Rowling in my Famous Authors database so I could send her a work of fan fiction in which I am a witch and Ginny Weasley accidentally suffocates during a sleepover at my house and I end up marrying Harry, I would just type in "row". This would likely be enough to get me to a list of at most three or four people, from which I could select the victim of my obsessive tendencies. When you type a complete name or word into a search engine, you put pressure on yourself to nail the spelling outright. So I never do.

This seemed like a prudent spot for a new paragraph. So I needed to figure out how to spell "bassinet". I navigated to Google, set my cursor, and proceeded to overshoot with my only-type-part-of-the-word strategy. To correctly practice this strategy, I should have searched for "bassi" or "basi" to start with, and then decided whether or not to add more letters based on the results of that search. But I was overconfident, and audacious enough to search for "bassine". Can you imagine? Searching for "bassine" right out of the gate? What on Earth was I thinking?! Those who are (duly) shocked by my impudence will be happy to know that Google punished me. It turns out that "bassine" is actually a full search result in its own right, as the load-bearing portion of the name "La Bassine". La Bassine is a company that manufactures top-of-the-line tubs used for in-home tub births. And thanks to the all-encompassing nature of Google, not only was I greeted by a list of links to sites where I could learn more about the tubs or even buy one to grace my own home, but it was also my happy lot to be smacked right in the eyes with pictures of the tubs in action! I would include one of the reality-grade photos here, but that would just be too much. I mean, have you ever seen a tub birth? I've seen pictures (now), and it looks like Horrible Soup. The beauty of the child's arrival is totally overshadowed by the awful pink goopiness of the water into which the child has just been forced. So instead, I'll give you the Italian soap-opera version of La Bassine:

It means "We're almost there." According to Google.

Squanto is BFFs with the Pilgrims

The 2010 edition of Thanksgiving Day has past, taking with it the few days when elementary school students from the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream Waters get split into Pilgrim and Indian teams and are shown how to adorn themselves accordingly using colored craft paper. Also past for this year are those HUGE DEAL football games, the ones that are so much more important because they take place in conjunction with the bringing-home-and-sticking-to-the-refrigerator of those colored craft paper Pilgrim and Indian costumes. And the awesome trace-your-hand-and-make-a-turkey-out-of-it pieces go up on the fridge too. And then you watch football. And it's a HUGE DEAL.

The football game I watched this Thanksgiving actually did not disappoint. It involved both teams playing below their potential (apparently - according to the people who know many things about those teams) and then a blocked field goal with 4 seconds left in the game, which won the game for the team who blocked it. I never heard my Grandmother scream or yell until that game. I went a quarter of a century knowing her to be a composed woman. And then we watched that football game together. The reason she was so into it was because she wanted one team to win so she could rub it in the face of my cousin's husband, who is a die-hard fan of the other team. It was fun.

It seems like there is another reason Thanksgiving is a Day. Oh yeah, the food! Nope! Actually I was talking about the Native Americans who helped out the Pilgrims when they washed up on the shores and started to drop like flies because they couldn't find a Pizza Hut anywhere. Legend tells of a Native gentleman by the name of Squanto (or, if you asked my sister when she was six years old, "Squasho") who did fantastical things like show the Pilgrims how to build corn and fires, so they could avoid dying from starvation and exposure. This is my understanding from elementary school. Clearly, the public elementary education system has Thanksgiving down. The part that throws me though is the way the Natives are portrayed in popular Thanksgiving canon. The consensus seems to be that they were generally unfazed by the Pilgrims' arrival, and straightaway stepped in to shore them up in their time of need. There is little mention of any feelings of animosity or distrust, unless you watch Disney's Pocahontas, but that is not about Thanksgiving, so it doesn't count. Maybe the Thanksgiving Pilgrims just found a really nice, stand-up group of Natives who had no qualms about putting these squatters up on their tribal land. That's the impression I've gotten, at least. But my thought is that, even if the Natives were cheery and compliant on the face of it, the truth of the matter was a bit closer to this:

This picture tries to make you think, "Oh, check out Squanto, all he wanted was a fancy European rifle and for someone to tell him he was the boss of the tour group! Now he is BFFs with the Pilgrim men!" But we know what was really going on. One wonders if Squanto would have been so helpful had he been able to see into the future to review this weblog's top five list of atrocities perpetrated upon Native Americans by palefaces:

1) The Trail of Tears saga and all events related or similar to it.
2) The classification of them as "savages" to the wider world.
3) The alcohol and casinos. Enjoy your addictions!
4) Their portrayal in Disney's Peter Pan. Really, really sorry about that, guys. We tried to make up for it by doing Pocahontas, is that worth anything by way of an apology?
5) The performance (and logo) of the Cleveland Indians. Again, terribly sorry.

This should shed a fresh light on Thanksgiving. So thanks, Natives, for your patience.