Life Change #10: I Don’t Drink Enough Green Tea

Just as we, as a nation, do not drink enough water, it appears that we do not drink enough green tea….or so says certain nutritionists or perhaps the cadre of green tea producers in our midst. In any event, it seems we need to solve this crisis, and I plan to do just that…one cup at a time. Aside from forgetting to do this, I think this will be a fairly simple habit to break. I often will warm up any left over coffee from the morning or sometimes even pour it over ice as a sort of afternoon pick me up. I will simply opt for green tea instead. I can drink it warm, or pour it over ice on warm days, just as I would coffee. I like the flavor, don’t really need to add sugar or milk or anything. I think just a cup a day is all I need, and really, if I miss a day, no big deal.


This may be the latest in a series of “fad foods” that we Americans get crazed on. We like foods that promise something we may not be getting elsewhere. In the case of green tea, simply put, the promise is longer life, in the form a batch of anti oxidants that fight disease, cell degeneration and aging it self. Sounds pretty good for a lightweight paper pouch full of ground up leaves. Sign me up.


Before green tea it was blueberries. Pomegranate juice is good. So is spinach, almonds, garlic and seaweed. Someone sent me a list one time of the top 10 most healthful foods you could eat, and it made a pretty good meal. We took spinach and sautéed it with garlic, olive oil and sliced almonds and placed a piece of grilled salmon on the spinach, served it with a glass or red wine and had blueberries in a bowl for dessert, served with green tea. The meal contained all 10 of the 10 best things to eat, and it was darn good.


In any event, there is always something that is attributed with curing diseases, old age and subsequent death. I have a theory that if you can cure all those things, folks will beat a path to your door; even more so if the cure is in the form of a good tasting food, or easy to take vitamin pill. Fish Oil was the cure of choice some years ago, and I recall my doctor indicated he thought it might be a good thing to take a fish oil supplement on a regular basis. Awhile later, it was disclosed that the concentrated fish oil, while having definite benefits, also acted to concentrate the mercury so often found in fish, thanks to our ill considered decision to dump our wasted and industrial by products into streams and rivers, and the ocean where it all winds up anyway. I still take fish oil, but wonder if the mercury is killing me.


Vitamin E was another panacea pill….a powerful antioxidant that seemed to deter aging, and when combined with Vitamin C, fought off cancer, wrinkles and did your homework if you asked nicely. Then they found out in some study that people who took Vitamin E supplements faced a greater mortality risk, though they could not establish any link to the actual vitamin…even saying it might be that unhealthy people took vitamin E at a greater rate than the general public with the hope of offsetting the damage their body had already sustained.


Longer life in a pill form or easy to drink liquid is a pretty attractive claim. I mean who wouldn’t want to take a chance? If such a claim is true, how can you go wrong? What is a person to do? What to believe or discard as nonsense? In the United States, most every claim made is an attempt to sell something. Either Dyna Gyms, Jack LaLane vegetable juicers, or fish oil capsules -- someone profits if I believe I just have to have something.


Green Tea is likely no different. However, I like the taste, and based on centuries of use in China and Japan, it appears that it does not wreak any sort of havoc, so it seems safe, even if it does not double my life span. We want to live forever, or if not forever, at least a long time. But I daresay we ought to put in there the proviso that those increasing later years are filled with good health and comfort, as well as strong mental acuity. Anything less is not a great bargain.
Green tea, though, also happens to taste good…and that is a bonus. A habit that comes easy. They make green tea ice cream, and candy, and it is a somehow comforting taste when brewed hot or poured over ice. I wonder if green tea ice cream has all the health benefits suggested by the name, or if the fat and sugar sort of offsets any premise of well being.


Rather than ponder those things, I will simply warm up the teapot after lunch each day so that I can take a spot of tea each day. Just think, if it helps me to live longer, how many cups of tea I will need to drink. What a great marketing tool….longer lives mean more tea consumed!.



Update on Previous Life Changes (Day Ten):

2 straight days with out cursing! Maybe anything is possible! Adding tea to the program impacted my water intake a bit, but I’ll get that under control. I’m feeling good, even if the waistline has remained consistent. I am far from perfection, I can see that clearly, but I can also see that 92 days of these type of changes will bring some tangible differences…can’t wait to get there!

Life Change #9: I Forget to Put the Toilet Seat Down

This may be the site of the initial battlefield of the Battle of the Sexes. It is surely nearby. I am not sure who decided that the default position of the toilet seat is in the “down” position, but I was not consulted and despite any and all protestations I may present, it never goes unnoticed in my household. Since I am not the only male in the house, and my son often has friends in tow, I am sure it is not always me. I however ALWAYS get blamed. I must have protested too much and hence lost any credibility on this matter.

The toilet seat is a marvelous invention. It raises and lowers depending on who needs to use it, and it even includes a lid, which inconveniences both sexes more or less equally. Hence, when I put the toilet seat down, I always include the lid…it requires no extra effort, and restores the toilet to a sense of neutrality. My wife refers to the bathroom as the “men’s room” when the seat is in the up position…I guess implying it is, or should be, the “ladies room” when restored to its normal state. Lowering the lids is my silent protest against that arrangement.

The primary reason I forget is that, as I work primarily at home, I am the one who uses the toilet most often during the day, hence I figure, if I am going to be the next user, I ought to be able to leave it as I will need it to be, my so called coffee mode. I am frankly surprised at how often my estimate fails to produce accurate results. My wife often walks into the bathroom before I have switched over to afternoon/evening mode. This of course has gained new importance now that I am drinking in excess of 100 ounces of water every day. That does not come without a price… all day long. No more coffee mode.

I am told that it is disgusting to have to touch the toilet seat before using the facility, and I wonder if raising the lid is any less so. I am guessing this stems from the use of public bathrooms, and perhaps one of the basis’ for same sex bathrooms. Women, apparently do not like to touch toilet seats. Men apparently do not either, since they can use urinals, and if everyone plays by the rules, the only person to ever touch a toilet seat is the janitor, and he would likely be wearing rubber gloves. This arrangement has carried over into my house, and though I suppose I could suggest we install a urinal, for now it appears, the seat needs to be adjusted.

My wife has an even more extreme idea than the installation of a urinal. She suggests that I sit down to pee. She intimates that many husbands of her friends do the same…I stop to wonder how comes by this information. I wonder if this is really the type of thing that women discuss when they get together for tea or a glass of wine…the urinary habits of their husbands. I can assure you that men NEVER discuss the urinary habits of their wives, unless it is to complain about the number of stops they have to make on a road trip. We discuss women, just not in that way.

