Breaking the volume barrier

I passed a milestone this morning. To be exact, I weighed 198.8 pounds when I stepped on the scale. I haven't weighed under 200 pounds in years.

Why I'm screwy

My Explorer has been acting up for six weeks now. It's some kind of fuel system problem: If you let the gas get too low, it won't start, altho' it will crank fine. Twice it's stranded me and I've had it towed to the mechanic only to have him tell me that it started right up in his shop. He thinks the fuel pump is going south and freezes up when the gas gets too low, then gets going again after getting sloshed around on the wrecker. But he isn't sure and an in-tank pump costs $500 to replace, so we figured we'd just wait until the silly thing breaks down conclusively.
Well, this morning it wouldn't start. Again. Of course, Nicholas and I were running late for school. So I gave it some gas and tried again and viola! it started right up. But the minute I took my foot off the gas, it died again. After decades of riding in and driving unreliable cars, I made do. (Aside: I remember taking a rich girl on a date in the family station wagon, a car with a leaky radiator that you had to top off every time you got into it or risk overheating the engine. There wasn't a second date.)
I pulled the Explorer out onto the street, driving with two feet. One was on the gas, keeping the idle near 1,000 rpm, and the other was for braking. I always hated having unreliable cars, so I've been pretty good about buying good vehicles, maintaining them well and promptly repairing problems. But not this time.
I never called my mechanic today. I wonder if it will break down on me tomorrow...

Emo musings, Part I (Or Getting Older, Part II)

Now that I am an adult, I can't relate to youth culture. One term that I hear but don't understand is "emo," so I decided to investigate it. Yes, I am now old enough to investigate pop culture trends like an anthropologist. I asked our office's resident music critic to lend me a book about it. He did and gave me a mix CD of emo songs, too, which was very generous.
And I've been listening to them tonight. Dashboard Confessional, Jimmy Eat World, Brand New. Now, these are bands I've never heard of. Well, I have heard of Dashboard. But I never listened to it before. My limited impression of emo is that its sad music, its listeners wear tight pants and they have long hair in their faces. And they cut themselves.
These stereotypes were protested by an actual emo listener.
To me, emo sounds like the bastard grandchild of punk; fast beats, simple, quick riffs, not a lot of flair. But instead of the screaming protest of early punk bands, it's all straining vocals and melancholy. I am intrigued by it, the way I am to any catchy tune. But I don't think I could stand a steady diet of the emotional content, which is filled with the sort of self-indulgent sadness and maudlin wallowing that filled my journals as a teen.
When I was in high school, we had grunge. The music styles are different, but the emotional landscape is the same: alienation, angst, and ennui. Every generation of middle-class white kids must have a version of this kind of music. The thing I pick up on in emo is the same sort of apathy and boredom that we had. There's a real desire for an authentic experience, not one manufactured by marketing or production values. I can relate.
But I often listen to music to provoke an emotional response, and emo fosters my own self-pity with its sentimental lyrics and sound. This is why I stopped listening to Dave Matthews years ago; because his later stuff always put me in a sad mood.
I leave you with Grandpa Simpson's thoughts on music and generational differences, which he related to a young Homer and Barney after seeing them "rock out" to Leo Sayer:

I used to be with it, but then they changed what "it" was. Now, what I'm with isn't "it," and what's "it" seems weird and scary to me.
It'll happen to you.

Hooray for me

At the beginning of April, I started a diet to lose about 20 pounds by August. According to charts, I was 30 pounds overweight, but I'm not going to get back to what I weighed when I graduated high school any time soon. In fact, if I weighed 180 at 6'2", people would wonder if I was sick.
Anyway, I've already lost five pounds. What's my secret? My PDA.
That's right. I guess all you have to do to get me to do something is make a PalmPilot program for it. I track my calories every day and it tells me how many I have left. That's kind of fun because sometimes I eat very little at work and have enough left over at dinner time to splurge at Taco John's or BeefaRoo.
Here's a few facts I've learned on this diet:
- If you stop drinking the buckets of Coca-Cola or other soft drink offered at fast food joints, you cut out several hundred calories.
- A Chipotle burrito made the way I like it has almost 1,200 calories. That's well over half my daily allowance.
- Weight is a sporadic thing. I started out at 207, jumped up to 210 the next day, then dropped steadily to 204. Then I leveled off for a week. Now I'm down to 202, but I'm just hovering here.
- Lean Cuisine meals are puny.
- If you keep eating Lean Cuisine meals, you gradually stop wanting to eat the massive portions that are doled out at restaurants. I got to gorge myself on my usual Taco John's meal last week. A regular burrito, a grilled burrito (potatoes and cheese) and nachos. But I couldn't finish it because I'm used to eating healthy portions now.
- You don't have to exercise to lose weight. Yes! (If Abby is reading this, she'll tell me I should. But I don't like to. I hate exercising.)

Ten years have got behind you

Today I had coffee with an old friend, Lindsay. I had not seen her in a decade, though we recently found each other on MySpace. It was great to see her and catch up. I knew her because she dated one of my close friends in high school. She's married now to another classmate of mine and lives in Colorado.
It was strange to sit and talk to someone after such a long absence. For one thing, I can't get over the fact that I'm now old enough to have more than 10 years of adult life behind me. The other day I was at a meeting where there were a bunch of teenage girls. As I was listening to them, it dawned on me that I could not relate to where they were coming from, at least, I was not "one of them." When I was 25, I could still at least deceive myself into thinking that I had things in common with 18 year olds.
The continuing revelations of the big 3-0.
It's also odd to see somebody years later and realize that neither of you is the same person you were when you were close. It's a comforting thing to have a shared history, to have someone who knows who you were. But when you've changed, you want them to know who you are now, too. And you want to know who they are now.

What I didn't tell you

Sorry about the dereliction of blog duty. I've been very busy.
I didn't have time to tell you about the Cubs game I saw in Cincinnati, the perfect sunny day for a season opener, or the game I watched in Milwaukee, cozy in shirtsleeves under the roof while snowflakes swirled outside. Or the guy I met wearing a big oval belt buckle with his name embossed in it (I'll give you a hint: the last part was "III"). Or the diet I went on, but still managed to eat a diner skillet with eggs, potatoes, cheese, peppers, bacon, sausage, mushrooms, onions and Tabasco sauce.
But I'm back. And I'm here because I have to tell you this: My newspaper was sold to a new company. The same company that bought a newspaper I worked at three years ago and proceeded to destroy it. I fled that time. I'm sticking around now. At least for awhile.