Personal

Today is our first anniversary. I'm still very glad we did a court house wedding.

Posting will likely be on hold for the next couple of weeks. In her journal, in an entry titled "Back to School Commandments," Sylvia Plath wrote, "There is a certain clinical satisfaction in seeing just how bad things can get." To be sure, lots of things for me are going fine right now, but we have a lot of costly and irritating little calamities to contend with of late, such as the incident on the Natchez Trace. Point is, I'm too grumpy to write much of anything on the blog, as I don't want to sound unhappy when I'm really not.

There's a reason for my absence here the past several days. Jonathan and I are in Florence, and I'm now blogging from the public library. We're about to go to Trowbridge's to grab some lunch in a bit. We're down here in the general Deep South for a visit, for a wedding, and to find a place to live. More on that later.

• I just installed a one-gig RAM card in my iBook. Much needed.
• I used to love this show!
  
• Jonathan and I are going out of town tomorrow for a little over a week, so blogging may be light, if I have a blog at all, that is.

I'm disappointed that this story about obesity in the NYT hasn't gotten more play. The story discusses research findings that show the degree to which obesity is genetically determined and the finding that the body's weight is going to maintain a certain range. If someone keeps his/her weight below that range, the physical and psychological effect is akin to starvation. Here's one of the most interesting parts, in my opinion:

The Rockefeller subjects also had a psychiatric syndrome, called semi-starvation neurosis, which had been noticed before in people of normal weight who had been starved. They dreamed of food, they fantasized about food or about breaking their diet. They were anxious and depressed; some had thoughts of suicide. They secreted food in their rooms. And they binged.

As I've mentioned in this space, I struggle with my weight. I'm not overweight; in fact, my body mass index is right in the middle of the normal range, but I have to fight constantly to keep it that way. A few years ago, I weighed about twenty pounds more than I do now. I dieted and lost forty pounds, putting me at 107 pounds. Then I gained some of it back. Now my basic goal is to stay under 130, and it is extremely difficult. I definitely have a touch of that neurosis they're talking about. I believe that if I ate as much as I really want, I'd be about 150 pounds. Anyway, I wanted to link to that story in the hope that it'll get more uptake.

It seems like a lot of bloggers are trying to lose weight right now. Me, I'm (as always) in my perpetual attempt to maintain current weight/lose 10 pounds, as my clothes are snug. Maybe 15. Anyway, I'm sure I've blogged about it before, but I enter the food I eat into FitDay, which I really like. It counts the calories for you and gives you a breakdown of your carbohydrate, protein, and fat intake. Here's a screenshot of my food so far today:

I only look at the number of calories as a rough estimate, but it's still helpful.

There's no purpose for this post other than to whine. I'm already a good bit of the way through my spring break, but I'm not yet rested, but I have to plunge back into work anyway: papers to grade, conference deadlines, and other writing deadlines loom. All I want to do is lounge around, eat, and watch movies. Over the past few days, I've watched You, Me and Dupree (hilarious!) and See Jane Date.

True confession: I used to have a big crush on Brannon Braga:

which is fine, but nerdy on an epic scale as he is a writer and producer of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Voyager, Enterprise, and First Contact. But in the early 1990s (particularly my first couple of years in college), I thought, OMG, he writes this stuff, and he's so cute!