Aside from the obvious suspicion about the veracity of the claim that some men are sitting down to pee, I ask myself, “why?” One of the notable good things about being a man is that you can essentially pee anywhere. With barely a fuss. Unzip and you are ready to go. Literally. In a field, behind a bush, against a wall, even in a toilet. In fact, I had occasion in my early teenage years to walk aside two friends down the main street of a small mountain town late one evening, peeing. All three of us, in unison. “A walking leak”, we called it, right on Main Street, for any and all to see…no one much cared, or even saw, or understood. Still, we added it proudly to our resume of places we have peed. And most men, I daresay, have utilized this flexibility to pee in various places at some point in their life time. Only to give up eons of evolutionary advantage to sit on a toilet? To avoid having to raise or lower the seat?

This does run counter to my intuition. Inventors have spent countless hours trying to perfect devices that would allow women the same ease and utility. I never hear women suggest that peeing sitting down affords them a chance to relax for a few moments. No way. It is a burden, depending on how many layers of clothes they are wearing at the time. NO one in their right mind would trade the convenience of standing up, unzipping, peeing and being done. You don’t even have to touch anything but your own body if you opt not to flush.

There is also the matter of sitting on a toilet unnecessarily. As I mentioned earlier, my house is entering its second century of service. Our toilet seems to be one of the early prototypes of toilet technology, and hence the seat is a scant 13” off the ground. It takes me a good 3 minutes to summon the strength and courage to stand up from a toilet that low. My knees simply do not enjoy that sort of thing unless nature demands that they cooperate. To sit on the toilet when there is another option is simply out of the question. Perhaps if the house was fitted with those newfangled “high-boy” toilets.

I can understand the seat position debate if in fact the problem was that I never raised the seat when going pee. My aim is not that good to reduce the target area by 25%. In fact, I have argued (unsuccessfully) that by leaving the seat up, I have offered proof that I have not attempted to “pee through the seat”. It is a signal that the seat, when lowered will be clean and ready to use. If it is left down, how can you really tell? What assurance do you have that the last person that used it did not pee all over the seat. This problem was surely a more pressing issue when my son was much younger. He definitely had no problem working on his target practice, and often seemed to treat the seat as a part of the target. In that context, raising or lowering, much less using the seat had a less appealing slant to it.

A subcategory in this debate is the issue of leaving the seat up at night. I am told that one of the worst feelings is using the toilet and feeling cold porcelain on your rear end just prior to slipping downward into the water. I cannot say from first hand experience how this might affect me, nor can I really prove that it has happened. I must confess that it sounds dreadful…uncomfortable, disgusting, and really not at all the kind of thing you want to happen to you in the wee hours. I can say, though, that one of the solutions is quite simple. The light switch.

However, after some 20 years of having this discussion, I will relent. I will change the sign on the door from “Water Closet” to “Ladies Room” (at least in my own mind) and I will keep that seat (and lid) in the down position, and wonder why, if this is so important, they don’t have toilet seats self lower upon flushing. If that is truly the default position, why does the toilet not have a self actuating reset button, to return the toilet to neutral following each use? Like windshield wipers, or the refrigerator door? They could have a very slow acting spring hinge, and the seat and lid would descend almost imperceptibly once it was raised…and then, perhaps 3 or 4 minutes after each use, the toilet would be back to the closed position.

Of course, if peeing was taking a long time for whatever reason, the seat might eventually descend enough to get in the way. This might actually add pressure, and make peeing even more difficult. In this case though there is an easy solution: You can simply sit down to pee.


Update on Previous Life Changes (Day Nine):

Feeling a groove sort of take over. Got the exercise, the water, the right kind of milk in my coffee. And you know what? I do not recall uttering any expletives. A miracle after only 9 days…of course, other than to drink coffee and water, I elected to go with the gag all day, so I couldn’t utter any words at all….not really, but it did cross my mind. I have made now 9 changes, and have fit all of them into my daily regime with little difficulty, other than the occasional word that slips out. But even there, I seem to be swearing less.

Life Change #8: I Use Whole Milk in my Coffee

I hate milk. It has been about 43 years since I last drank a glass of the stuff. I never liked it, and though I would never consider eating a bowl of cereal without milk poured over it, I am also the last guy in the world that would pick up that bowl, when the cereal is gone and drink the milk remainder. I’ll drink chocolate milk, but even that is not something I ever crave. Milk and I simply walk different roads.

That said, despite my love, no, need, for coffee to start each day, I could never drink that coffee were it not for milk. I have tried coffee black and much as I love it fully “polluted” that is how much I despise it “black”. Pity too, as I have this sense that it would be far better for me if I kept my coffee to two simple ingredients….water and ground up coffee beans.

When the advent of coffee houses really took control of our lives and there was one in every block, I began the bad habit of using half and half in my coffee….I mean it was so easy…the little thermoses with three kinds of creamers…it was so much richer, smoother and for some reason, it seemed right, when spending two bucks for a cup of coffee, that it be somehow more flavorful, more decadent, more unhealthy than what I would have at home.

Eventually I discovered something interesting: they sell half and half at the market. So the argument became, “if I have this at home, perhaps I will be less inclined to go out and buy coffee”, since I could get that great coffee house flavor at home. This will save me time, and money. Half and Half may be the cure to all of my problems.

Well….though I am no richer, and I surely did not put that time to good use, I am not sure that half and half was the panacea I was looking for. I am sure though, it raised my cholesterol. SO after a year or two of seeking half and half when making coffee, I down grade to simply whole milk…still laden with fat, to be sure, but without the whole cream to really insult any pretense of eating healthier. At first it seemed a bit less tasty, but I’d guess no more than a week went by before my taste buds had made the adjustment….so why not go all the way. Why not avoid those trips to the store to get whole milk, when in fact there is (almost always) 1% milk in the fridge, as a result of having two teenagers (and their friends) in the house. Hey, maybe THIS will save me time and money!

Of course, on day one, I am under whelmed. The first thing I notice is the color. Gone is that sort of tan color…the drink is clearly brown. And there is a thinness to the drink…I can sense the way that it hits my tongue and goes down my throat that there is something missing. That something, as it happens is called fat. Can fat really make that big a difference? What does fat taste like? Why do we miss it when it is gone, and deplore it when it is present? Why do we have to have phrases like “half the fat with all the flavor?” Are “fat” and “flavor” related in some strange way? Lemonade has no fat, and it has a lot of flavor.

