Imaginings and Pessimism

My Mind and how it Works

I remember watching a movie growing up called "What About Bob," where the main character tells his psychiatrist that if he fakes certain diseases, then he doesn't have them.  I always thought that was a clever idea, but never figured that becoming horribly obese wouldn't follow under the same rules.  If I just pretended to be obese, then one day I'd get sick of it, and just wake up to a "Big" like transformation and suddenly be Tom Hanks in "Joe vs the Volcano."  That seemed like a really good idea, because... Meg Ryan.

I was a bit upset when I learned that wasn't the case.  I actually found myself to be upset by a lot of things I learned growing up.  I honestly don't know how/where everyone acquires their knowledge from in growing up, but nobody sat me down and said, "there's a difference between movies and reality, so don't rely on them," or "a nocturnal emission is not another way to say that you've pissed in your bed."  I never had that kind of guidance, primarily because everyone just seems to get that guidance without having to get a parent or friend to tell you, and why would my parent presume that I wasn't going to be able to get that sort of training from life itself.

So there are maybe a few key things about life, society, oversharing, or boundaries that I haven't learned yet, and when I conflict with obvious norms, I just don't really notice or understand why they're a problem.  In my mind, it all makes sense -- I'm equally as confused at others as they appear to be by me and my behavior.

I legitimately peed my bed until I was fourteen years old.  Most nights I'd go to bed, and wake up in urine.  My body just wasn't waking me up -- it was enjoying the dream, and I could just relax and make the urgency go away, so just do that and enjoy the dream.  I had to have a pouch sewed into my tighty-whiteys to hold a device that would screech loudly when urine would connect the circuit on the box, emitting the sound.  However, this rarely woke me up.  It did, however, wake up my siblings in adjacent rooms, and they would get very mad at having been woken up by the alarm that I was peeing.

And because my body had already begun changing with puberty, when other things began to emerge, I wrote them off as being just other things I need to not have happen anymore.  Nobody explained what having a hand-party with yourself meant, so when the topic came up in immature circles of discussion, the best I could figure was that the rigor mortus One-Eyed Willy was struck with each morning was evidence of my having participated in hand-parties in my sleep.  So my only contributions to those discussions were, "I do it in my sleep."  Which captured attentions and bought me a reputation of just being a natural.

It all seemed very strange for that to be something people wanted to talk to me about, but figured that was how things worked and went along with it.  Now, you might be thinking this all went away when I actually did have a hand-party; but I legitimately thought I was sick, and was too embarrassed to talk to my parents about it.  And I was sixteen at the time.

I didn't learn what a "wet dream" was until I was nineteen, when I laughed at someone for having one, and then bragged about how I hadn't pissed my bed for 5 years now.  That was when someone sat me down and explained things to me that had yet to actually make its way onto my radar.  What I found out made me feel like my entire time in puberty was lost and really not experienced.  Since then, I've discovered other things that society in general considers to be "common knowledge" and I really have just no clue.  And when I figure those things out, various events from my life suddenly make sense, where before they were menageries of confusion.

In essence, unless someone tells me something straight-up, I don't tend to learn it, or find enough evidence around the inferences to lead me to that exact result.

My Mind at Work

I thought I had won the lottery the day I found out that I could be critical of others, and get paid for it.  Engage "my career as a software tester."  I didn't know that was even a thing.  I was just working at a software company in their technical support, helping old people reset their passwords, and found some things wrong with some of our software.  So I emailed the development group and said, "these things are strange, and I don't like them because they generate a lot of calls.  It would be better if we did x instead."  And the head of Development reached out to me and asked if I'd do testing for them part-time.  Once I found out someone would pay me to be critical, I latched onto that like a magnet to some iron.

Nobody taught me how to do testing -- I just applied the same algorithms to work that I had to life (still not understanding that those algorithms were seriously misguided), and was able to work out the majority of what was expected of me within a few months.  After years of doing it, I went to a conference to see how everyone else was doing it and found out that I was about 95% correct with what I had figured out.  The other 5% I didn't care about, as that represented some mindsets and notions I thought to be contrary to the role, so I was happy with where I was at.

However, this positively reinforced my thought that I could simply rationalize my way through life -- I used it to find a job, so I could just use the power of my mind to do anything else I needed.  It turns out love is not something that can be quantified, and feelings are more important than reasoning a lot of the time.  That's not to say that I don't feel feelings, but rather I feel them in extreme ways.  Unless something is REALLY upsetting, I will try and approach it from a silver-lining perspective, just to break even on the notion of whatever the bad news was.

And this also applies to good news -- perhaps something else should be considered in the negative to make sure that something that is good stays good by not overlooking something minute which could turn into something bad.

I've found this activity to be very beneficial in my career, but it's forced me to always take plans and agendas, and voice the most realistic worst-case scenarios for them that I can potentially see on the horizon.  This may paint me as a pessimist, but after being accurate time and time again, it seems like my warnings would be welcomed to others; but they've always been met with resistance.  And now it seems that I'm warning just to cover my own ass for when things undoubtedly fail.  And that's a different reason to why I started doing things to begin with.

