Archive for February, 2010
I recently joined the world of Netflix, and today began watching Skins, an interesting British drama. The second episode is about a pretty anorexic girl that no one seems to pay much attention to. I love her immediately.
I’ve been fascinated by anorexic people since I was 13 and watched that movie about the girl from Growing Pains in health class. Truth be told, jealous of them really. I know it’s bad, they’re killing themselves, la la la. But still, I’ve always been sickly envious of their abilities to control their intake of food like that.
Several years ago, I had a favorite website. It was called Fat Like Me, run by a girl named Jaoi. Often referred to as a “Pro-Ana” site, but I didn’t really see it that way. This girl was smart. Screwed up, but extremely intelligent and well-informed. Her site basically dealt with accepting her eating disorder and learning to live with it. Tips on living with it is where people tend to coin it pro-ana, I suppose. But it sure wasn’t encouraging people to be anorexic at all.
Anyway, she kept a journal of sorts, and I miss it. She took her site offline a few years ago. I search for her every now and then, and watching that episode of Skins reminded me of her and I decided to check again to see if anyone found where she went. Didn’t find anything. Did stumble across the archives of her site though, and I’ve enjoyed the past hour or so re-reading some of it.
I’ve been increasingly annoyed with food lately. Increasingly binging and unable to put a good lid on it. Sometimes I find food that can distract my cravings. But it’s never perfect. Everything good has one of the three bads. First bad for me is carbs, for obvious diabetes reasons. The more carbs I eat, the more insulin I need; the more insulin I need, the fatter I get. So I find lower carb food. Low carb food that satisfies binging urges, however, has more fat. This summer I was obsessed with almonds. Boot camp Cliff encouraged eating almonds. They have the good kind of fat. Of course, I know he wouldn’t encourage the way I eat almonds, which is probably 5 times the amount (at least) he would recommend. But they were so great because they had hardly any carbs!
Anyway, soon I decided all this extra fat from almonds wasn’t doing me any favors, so I’ve sworn them off. Now I try to avoid fat along with carbs. So what’s left in foods that don’t have tons and tons of carbs and fat AND satisfy my compulsive need to binge? Why food with lots of sodium of course.
Obviously I have issues with balance and moderation. I shouldn’t focus on one thing at a time, and should focus on moderately balancing nutrition. Ha, my brain knows this, but try getting my urges to comply.
There is no good binge food. I think that anything healthy for me is not capable of satisfying my binging urge. That would be against the rules. My whole binging desire stems from the need for forbidden fruit after all. Forbidden fruit not being literal fruit of course, as actual fruit is healthy and therefore utterly disgusting.
So long rambling aside, this is where my fascination with anorexia comes from. I am forever in awe of people who seemingly have such control over their hunger, screwed up as it may be.
On Friday, Cliff’s boot camp email contained a sentence that read, “There is an old saying in the fitness world that goes: Fitness is 10% physical, 10% mental and 80% nutrition.” UGH.
I couldn’t help but responding that it was the most depressing thing I’ve ever read in one of his emails (end: happy face, so I don’t come across completely batty!). I shouldn’t have replied, and I don’t really know why I did. I normally say very little at boot camp. Excuses may be that it’s too early in the morning, it’s too dark to see much of anything, and I’m just the quiet type. But truly I think it’s that I find I can’t relate a whole lot to such mentally sound and up-beat, positive people. I’m more the sarcastic roll-your-eyes type. Not that I’m not a happy person, I generally am. I don’t know. I just feel these people have a much more positive life outlook than I do, and that they have it all put together in regards to their health.
Where as I’m the stupid type 1 diabetic with weird ED issues. Who the crap can relate to that? It’s mostly my own BS ego, really. I feel like any difficulty they may have in regard to food and losing weight is not on the same level as me. My issues cannot be compared to someone who struggles with a mere 20-30 pounds that has a perfectly normal insulin-producing and thyroid-producing body. If I’m completely honest, all I really want to do is punch those people in the face, even if they are nice and well-intentioned.
Don’t get me wrong, I love boot camp and those perfect people, and will never stop going so long as I’m able. It’s helped me tremendously over the past year and I’d be far worse off without it, that’s for bloody sure. That said, it can’t cure me of my constant food struggles I’ve had since as long as I can remember. I don’t think anything ever will. Perhaps the issues will hide themselves for a while, but they always resurface.
I was bingy today. Which isn’t so out of the ordinary for a Sunday. Now I feel guilty and gross for eating, plus my blood sure is on a hideous spike. Double guilt, double patheticness. I think it’s dinner time though.
I got Cities XL for Christmas. My brother laughed because I put as Very High priority on my Amazon Wish List. I was super excited about it as it sounded great. And it would have been great, could still be great even, if Monte Cristo didn’t screw it up so bad and release what basically amounts to half a game.
After I installed it, I discovered there was a Planet Mode, where you can trade city resources online with other players and have access to public transportation. Neat! Except it was $9.99 a month. I wasn’t willing to try that yet, so I just went into Solo Mode. In Solo Mode, you can’t trade city resources with other players, so instead they give you only a single option to trade–and it’s shitty. You get less than half the amount of money on items you sell than what you pay for items you buy. Meaning: it’s easier not to trade and just produce everything yourself… UNTIL your city starts to get big and you basically get stuck because you can’t produce enough of everything (fuel, water, agricultural areas, etc). The game limits areas on your city map where you can build fuel fields, water towers, farms, and even holiday areas. And some city maps are labeled harder because they don’t have any areas for these resources. Meaning: you have to trade. But again, trading isn’t so hot when you’re stuck with one lame computer city to trade with, and they screw you. Obviously: online trading with other players would solve this.