Fat is a word that carries almost no good connotations. Unlike “sun” or “sunshine” which sound great but are apparently a grave danger, “fat” leaves almost no room for confusion. I am fat, and that is unhealthy. If I eat fat, I will get fat, and that is unhealthy. If I am fat, and want to get skinny, one way to do that is to eat less fat. And yet, fat seems to taste good. Fat seems to be present in large amounts in foods that we may crave…ice cream, t-bone steak, chicken wings, cheese, chocolate mousse, and of course, half and half and whole milk. Perhaps this leads to the phrase that seems to be the exception to the rule…”fat and happy”.

It seems as if many of the experiments to eliminate fat go awry in some manner. Margarine was thought to be a healthy alternative to butter, but it turns out that all the hydrogenated oil was even worse for you than the animal fat in butter. Non Dairy creamer uses those hydrogenated oils as well. Synthetic fat (no feel good words in that description) gives you the runs if you eat too much of it (or so I am told).

In the end though, some non fat foods are sure to make you lose weight. When we buy fat free cheese, as sometimes happens during a bout of health consciousness, fear or with swim suit season approaching, we find we eat far less of it because it tastes so bad. It is dry, melts poorly, and has no flavor. We are guaranteed to eat less cheese, at least until someone can get to the grocery store to buy some decent, fat laden cheese.

Low fat ice cream has some potential. I understand that they simply infuse the product with air, so the same volume has fewer calories, but I am willing to live with that illusion. I’d probably be willing to give low fat or non fat frozen yogurt a chance, but it hardly stands a chance when it has to sit in the same freezer as the ice creams, which offer a dizzying array of flavors like “Butterfinger Almond Mocha Crunch with Fudge Swirls. Yogurt offers “Chocolate”. That is not even a fair fight.

Even buying super lean ground beef is unsatisfying. A burger made of this ostensibly healthy product falls apart on the grill, and typically comes out dry and mealy. Again, as a weight loss food, not a bad concept, but if you are actually hungry….

So what is this stuff, fat? It adds flavor, adds texture and binds things together, it creates a sense of richness, of thickness. It clogs our arteries and kills us, slowly. It seems essentially irreplaceable as no great options have appeared in the marketplace. And yet despite all it seems to do, it still has a very bad reputation (probably the “kills us slowly” part). Fat is in need of a good agent, or perhaps a council. Like the folks that try to get us to drink more milk (Got Milk?) or the folks that want us to eat more pork (the other white meat?). The Fat Council; or perhaps the American Fat Association. Definitely need someone to spruce up the image. Take care of that pesky artery clogging thing as well….

The milk that I will use in my coffee now is called “low fat milk”. But they do not call the stuff I used to use “High Fat milk” or “full fat milk” they call it “whole milk” or simply “milk”. Whole milk is either clever branding or very devious. “Whole” brings to mind words like “wholesome” implying healthy, and the word “whole” seems to imply that something valuable is missing from the low or non fat versions. The something is called “fat”. And yet, if you are a “whole person”, that means you are well rounded, and it does not mean you are fat (though you may be anyway since a large portion of Americans seem to be); and if you get the “whole enchilada”, well I guess that includes generous sauce over the top.

For now, and given my family history, I think I will seek to trim the fat wherever possible. The one thing I do everyday is to drink coffee, and as it stands now, that means drinking it with milk laden with fat. If I cut that to low fat milk, then it seems a positive step towards cutting my fat consumption, and until they get a council to convince me otherwise, I will consider that a good thing.
I
am also unsure if I should make the switch to 1% milk, which is in plentiful supply around my house, or bite the bullet and drop all the way to skim milk, which has zero fat, but offers the same lack of convenience as half and half and whole milk. Ina week or so, after my taste buds have grudgingly accepted the change, I can look forward to never having to adjust again (the only thing left, I suppose, would be to add water to my coffee, and frankly, that seems unfulfilling)…besides, I get a little calcium if I add milk, whole or skim. And I am told we need some of that.

Update on Previous Life Changes (Day Eight):

As I enter the second week of my little self improvement project, I note that many of the earlier Life Changes are already integrated into my life. I have found time to exercise, and it has not been a struggle to do so…Today, I expanded both the duration as well as the degree of difficulty, and it felt right. In fact, I noticed my heart rate did not climb as high, and I recovered much more quickly than I had initially. I will not say that I am in good shape yet, but after only a week of conditioning, my body is changing…soon, I hope, it will be shrinking a bit, but it is nice to detect things happening, even if they are invisible to the outside world.

Life Change #7: I Find Too Many Excuses (Not to Exercise, Wear Sun Block, etc)

This is really my most insidious habit, and the root of most of the things that I’d like to change about myself….sticking to things once I start. I will really start to feel good, after a few weeks of regular exercise. I will start to notice it when I climb stairs. Maybe even my wife makes a comment, or my daughter. And yet, despite the internal and external positive feedback, I simply stall out. I quit. The opportunity to stop presents itself, and instead of working overtime to stick with it….I simply let it go. If I have an all day meeting, instead of waking up early to get in the exercise, I let it slide….one day at a time is OK….I get that, but for me, the loss of momentum is profound….If one day ever turns into to 2 or 3 days, then it will almost assuredly turn into 2 or 3 months…and back to square one we go!

Maybe this is just who we are now. We want quick simple gratification. We don’t want to work for anything. We want fast food, easy money, quick fixes, overnight sensations and love at first sight. Expressions like “short attention span theater”, “the MTV generation” and “Quick Lube Oil Change” are permanent fixtures in the lexicon of our language. Folks, we want it fast. I have been exercising for 7 days now…aren’t I done yet?

The problem with a good excuse is that it often rings true in the moment. If I decide to get some exercise, my mind might race to any one of the following gems: I am too tired, it is too hot, I am hungry, I do not have time, my head hurts, I am expecting a phone call, I should go get gas in the car, there is a lunar eclipse next week, weekends should be three days instead of two, there is nothing good on TV. At one time or another, all of those statements have been true, and it is also possible that they have all been true at the same time. It suggests the range of legitimate and ridiculous things that creep into my mind when I am trying to rationalize why I am not doing something I wanted, or needed, to do.

Sometimes, the fact that the excuse is wholly unrelated to the task I am excusing myself from, does not occur to me until well after the fact. I have opted not to exercise because I have an early morning meeting (leaving me, conveniently the entire day to exercise once the meeting is over). I have opted not to wear sun block because I left it at home, when in truth, there is almost always someone in attendance at our various outdoor activities that has an ample supply. Sun block is one of the things that is shared willingly, generously and sometimes even, forcibly. Forgetting the sun block is not an excuse. The fact that I invariably get sun block in my eyes at some point during a day in the sun may well be a reason to buy sun block that does not hurt the eyes, but it still does not defend skipping the task altogether.

