Shedding Some Pounds

The quintessential new year's resolution:  Lose weight.  I'm no different - it's on my list.  After Kate's diagnosis, I stopped exercising and started stuffing my gullet at every chance as a way, I guess, of dealing with the stress.  I gained about 35 pounds.  By the time last spring rolled around, I was not feeling too good about myself.  I was easily winded, in part because I was carrying around a lot of extra weight and in part because I was not in the best physical shape.  So, I started exercising and trying to eat at least a little better.  Since then I have lost around 17 pounds, but feel I need to lose another 27 or so.

I am a hopeless snacker.  Evenings are the worst.  I'm always stuffing something, usually not especially healthy, in my mouth.  I suffer from depression and anxiety and I'm pretty sure my snacking is a form of self-medication, of comfort.

I'm not a big breakfast eater.  My therapist, who has in the past worked in the area of eating disorders, has suggested that my nocturnal noshing may at least partially be coming from skipping my morning meal.  So, she has suggested I eat a more complete breakfast and see if that helps my post-prandial munching.  So far, it has not had much of an impact in terms of how much I eat, but I do seem to have lost four pounds in the past week.  Maybe we're onto something here.

Meanwhile I continue to exercise.  I try to get in a 40-50 minute cardio workout at least three times a week, though 4-6 is more the norm.  My workouts have become important in two respects.  First, this is the only time during the day I don't live with that omnipresent knot in my stomach and, secondly, I feel a sense of accomplishment at the end of it, however fleeting the feeling.

So, hopefully starting today, I will try to minimize my snacking and keep on with the exercise to see if I can shed the extra 27 lbs. and see if I can bring myself to 190 lbs.  I hope blogging about it will motivate me.  I'll try to post once a month about my progress.

And on a different note, Happy New year to all my Chinese readers and friends.  The year of the snake seems to be somewhat inauspicious, but hopefully everyone will come out the other end happier and healthier.  All the best.

Smart Phones, Tablets and that Interweb Thingy

Over the past few years, I have have been developing a profound dislike of information and communications technology (ICT).  I see its potential as a liberating tool - facilitating access to vast amounts of information from almost anywhere.  Allowing us to connect with people we may never have otherwise met and stay connected with people who maybe have moved away.  We seem to have overshot its potential, though, and landed in a less desirable situation where ease of access has led to intellectual laziness, where connecting electronically has supplanted more intimate forms of interaction and where our sense of privacy, and our desire for it, has been lost.

I admit I don't have a lot of empirical evidence to back up some of my claims.  Before I left work, though, I was noticing that cutting and pasting little factoids from online sources such as Wikipedia was creeping into the various documents that came across my desk.  Rather than doing their own anlayses and trusting their own judgements many government professionals seem to prefer the pre-digested views available in cyberspace.  As I say, this phenomenon may not be widespread, but it is creeping in.

I heard a story from an acquaintance recently about a university professor who caused an uproar among his students by refusing to post his lecture notes online, forcing his students to actually attend class and take their own notes.  Of course, this relates directly to the intellectual laziness I referred to earlier, but I think it also speaks a lot about the growing sense of entitlement I feel is growing within  younger generations, but that's a different topic for a different post.  The great promise of accessing information so easily is tainted somewhat by the fact that any idiot can publish anything online (as this blog demonstrates so well) and people seem unable to distinguish the good from the bad.  If any of you reading this teach, I would love to hear your observations about how ICTs are affecting the work and intellectual development of your students.

I also feel that the ubiquity of smart phones, tablets and laptop indicate a bizarre form of addiction.  People seem to have a helpless need to be constantly connected - to the web, to others, to playing games. I look around and all I see are people's noses stuck into some electronic device - texting, surfing, playing.  People text while they drive which is an unbelievably dangerous activity.  I see people, presumably friends or family or at least acquaintances, sitting at the same table in a café not talking to each other but thumbing their respective smart phones.  I see parents at their kids' sporting events engrossed in their phones or tablets oblivious to what their kids are doing.  I always feel bad when I see a child do something great, look over with pride at their mom or dad only to see them clicking away.  And, of course, cyberspace has become a valuable tool in the arsenal of bullies.

Many, and I include myself here, are living their lives online through social media with no regard for their own privacy.  No more secrets.

I have to rethink my own use of technology.  I'm just one red crayon and notebook away from moving into the woods and writing a manifesto off the grid. 

100 Best Movies

Karen, of A Peek at Karen's World fame (among the more entertaining blogs I follow), today posted her version of the best 100 movies.  Of course, this kind of exercise is highly controversial and it got my juices flowing.  So, I decided, what the hell, why don't I put in my two cents worth?  I have to admit coming up with a list of 100 movies is quite difficult, but I don't think there are many I would take off.  

You'll note that movies from the past ten years are not well-represented.  The largest reason for this is that since we had Lena, we don't get out much and our choices tend to be more family -friendly.  I also believe that movies today are more about flash-and-bang than anything else, but that's just my opinion.

So, here they are:

1. Schindler's List
2. Casablanca
3. Psycho
4. The Exorcist
5. Traffic
6. Dogma
7. The Godfather
8. The Godfather II
9. Ferris Bueller's Day Off
10. Austin Powers:  International Man of Mystery
11. Erin Brokovich
12. Dirty Harry
13. The Usual Suspects
14. The Birds
15. The In-Laws (1979)
16. Maltese Falcon
17. Pirates of the Caribbean
18. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
19. Big Night
20. Star Wars
21. The Cook, the Thief, His WIfe and Her Lover
22. Slap Shot
23. The Caine Mutiny
24. So, I Married an Axe Murderer
25. Rear Window
26. Star Wars:  The Empire Strikes Back
27. Star Wars:  Return of the Jedi
28. Reservoir Dogs
29. Kill Bill Volume 1
30. Kill Bill Volume 2
31. Deliverance
32. A Beautiful Mind
33. October Sky
34. The Hunt for Red October
35. The Gumball Rally
36. Marathon Man
37. Bullitt
38. Three Days of the Condor
39. Gaslight
40. Rocky
41. Rocky II
42. Alien
43. The Big Sleep
44. Grease
45. All the President's Men
46. Caddyshack
47. The Dirty Dozen
48. Pale Rider
49. Guns of Navarone
50. North by Northwest
51. The Shining
52. To Kill a Mockingbird
53. Die Hard
54. Mad Max
55. Mad Max 2:  The Road Warrior
56. Fargo
57. Seven
58. National Lampoon's Animal House
59. Taxi Driver
60. Catch Me if you Can
61. Jurassic Park
62. Saving Private Ryan
63. Miracle (2004)
64. Office Space
65. Election
66. Pulp Fiction
67. Wayne's World
68. Goodfellas
69. National Lampoon's Vacation
70. The Bourne Identity
71. Amélie
72. Being John Malkovich
73. Monty Python's The Meaning of Life
74. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
75. The King's Speech
76. Presumed Innocent
77. Silence of the Lambs
78. Glengarry Glen Ross
79. Magnum Force
80. Sudden Impact
81. Stripes
82. Ghostbusters
83. The Longest Day
84. National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation
85. Saving Private Ryan
86. Back to the Future
87. Risky Business
88. The Big Sleep
89. Body Heat
90. Pride of the Yankees
91. Mississippi Burning
92. Twelve Angry Men (1957)
93. Treasure of the Sierra Madre
94. This is Spinal Tap
95. Goodwill Hunting
96. Boys Don't Cry
97. Mystery Men
98. Dead Calm
99. A Few Good Men
100. Terminator

I look forward to reactions and I'm sure you have some.