Issue two with Solo Mode: no public transportation–e.g., buses. These are only in Planet Mode as well.
So…sounds like Planet Mode is the way to go, which I just figured out after trying my hardest to build unique cities on the different maps available and failing when they reach a certain size every time.
Only, Monte Cristo just ended the Planet Offer because not enough people were subscribing. Gee! Maybe because charging $9.99 a month to play the full version of a game you just paid $40 for is completely lame perhaps?
Complete failure. Now I’m just hoping Monte Cristo incorporates better, diverse trading options and public transportation options in Solo Mode. I’m kind of skeptical though. I’ve read somewhere about this being included in a Cities 2011, which would be a new version of the game we all have to pay for again. Sounds pretty assy to me.
I’m rather disappointed in them for being so shifty. City Life, Cities XL’s predecessor was a whole lot of fun, but also could have been a lot more–which of course, is what Cities XL promised to do. And now I’m really in the mood for a new city simulation game, fully featured, and I don’t have one. I’m currently tired of Sim City 4, plus it’s so old, and runs like shit (random crashes, slow). I popped in Sim City Societies the other day, but turned it off because I wasn’t in the mood to re-learn the utterly ridiculous zoom/navigation controls.
Sigh.
This whole thing with Kevin Smith and Southwest Airlines is stupid. Stupid on Southwest’s part, that is. Haven’t heard about it? Rummage through Kevin’s Twitter, or listen to the hour and a half long Smodcast for the full story if you have time. Worth it if you’re really interested, or if you just like listening to Kevin Smith. I could just listen to him talk for hours; I can’t think of too many people who tell a story better than he does.
Also read Southwest’s “apology” blog.
Sitting next to fat people on a plane is hardly the worst option. For me, I avoid small children first. No amount of fat is worse than getting next to screaming, squirming kids. I wish they had a day-care section of the plane roped off.
Next I avoid old men. Haha. Sounds silly, but I swear, I get next to older men a lot, and more often than not they’re all elbows, knees, and newspaper. It has nothing to do with their size; and I’m not saying they’re bad people. The one’s I’ve been next to just have a habit of being all over the place and not caring about personal space at all.
After that, I avoid college-aged kids. They’re usually loud and obnoxious.
I guess the point is, why is it fat people get kicked off? Tall people don’t get kicked off if their legs are too long and they have to spread their knees into my space. People with the most annoying kids in the world don’t get kicked off for being turdy parents.
If Kevin Smith could fit with no seat belt extender and with the arm rests down, he certainly was no safety risk. I’ve certainly seen people way larger, using the extender fit into one seat and be allowed to fly. And, regardless of ANY of that, even if he was too fat (he wasn’t), the way the employees handled the entire situation is completely absurd.
And if you can’t listen to his entire Smodcast, you should listen to the last 20 minutes or so when he talks about how when he finally got put on a plane back after all this nonsense–with two seats, mind you–a heavy girl sits next to him and gets lectured by another Southwest employee about the necessity of buying two seats in the future.
Douche-baggery!
A year and a few months ago, we discover we have to get a new system to process credit cards. Great! The old system sucked beyond belief.
So, I get the information for the new system. Learn the API, program our site with the test credentials, get everything good to go…. HALT! Some kind of drama between the fiscal office and this new company holds us up for 6 months.
Fast forward to around August. They’re ready to get moving again, they just need us to run a security scan on our web server and that is it. We’ll be ready to go after that!
Fast forward to January. They finally tell us we’re certified. They just have to get us a production user name and password.
Fast forward to today. They send us our user name and instruct us to call customer service to get a temporary password since it’s not secure to send a password via email. Okay. Call customer service, wait on hold for what seems like an eternity. Get temporary password. Try to log in so I can set our actual password. What happens?
If you expected me to say it worked great and we’re finally set on this new system, you’d be wrong. Instead I get this message:
“Your account is inactive. Please call your reseller to activate it.”
WOW. Amazing. So now I’m waiting for our person to do that / hear back. Do you think they’ll get it fixed today? Or perhaps sometime this spring? 2010? Before I die of old age?
Turns out they got back within an hour. Saying, oh oops, it’s fixed now, but if you have more problems call tech support again. Guess what? Didn’t work, had to call tech support again.
This guy was a piece of work. The first thing they ask for is your merchant account number, which I have from them directly in an email. Well, they actually gave us our account number wrong in the email. They left out the first two numbers. Seriously.
Anyway, this guy takes some time to figure out that it’s not our user name that was inactive like he thought, it was actually our entire merchant account. Brilliant! He couldn’t find any reason for it to be inactive though, so he just turned it back on, gave me a new temporary password, and what do you know, it finally worked.
While I was on the phone with him, I figured it would be a good time to go ahead and confirm this production URL they sent us for the web service we use to connect to their system. They sent us this in an email, with this phone number I was on the phone with at that time listed as who to call if we had questions/problems. Well this guy had absolutely no idea what I was talking about with the web service. I read the URL to him. NOTHING. Not a damn clue. I said “API” to him, and he thought I was talking about another company.
UNBELIEVABLE.
So who knows if this will work. I’m extremely skeptical.