Excuses offer us the illusion of having choices. We may not want to do something, so we offer up an excuse to give ourselves an alternative that is more appealing. “I cannot help you move on Saturday because I am going to the beach, where I will apply sunscreen liberally.” Often times these “excuses” are simply facts resulting from a busy life which many of us “enjoy”. “I cannot go to the ballet on Saturday because I already have tickets to college football game that afternoon, much as I’d love to see the ballet.” Sometimes the choices are hard, sometimes they are easy…

But it is also, sometimes a reflection of how we’d rather spend our time, and this can be touchy. This is where excuses can veer into the territory of outright lying. I don’t want to attend the ballet, because I do not like the ballet, and so, if invited, I say I have plans that evening, as opposed to saying “the ballet sucks”, or “I cannot imagine spending even one moment of my life span watching ballet” which, though true, would be rude and sort of implies an unnecessary disagreement. I understand that people like the ballet and that is just fine….How do you decline something like that without creating debate.

Even if I decide to find a gentle way to take the high road and decline to go to the ballet because I am not interested, it invites the response “Have you ever been? You might really like it!” To this response there are two possible outcomes. First of all, it is so doubtful that “I might really like it” as to be laughable…but what if I do really like it? What if I love it and crave it and want to return as soon as possible? Do I really need some other thing to fill up time in my life? I have my kids and all their activities (none of which, happily, include ballet), I have work, and at least 3 organizations I volunteer time to. I like sports…attending sporting events, watching sports on TV, and I live in a house that is marking its 100th anniversary, and hence it could always use a helping hand somewhere. I spend time with friends, and my kids and their friends, and it seems like I have no time for some other activity that I enjoy…like ballet. Though I have always been curious about Robot Wars….

Sometimes we have excuses that are misconstrued as attempts to wiggle out of a task or commitment that we don’t want to do. Odd sounding excuses seem to fall easily into this category, even if completely true. The first date I ever had with my wife had to be postponed because my dog had suffered a stroke a couple of days prior. I needed to be with my family, and sit with the dog that evening, because we feared she would not survive the night. This kind of excuse assumes that everyone loves dogs as much as my family does. My wife, to her credit, did not hold this against me for too long, but it was not an easy excuse to offer, initially.
But no matter what, an excuse carries some implied debit, as if using an excuse to get out of doing something reduces your stature in some, even infinitesimal way. An “excused absence” means you gave a reason why you did not attend, but you were still “absent”. You missed something you were supposed to be a part of, and even though you had, perhaps, a good reason for not being there.

The best excuse is the one that cannot be rejected. You have to be careful using these. They are often unverifiable and usually involve some sort of urgency or illness. “I cannot attend the dinner party on Friday because we must go to a funeral out of town”. Slam dunk. You are out of that engagement…just be sure you have a name and relationship ready for the inevitable “Oh I’m sorry to hear that…who died?”

It is difficult to offer these kinds of excuses to your personal self help regime unless they are entirely truthful. “I cannot exercise because my grandmother died” is ineffective if it is not true. It may not even be a good excuse if true. Personal excuses carry the burden of needing to be entirely truthful, but have the advantage of always getting the benefit of doubt. “I cannot exercise because my feet hurt” can derail a planned exercise session if given enough credibility, and since you only have to convince yourself…the person with the sore feet…it seems a near certainty that you will be swayed.

Unfortunately though, this is where I have the most trouble, and this is the habit I must break free of today…I allow these little internal excuses to derail too many commitments in my life. “I cannot exercise today, because I must write”. Seems reasonable, but a well organized person, committed to the importance of both, would plan his day accordingly. “I cannot write today because I have a dentist appointment” is also a matter of time management, and I find that most excuses are driven by some lack of time. If we had infinite hours in each day, we could find time for everything. In truth, we may have 17-18 hours, at the most, to do all we want or need to do in a day. It is a surprisingly small amount of time.

Excuses, then, are also a kind of tradeoff…a negotiation with ourselves to address the finite amount of time we have…today, this week, and in our lifetimes. We can measure the amount of hours we have in a day, and a week, but since we do not know how much time will make up or lifetimes, we must negotiate vigilantly to avoid spending too much doing that which has no meaning to us. And we must also make sure we allow proper time for the stuff that truly matters, and acknowledge that sometimes there is not even enough time in a day to do what we really want to do.

I propose then to examine my priorities each day, starting with family, work, and my personal goals, and prioritize accordingly. I will try to make certain that my excuses are legitimate reasons as opposed to time management decisions that favor laziness or a lack of organization. This sounds a bit like the swearing habit (Life Change # 3: I swear (way) too much). A noble goal but difficult to measure and prone to minor or even major slip ups. However, if I do mess up, I’ll have a really good excuse---if it were not for bad habits, I’d have no habits at all!


Update on Previous Life Changes (Day Seven):

Memo to self: On hot days, in which I am sweating, be careful not to rub your eyes while wearing sun block. Sort of like getting shampoo in the eyes…a sting that lasted the better part of 10 minutes. Sure made tanning sound fashionable. Though I got in my required water intake,(again, the heat and the time spent outside made 4 or 5 32oz Nalgene bottles go down easily), I also added some lemonade and a cherry snow cone to the liquid intake…totally worthwhile misadventures.

I pushed through the couple of weeks of my bad habit elimination regime with mixed, but overall, decent success. As expected, I have had more slip ups with swearing than any other Life Change. I doubt I have been able to go an entire day without uttering one of the words that John Stewart has edited out. But I have grown aware of saying them…they do not slip out along with the rest of the words, and so I’d say my swearing has reduced dramatically, and I hope, I will maintain this awareness and gradually swear less and less.

I did get in at least 30 minutes and sometimes closer to 45 minutes of quality exercise each day, and though no tangible results in terms of weight loss or appearance, I do feel better...more energetic, more alert. I also found that introducing 96-128 ounces of water each day was not as hard as I thought, and I find this to be a change that already seems integrated into my daily regime. No more standing with the refrigerator door opening searching for something to drink…I keep my water bottles in the freezer, and when one is done, I go get another. I actually find myself vaguely thirsty, so it is never something I have to force myself to do…my body has quickly started to appreciate all the water I am consuming.

I did yell at a guy in an intersection today, to stop smoking. I was doing a u-turn and saw him as I had revered direction and drove past him as he waited to either do a u-turn or turn left. There is no doubt that he thinks I am crazy….and those who could hear me thought that as well….it just seems odd to hear someone scream, randomly, “STOP SMOKING!!!” at strangers on the street. I have no idea if this helped him stop smoking or not, but at least he did not follow me and run my car off the road. I consider this to be a signal that he is open minded about the need to stop smoking.