So now I'm finding myself emotional at work to help balance all the rationalization I employ while being employed, and it is just plain exhausting.

My Weight

  It's not good, folks.  I had to buy a scale that had a max weight above 500 lbs. because my 450 capacity scale was throwing an error when I stepped on it.  I've jumped up and down a lot lately in my weight, but getting below 400 is a real challenge.

For starters, I fully acknowledge my addiction to doing nothing, and my addiction to food.  I love them both for different reasons.  And each time I've tried to fix it, the two things that always show up as the perfect pairing for this situation are "Diet and Exercise."

It's hard enough to conquer one addiction, but to conquer two at once has always been super difficult.  I'll get going, and things will be going great, and then a trip or visit or sickness will make everything come crumbling down, and then I find a month of work was just reversed in a weekend.  And depression sets in, because how can I compete with those kinds of numbers?  And if my behaviors are bound in that direction, it means that losing the weight won't necessarily rectify the behavior, just change the starting point.  So it's less like a fix, and more like a treatment plan, and that sounds more like acupuncture than surgery to fix knee pain, and I don't want to spend my resources on treatments that aren't fixes.

So my recent modification to the general "Diet and Exercise" solution was to just do one and not the other.  Admittedly, being active isn't nearly as difficult as putting down the Zebra Cakes.  So I aimed to tackle the easier addiction first and make a change in behavior toward activity.

Each day after work I committed to going to the gym and getting into some sort of routine -- treating exercise like I do work.  Sure, some days I just don't want to go into work, but I still do because I have to.  The same would apply to the gym -- each day I went to work, I would always follow it up with time at the gym.  Doing what?  Just whatever I could to make going to the gym, that act in and of itself, part of my routine.

And I did that for more than a month.  After checking into the gym 28 times, with each of those times not corresponding to a weekend day, I found out something interesting.  My muscles weren't recovering in a good amount of time, and I was actually getting weaker.  My regiment had me doing cardio at the beginning, running 1 mile on an eliptical machine, keeping my time below 11 minutes, with my best time being 10:02, and then after doing some strength training.  Mondays and Thursdays were basically arms, shoulders, and chest, with Tuesdays and Fridays being legs, and Wednesdays being core and back.  Nothing too extreme, with maybe 6 different activities per day of 3 sets of 10 reps.

Toward the end of this, I found I couldn't do 3 sets of 10 anymore, but rather 3 sets of 10, 8, 6 reps.  And the weight hadn't changed from day 1, so that wasn't great.

And then I realized that maybe the same movements and workouts weren't shocking my muscles enough, and perhaps my diet wasn't allowing for enough protein, carbs, and fats to get in to where they were needed to allow for proper recovery.

And that brings me to today and right now.

I've modified my routine so that I still go to the gym, but will start doing triceps, shoulders, and chest on Mondays, cardio only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, biceps and back on Wednesdays, with legs on Fridays.  Along with that, I've made some slight modifications to my diet.  Not anything huge, but where I'd buy two, one-liters of caffeine before work, I'm going to get two, twenty ounce drinks instead.  It's not a lot, but the reduction in calories of that should be slightly significant.

Next week, I'll make another small modification.  The week after, another one.

And then, I'll be heading to a facility that will use a machine to determine my exact body fat %, muscle tone and location, bone density, weight, etc.  I will then participate in a resting metabolic assessment to determine what my resting caloric intake is at, and then plan to do fewer than that number of calories per day, while I'm working out.

After a few months of doing that, I will go back in for another body scan.  If I don't go down in weight, but my body fat % drops at the rate I'm building muscle, proportionate in weight, not volume, then I'll know that it's working, and if I persist, the muscle mass will soon require so many calories more that the excess weight will begin to shed off.

As for the diet, I am not going to focus on a specific fad or diet.  I've tried SlimFast, Weight Watchers, Atkins, Keto, Intermittent Fasting, and paying a homeless guy to wave a wand he claimed as being magical to cure me.  They all work when followed, which leads me to believe that they don't work because of how unique and special from each other they are -- it's because in all of them, calorie counting is absolutely a part of it.  So I'll just count calories, compare with my daily expectancy, and count on maths doing the rest for me.

And before any of you imaginary people come out of the woodwork to provide suggestions, let me lead and say that unless it's a potato or ear of corn, I don't like vegetables.  I hate vegetables with such emphasis that if I could consume the goodness from vegetables in a pill and simply starve, I'd do that.  And my gravestone would simply read, "Didn't like vegetables."  And the story would go that my remains were found in a patch of cabbages, during the season in which they would have been picked, and I simply starved to death.

And before you try and offer a way to prepare it, my mother is a chef, and I've had them prepared in so many ways, I'm sure you'd not know about a few of them.  Unless you bread it, deep-fry it, slather it in cheese or ranch, and serve it like that, I'm going to hard-pass on the vegetables, and take multivitamins, and pretend like that's sufficient.

I'll make it a point to remark each day on here, but the last attempt was eight years ago, and I got three posts in before I quit.  Let's see how this goes.

-Your Semi-Retarded Friend