First off, I apologize for the lack of posts. It's not that I've been extremely busy or anything like that; I just have a mixed case of writer's block and thissucksitis*. Anyway, I figured I'd give you guys a glimpse into what's going on right now.
As far as NETPO goes, we had the Sig Sauer P225 range day last week, and it went pretty well. It's a nice pistol. More on that later... maybe. Right now we're in Damage Control school. We have three days of flood control, then we'll move on to firefighting, and finish off with CBRN. (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear... basically how to wear gasmasks. Lovely.)
Live Free or Die Hard is in my top 5 movies of all time. If only they'd shown the daughter more... or had typical women-villain outfits for the asian chick. Ah well, still an extremely kick-ass movie.
Other than that, I've finally started actually following the training plan I have for the Marine Corps Marathon, and I'm starting to get as motivated for my runs as I used to be for going to the gym. It's weird and crazy. I'm about as far from an endurance athlete as one can be. Heh, maybe I'll get all lean and mean and sexy and I'll have a six-pack and all the women (and the gay men—they're much more discriminating than the women, it seems) will adore me and magazines will ask me to do covers for them and I'll be like the next Pat Tillman, only not quite as heroic. Ok, so I'm pushing it, but I hope to drop a lot of this weight—there's really no point in me weighing 225lbs anymore. A more adequate weight would be 185lbs or so. I'd be pretty much as lean as I can get, at that point.
I've been trying to cut back on junk food even more. I've cut my consumption of chips and chocolate pretty much to zero, desserts have become an exception rather than a rule, and almost all the pop I drink now (I don't do drugs, smoke, I barely drink, seldom gamble, and I don't delve into debauchery... I need to have at least one vice!) is diet—not quite as good as water, but better than regular pop. I still eat bad foods more than I should, but I figure that just the cutback on calories from junk food is already a giant step forward.
It just feels weird, because one generally assumes that eating better also means eating less, but my tray is usually fuller now than it was when I only ate junk food. I have my main dish—meat and some veggies, sometimes some rice—then I have a place for veggies, cottage cheese, and sometimes some pasta salad, then some fruit, cheese, milk, and, (too) often, Diet Coke. Still, all of that packs less of a punch, fat-wise, than my tray with only some Coke, jalapeno poppers, fries, and dessert.
What's the weirdest is that I don't really crave bad foods anymore. I actually eat them absent-mindedly, because it's still a habbit. I stop by the desserts not because I want one, but just because they're there and I used to get dessert all the time. Same when I drink pop at the movies; I'm just used to getting myself a “jacuzzi” of Coke when I go watch a movie. Sure, I enjoy it, but it's not the same visceral sensation of utter satisfaction. It's more the guilty pleasure of doing something you're not supposed to... and it's hollow. I actually got to that point—and beyond—last time I started eating well, but it seems this time I not only feel some revulsion at bad foods (though I still, at the same time, feel some urge to eat them) but I actually enjoy eating “good” foods. My eating habits aren't perfect by any means, but compared to just six months ago, I'm a nutrition saint.
On the intellectual front, some more news. I've been buying books lately, and I'm starting to really enjoy delving in that again. I bought a book called The Triumph of Narrative, by Robert Fulford, and I'm more than halfway though. (It's a short book.) I also bought a book composed of essays on Proust's In Search for Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu). More importantly, I finally managed to acquire a copy—in a pocket book edition—of the famous Story of Art by Sir E.H. Gombrich. It's 500 pages of text, and almost as many of full-colour illustrations, and it kicks some serious booty. No wonder it's hailed as the single best volume on art history. It was originally written for teenagers and young adults, “the harshest of critics,” and it avoids most of the fakeness and pomposity (pompness? pompousness? pompousity?) of other art volumes. I bought it yesterday afternoon and I'm already on page 50—and I read the Foreword and all that other junk. As unmanly as it might seem, I really enjoy art history and, obviously, art in general, but I'm also a near-complete twit in that area, so Gombrich is just about perfect for me.
I also found out, in Fulford's book, that George Orwell had, at least in his youth, a kind of self-narrative going on in his inner voice; his mind described what was going on around him: “an almost precise description of what he was actually doing and the things he was seeing.” It seems strange that I sometimes do that, usually when I'm bored. However, unlike Orwell's decidedly classically literal (for lack of a better term) descriptions, mine tend to be a more barren and matter-of-fact type; Ellisian, really. I guess it must be post-modernism. Or is that post-post-modernism? Either way, I'm glad to see I'm not totally insane; if someone as great as Orwell did it, it can't be wrong!
Anyway, I'm just blabbering on, now. I'll try and come back with some artistic writing sometime... or at least with something of little more value than this post.
So I want to wish, a bit late, a happy 4th of July to all my American readers and their familes, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. Glad to see the stuff that was described in that awesome documentary, Live Free or Die Hard, didn't actually happen.
And to celebrate the upcoming Simpsons movie (and the transformation of 7-11s into Kwik-E-Marts):
Thank you, come again!
*People suffering from thissucksitis believe—correctly or not—that all that they write is crappy and that they ought to work harder on it so it's not as bad. This causes them not to update their blog or send out e-mails, even when they said they would.
Note on the title: it was as random as I could think of on the spot.
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