Life Change #6: I Forget to Wear Sun Block

Today I slather on sun block. On my face, forehead, nose, on my ears (my ears peel really badly when they get sunburned). I’ll put it on my arms and chest, and I will apply lip balm with an SPF rating of 25, and I will walk out into the warm sun of late summer in Northern California. I will do this, as I should have done most every day this summer, and for many summers before that. And yet, all summer, in the backpack I carry around with me most of the time, I carry SPF 50 waterproof sun block. For the last month or so, I have even had some special SPF 45 sun block that is made entirely differently and blocks special rays that cause wrinkles and wreak untold havoc on free and not so free radicals and all that stuff. I have no excuse for my oversight. Somehow, deep ingrained in my brain, against all scientific understanding, I carry with me the completely absurd thought that being tanned is a sign of good health.

I am a product of the late 70’s, of Southern California, when tanning on the beach was considered an activity, and the sunscreen of choice was Baby Oil. I recall feeling unhealthy in the winter because I was growing paler, and losing my hard earned tan. We admired those who had garnered a deeper darker tan than our own. We particularly admired those girls who seemed to have achieved tans with no apparent tan line. We admired them a lot. In fact, that may be why we bothered to go out and sit in the hot sun at all…so we could admire those girls with imaginary tan lines…lots of imagination involved with those tan lines.

I wonder about the girls I went to high school that truly committed themselves to the art of the tan. There was a handful. It took some serious time and effort to maintain that bronze mocha tone that seemed at the time to reflect the picture of health. They were typically long and lean, and wore about as little bikini as possible in order to show off their life’s work. They were always there, at the beach. And I wonder now, if they are still tan and lean, or perhaps they are less tan and wrinkled, or worse. Another good reason to attend my high school reunion, I suppose.

Now of course, I have friends that have been stricken with skin cancer, and we fully understand that tanning is no sign of health. In fact it seems to suggest that the sun is microwaving your body to a crisp like a piece of bacon. How, though do I undo the wiring from so long ago…don’t get me wrong…next to exercising, this is probably the most important habit I will break on this little journey….I guess I just had hoped that when I got that body back in shape, I’d be able to take my shirt off and get a tan.

Still, this is a tough topic to be smug or funny about. At the end of the day, it takes, what 15 seconds in the morning to take care of this…maybe another 30 seconds around mid day if you are in the sun for a long time. I really ought to be able to add this to my daily ritual. I’ll be outside watching my daughter and her friends play soccer most of the day, and it will be sunny, and today, I will be protected…is it too late? I think at some level that has been the question that has been at the back of my mind each day I march out into the sun with nary a hat.
As a (nearly) lifelong Californian, the word “sun” has been synonymous with, well, everything. So much of our lives take place outside, that I have come to feel uncomfortable if for some reason weekend activities keep me indoors. The sun can be warm most any time of year, and as nice as it is in the summer time, it is more so in the winter when we watch football games on TV that are played on the “icy tundra” a while it is 66 degrees and clear outside. I have heard it described that the greatest travel advertisement for Southern California is the Rose Parade and Rose Bowl on New Years Day, while most of the country is covered in snow and ice, the invariably sunny warm weather for these events seems to rub the salt intended to melt ice into the open wounds of the viewers. Almost seems unfair.

We even use “sun” as an indication of happy healthy things….a sunny disposition describes a happy, upbeat person, while a walk on the sunny side of the street evokes feelings of warmth and well being, like you are headed in the right direction. “You are the sunshine of my life” is an appreciation directed at someone whom you love. It is a difficult adjustment to make to suddenly consider the sun a danger.

I guess we deserve it though. If we have dumped chemicals into the air that erode or destroy the protective ozone layer around our planet, then I guess this is our reward. What is odd, however, is how we as a family of nations respond to these discoveries. IF it is determined or even suspected that something we are doing is making the sun dangerous to us, shouldn’t that behavior stop immediately while we sort it out. If you suspect that each time someone shoves a sharp stick in their eye, they wind up losing sight in the eye; it seems prudent that step one is to stop with the sticks in the eye, while we figure out what is going on. The retort, though, today seems to be if some chemical is dangerous to the ozone layer, that chemical is phased out (over what is usually like several decades) or the very data is questioned, thereby leady to a series of arguments while the lawyers figure it all out…meanwhile, bye bye ozone. “I will continue to shove sticks into my eye, until you can prove to me that it is dangerous.” I’d advise setting the sticks aside immediately.

Perhaps, then, the reason that things have changed in the 40 years or so that I have been a sun worshipper is because the sun, or at least its ability to harm us, has changed. We don’t have the planetary sun screen in place, so we have to apply our own. I am sure as time goes by, the sunscreen that we apply will become stronger and stronger as we continually erode the ozone layer. And I wonder, will there come a time when the sun screen itself is so potent, that it will actually begin to harm us, and the suns rays pose such a threat that we will not really be able to go out in the sun at all. We will have to change a lot of songs, and phrases….we will rejoice at the “beautiful cloud filled skies”, and I will “walk exclusively on the shady side of the street”…and you will be the “dark cloud of my life”.

It will be an adjustment. Learning to love the clouds instead of the blue skies. Hopefully it will never get that bad. For now I will focus on applying sun block whenever I will be outside on a sunny day for more than a few minutes at a stretch. This exposure to the sun is not confined to summer afternoons by the pool…no…it is a year round commitment I make today. . I recognize that this is a change that may well save my life, or at least prolong it. Maybe I will have fewer wrinkles as I age, and maybe a few less freckles, and maybe I will simply change my idea of what a picture of health is…maybe even I’ll have to buy a wide brimmed hat. I just hope that in 10 or 12 years they don’t discover that the powerful and mysterious chemicals they need to use in order to block the sun’s rays aren’t killing us in some other insidious cumulative way, much as they said the sun was doing. Given the choice, I’d rather have it be the sun…so much more beautiful to say “I love the way the sun lights up your face”, as opposed to “I love the way the sun block shines on your pale skin.”


Update on Previous Life Changes (Day Six):

The exercise program faced a daunting challenge today…I really didn’t feel like it…after spending much of the day in the hot sun (well protected as noted above!) I really was not into finding the 45 minutes or so to sweat and breathe hard. Despite my distaste, I managed to force myself to do it…and as always, I felt like I had accomplished something when I was done…I knew there would be days like that and today I emerged victorious over sloth and lethargy. Not only did I wear sun block, I reapplied at about noon! I can already feel myself growing more pale…
Swearing was a mixed success…let’s just leave it at that, and on the hydration front, along with my 4 full Nalgene bottles (really easy to do when standing in near 100 degree heat), I supplemented my water intake with several beers in the heat of later afternoon, which tasted really good and until I am told (or convince myself) that is a bad habit worth changing, I will simply consider it “extra credit” on the road to ideal hydration.

Life Change #5: I Procrastinate About Anything That Involves Travel

This fall, I am supposed to travel out of town to attend my 30th high school reunion. I knew about this event 6 months, or more, prior, and now as barely a few weeks remain, I have not purchased a ticket, though I am sure I am going. Part of this is related of course to the upcoming Life Change #41: I Let My Fear of Flying Control Me. However, I can drive and take care of that, so there is other stuff at work here…and no, it is not about the reunion itself…I want to go…I plan to go, at some level, I wouldn’t miss it. I just can’t, or won’t, be bothered to plan my life around this, or any event involving traveling. And that is not unusual for me….summer vacation, holiday travel…anything like that…I can never commit.

The most pressing travel event on my radar right now is this reunion event. The Holiday season looms, and though I am sure it will be dinner time topic in the next couple of weeks, so far I have avoided any discussion---good thing too, as we still haven’t paid all the bills from summer vacation! As for the reunion—I am committing. I am taking out the checkbook, writing it out for $125.00, and even putting a stamp on the envelope…I am in. But first, I really should call a few good friends just to make sure they are going. I’d hate to spend all that money, travel all that way, and then not have them be there.

This fear of travel commitment comes up cyclically each year. Holiday travel is something I avoid at all costs, so I play the passive/aggressive card and simply cannot be bothered to make plans despite the reasonable requests of family and friends who want to know what our plans our. I have been known to throw myself behind the planning and execution of a holiday party simply to avoid rubbing elbows with the masses who find they must relocate for a week or so at the end of every year. Moreover, each summer, our departure date for the annual trek to the mountains is a date shrouded in mystery, often not becoming clearly defined until the week we actually pack up and go. I may be the only person I know that has this bad habit. Everyone else plans, I simply wait for that moment when it seems right…keeps me off airplanes, anyway.

But at least for today, I can address this. I pop the envelope into the mailbox, and instantly I am struck with the sense that perhaps no one is going. Perhaps it will be just me and a couple of guys from the marching band, hanging around some swank country club in LA, discussing different types of insurance, or reminiscing about events that none of us can recall. I never learned the art of disinterested conversation, and find it almost impossible to carry on dialogue with strangers if the object is to simply fill up the room with conversation.

I guess what most people think about prior to attending a high school reunion is their relative success when measured against their former peers. I’d guess these advance concerns are confined to the days leading up to the event, and when you actually go, you get caught up in the flora and fauna of the moment…the swirl of memory, and the chance to fill in pieces that help complete our picture of folks we have not seen in some time. The volleyball player who became a porn star…whatever happened to her? The math whiz who was synthesizing acid in high school…how did he make out? What about the old girlfriends? How do they look now? How do I look to them? Wish I had started that exercise program a few weeks (or months) earlier.

I recall the last event like this, I suppose it was my 20th high school reunion, and I was struck by the number of people who had died. Polaroid faces on a white poster board, precariously perched atop a flimsy easel… It was not a great number, perhaps 10 or 12, but it was weird to see faces of folks who did not even have the chance to consider how successful they were when balanced against the others there….it made such concerns seem pretty trivial. Why is it that money always can be made to seem trivial, but only for a few moments at a time? If I did not recognize the faces, I felt a pang, like I missed the chance to get to know them. These were someone’s son or daughter, husband or wife, and they did not get to weigh life’s great decisions, like whether or not to attend a high school reunion.

Somehow, the concept of classmates dying brings up the real reason we attend these events. Time is passing. Our time, their time, everyone in the room is a spinning clock. This is a stop along the way, specifically intended to mark the fact that the years have one by faster than anyone can imagine. This will be our 30 year reunion. Everyone will be in their late 40’s. There will be, I am guessing, even more folks that could not attend because they have passed away, and the next reunion, there will be even more. It goes without saying that is a list that none of us want to get on. But it will grow; until at some point that list is longer than the actual guest list. Cancel my tickets for that reunion.

The other reasons we go to these things is to, albeit briefly, restore contact with those “friends” you have not seen since the last reunion. I stay in contact with the people I really want to see, and in fact, I have several friends from high school I am still in regular contact with even now. Oddly, these are the same people I want to make sure plan to attend this event. I don’t want to be there without them, and yet, since I see them, and talk to them on a regular basis, I know what they are doing, how their kids are, what kind of house they live in, how many times they have been married…why waste time and money driving 500 miles to see them? And yet the experience would somehow seem quite empty without sharing it with them…so we can laugh about it later…discuss who looked great, who looked not so great, and who made the greatest fool of themselves (typically a result of sticking too close to the bartender). My reunion posse. Hope they can make it.

Just as the reunions of our lives mark time, so do the other “travels” I so vigilantly avoid planning. The holidays are essentially a yearly reunion we have with ourselves, as we pull out the same ornaments to place on this year’s tree, or gather in groups to celebrate the purchase of a new calendar, and make promises about how this year will be different. I can do all that at home, thank you. I do not need to stuff presents and winter clothes into the “closed and locked upper bin” or the back of the SUV. I do not need to battle weather, and traffic, and sleep on my in-law’s couch in order to enjoy the holidays.

Summer vacation. Two simple words, that when placed together perhaps describe the most perfect event on the calendar. I delay committing to it, I already know why-- because I love the notion that it is still to come, as opposed to having just ended. Summer vacation has it all…the weather is usually good, if you favor blue skies, warm weather, beach/pool play, scantily clad women, warm nights and long days of ample sunlight. Summer vacation has a meandering quality to it. Not scheduled around a day or date as the winter holidays, and there is often no objective (like shopping or decorating or shoveling snow). Summer is more about drinking a beer around a roaring campfire, or sitting on a boat dock listening to the splash of water against the moss covered wood. There is plenty of time to get to everything, because the agenda is short, and there is still lots of time left in the day. That said, the saddest day of the year is the last day of summer vacation. The ringing of the school bell, back to work, and the worst thing of all, almost a year before it rolls around again…a year to wait…far too long.

So as much as I look forward to it, I would far rather look forward to it, than rue its passing. So as it nears…as June gives way to July on the calendar, I begin to savor it. Like Charlie opening that first chocolate bar his grandpa bought for him on his birthday…morsel by morsel, I allow myself just a taste. Putting off planning it means it is still not here, and it sits, like an unopened present under the Christmas tree…full of potential, full of surprise. And when it does arrive, it’s a bit like that last day of school each year, when the binder paper can be thrown into the air, the assignment folder discarded into the dumpster. Homework left undone would simply have to stay that way.

So how many summer vacations do we get in a lifetime? 50, 60…70? Not nearly enough, I’d surmise. How many until they put us on the”definitely will not be attending” list at the reunion. How many Christmas trees will we decorate? How many calendars do we own in a lifetime? And what does any of this have to do with planning to travel?

In the end, I think my avoidance stems from not wanting to acknowledge that another year has gone by…I still have a lengthy to do list from last year. So much of MY travel involves ritual and tradition. Perhaps if I had a jetsetter job where I have to be in Paris for dinner and Milan for breakfast the next day, it would become second nature, and I would be able to get out one of the calendars I purchase along the way, and pick a date to be wherever I need to be. I wouldn’t worry about who would be there, or what I might miss if I depart from Northern California for a few days (an earthquake perhaps? See Life Change #21: I Have Let Our Earthquake Survival Kit Fall into Disrepair).

My fondest travels have always been those that had no strict itinerary. Those road trips without a clear beginning or end, where you linger in one place it feels right, and pass quickly from places that don’t offer much comfort. Perhaps that is why I procrastinate. I don’t like to lose that flexibility. An itinerary assumes everything has gone just as planned, and it seems, for me, nothing ever goes just as planned. How in the world can I know if I will be able to be at the airport on Oct 15th at 9:30? How can I be sure if I will be home next Thursday if I am driving through Yellowstone today? What if I like it? What if I want to stay? What if something better comes along? What if my car is surrounded by 861 bison, in front and behind and all over the road ahead and I must sit there until they have moved along? I could never quite commit to where I will be or how I will feel at some arbitrary date down the road. Who knows, I might even be one of those folks that can’t make the reunion.

But for now, for me, I will make that reunion, and if that goes well, I will try and layout my plans for the holidays, just so long as I get to sleep in my own bed.

Update on Previous Life Changes (Day Five):

A curious, unexpected surprise: since I have begun regularly exercising, and drinking so much water, I find that I have been drinking less coffee. In fact today, I actually made less of it, after dumping more than a little of it out into the sink the last couple of mornings. Could there be a connection? Or is it because I have stopped swearing? Are coffee and cursing connected? Happily, I got in my exercise, my water, didn’t swear (much), and against all odds, managed to avoid smoking. Didn’t get anyone to stop though, either. I kind of pushed things on the exercise front -- just shy of 40 minutes which seems a positive development.

Life Change #4: Stop Smoking

For me, this one will be easy. Simply put…I DON’T SMOKE. But I figured if you are reading this, you just might, and we best get our arms around this one right away. I am told, though I have no first hand knowledge, that stopping smoking takes time, dedication, will power, support, luck, nicoderm patches, several relapses, and in the end, failure is the most likely result. It seems to me simple…..it takes matches (or a lighter) to smoke. Hide the matches, discard the lighter. And there you have it…you cannot smoke! Then again, I always thought the best way to achieve gun control was to simply make ammo illegal. Constitution says you can have guns….nothing in here about ammo….

OK, so I am not quite so insensitive. I can hear ice cream call out to me at odd hours of the day or night. I can rationalize that one carton of Haagen-Dazs Swiss Chocolate Almond will not really hurt all that much in the grand scheme of things. I’ll exercise for an hour and then convince myself that “I earned it” and then eliminate any benefit I derived from a 600 calorie work out with a 1200 calorie ice cream binge. Addiction is addiction is addiction. But you should still stop…stuff is killing you, and it is not doing the rest of us much good either

I can scarcely imagine growing up the way I did. My mom smoked….everyone’s mom smoked. They smoked while they drove us around; they smoked while cooking dinner, while eating dinner, and all over the house. They smoked in restaurants, in theaters, on airplanes, at PTA meetings, in bed, in the bathroom…smoke was everywhere. Second hand smoke had a different description back then….we called it “air”. It was in fact the very stuff that we breathed—everything was second hand smoke….such was the prevalence of smoking.

At least now, we have relegated smoking to the back alleys or single occupant vehicles in our midst. Even so, when I pull up behind you in your Honda Accord with the windows down and the smoke billowing out the window, the smell is nauseating. How did I put up with this for so many years?…how did any of us put up with it?…how did smoking become so widely accepted? I want to get out of my car and tell you that I wish you’d roll up the windows, since I have small children in my car and don’t want them breathing that smoke. Probably get punched. Might even deserve it.

My limited experience with smoking came at the age of experimentation...about 13 years old…I stole a few Newport’s from my mom’s purse…getting cigarettes was no big deal…hell they all smoked so many of them so constantly that who would miss a cigarette or two. Cigarettes are so expensive now, that I am guessing a serious smoker knows exactly how many are left in the pack…that makes them hard to steal…and for that reason alone, expensive cigarettes seem like a good idea. Kids can’t steal them as stealthily from their parents.

The first thing I noticed as I lit my first cigarette is that holding a burning object that close to my eyes seemed wrong. In fact it burned…maybe my eyes are too sensitive, or a I smoked “wrong”, but it seemed that the little plume of smoke went right into my eyes, and that was not something I was going to easily grow accustomed to. Then there was the burning sensation in my throat and lungs…the sudden explosive coughing as the body rejected the entire premise of breathing this crap (I did allow myself to use that word, didn’t I?)…and finally, as if that was not enough, there were the spins….that “green around the gills feeling”…which is odd, because I do not believe I own gills…and yet, that description works…I felt like a sick fish. How in the world do people ever come back for cigarette #2 I wondered.

“Oh you get used to it”, I recall a friend, my partner in crime, telling me. “It’s pretty cool once you get the hang of it” he assured me. I think really, he just wanted me to steal more cigarettes from my mom, and he recognized that if I wasn’t interested, the supply chain was shut down. I think I got the second cigarette done. Not sure. All I know is that I simply never came back. I have a ton of bad habits, but happily, the worst, or at least one of the worst, habits is not mine to shed.

Still, tobacco holds some sway over our culture. I was floored when my son, on the occasion of his 18th birthday suggested that we might go out and smoke a cigar together. This is a kid whom I doubt has ever smoked in his life, and even if he had tried cigarettes, he had pretty clearly rejected them as a satisfying alternative to good clean fresh air. Now he wants to smoke a cigar with me?…it seemed sort of retro….like if we were some family of stature in the late 19th century, I’d take him into my drawing room on his 18th birthday and we would smoke cigars while discussing the ways of the world…big leather chairs…a globe...brandy.

I guess I sort of modeled that behavior…from time to time, I have enjoyed (not sure that is the right word, but we will let it be for now) a cigar with a friend…it typically surrounded some sort of uniquely male activity…bachelor parties, poker night, camping trips, scotch drinking…I’d guess a dozen or more times over the past 10 years…so that is what I will be giving up…no more cigars…if only to send a message to my son that even though I CAN smoke a cigar any time I want to, I don’t. And clearly, if I did, my wife would have a thing or two to say about it.

I chewed tobacco on a canoe trip with a bunch of friends from high school and college…seemed ok…easy to spit (anywhere) and if you did swallow a little and had to puke that was easy enough (anywhere). But there were no women with us…I always wondered what it must taste like to kiss someone who chewed tobacco, but since I never met any women who “chewed” I never got that bit of research done. I can imagine though…if kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray, I suppose that kissing a “chewer” is like licking a spittoon. If I had a choice, pass the ashtray…

Spittoons are not as common as say, beer bottles with spit and chew debris coagulated at the bottom…that is why in certain parts of the country, where chewing is prevalent, you never ever set down your beer bottle, and if you do, well, you go get a new beer…never risk picking up a bottle that might have been spit in…

However, despite these reservations, chewing tobacco is a much more personal thing to do than smoking…no second hand smoke…second hand spit may be disgusting, but no one suggests we are being killed by it…I’d rather be around a person chewing than a person smoking. And thanks, I’ll get my own beer!

So this bad habit is called “Stop Smoking”…and since I don’t smoke, perhaps it is time to look at the deeper meaning behind this…notice I did not say “Quit” smoking. No, I have to “Stop” smoking. Have I ever lifted a finger to keep a person from smoking? Nope (See Life Change #48: I Avoid Confrontation). Though there have been many times when I have been around someone who is smoking and it bothers me, have I ever said anything? If I say nothing, isn’t that sort of endorsing the despicable behavior? I should actually do something to “stop smoking”.

I should come at this somewhat naturally. My father, a life long torturer of smokers, way before it became fashionable, would make these labels on his little DYMO machine and put them all over his car…”NO SMOKING” they cried out in their embossed white on black background 3/8” high sort of way. It was sort of absurdly underwhelming, but he made up for it by putting them everywhere….on the dashboard, by every ashtray, by the cigarette lighter (cars used to have them, before they became “power ports”). It was, as if to suggest, that someone might inadvertently light up a cigarette and before he could utter the phrase, “No Smoking, Please!” a molecule of cigarette smoke might escape and linger in his car. Perhaps he was avoiding confrontation. Didn’t want to be the one to have to tell the poor fool about to light up that this was a no smoking area. In fact, I think my father’s car was the first no smoking area I was ever aware of.

Since my mom smoked, this was an issue of not so little consternation to both of them. On lengthy road trips, she would need to stop for a cigarette. Everyone’s bladder stayed nice and empty, so it wasn’t that great a problem, and she got to ride in the car, mile after mile with the little self adhesive label staring back at her. No Smoking. I recall thinking there was cruelty in the labels…but I am not sure who was more cruel…my dad for placing those labels, or my mother, for continuing to smoke despite the impact it had on his allergies and asthma. I suspect both had somewhat cruel intentions.

My father eventually became intolerant of the lingering odor of cigarettes which was noticeable long after my mom had finished her cigarette, so the road trip ritual was amended to include time to walk around after the last puff, to give the clothes and hair some time to air out. My father gradually made it harder and harder for my mother to smoke. She never fought back She was outnumbered…by this time, my sister and I were aware of the health risks posed by the “cancer sticks” and so she found less and less time, in less and less space to smoke, until eventually she gave up….for good. I can’t help but think it was a sort of gift he gave her. He made her stop…it took 30 years, but smoking eventually became so complicated that it was simply not worthwhile.

Back when everyone smoked, everything smelled of it. But now, with smoking such an outlaw enterprise, the lingering odor is a bit of a telltale. My daughter’s 2nd grade teacher smoked, and she didn’t like her simply because “she stunk all the time”. Everyone knows who smokes and who doesn’t now. So picking them out won’t be hard…making them stop will be difficult.

My son had a great approach back in his “parrot” phase of development. We would always tell him (brainwash him?) that smoking was “stupid”…from as early as he even knew about smoking. So of course, that paid dividends. I was walking with him in town one day, and we went past a rougher looking guy who was smoking while seated at a bench outside a store. “Look dad, that man is STUPID!” he said, with conviction and not the slightest trace of malice…as if simply stating a verifiable and obvious fact, like, “look dad, that guy has red hair”…clearly the dude heard the remark…we were only one or two paces past him….paces which I might add, that quickened after he said it…I never looked back (remember that discomfort with confrontation habit I am saddled with currently?), though to be fair, I think I was more fearful of getting a black eye in front of my son who at that time thought I was almost as cool as I thought I was. But it does bring up a point. Smoking is stupid. Everyone who smokes knows it, and it is the only habit that I can think of that would most gladly be shed by those saddled by it.

Perhaps someone reading these words will opt to quit…and then I will have succeeded on this life change…but just in case, the next smoker I see will hear it from me, or …perhaps I will bring my son along. See, if you quit…one less smoker, that much less smoke and I won’t have to get in your grill—I really do hate conflict.

Somehow, I gotta stop smoking.

Update on Previous Life Changes (Day Four):

Another day of well hydrated exercise sans I Pod. I did have that moment today, where putting on some pants I knew to be, well, snug, I hoped that maybe on Day 4 there would be some change…some easing of the tension of the fabric around my waist. Nope. I noted no reduction in girth. I have uttered the word “shit” on 3 occasions…immediately stopped myself and apologized to the people I was with and explained to them why…they all seemed to harbor doubts about my chances for success…as if to test my patience, two recent canine calling cards have been left on our front lawn. Someone ought to be tackling that nasty habit of letting their dog crap on my lawn, or any lawn, without cleaning it up. Come on people; let’s get YOUR lists started!

Life Change #3: I Swear (way) Too Much

Shit. This is gonna be hard. Really hard.

OK…I can measure exercise (did I, or did I not, exercise?), I can measure water consumption (1 2, or 7 glasses of water drank today—I can count), but swearing….yikes, this will be a challenge. But it has to be done…aside from my weight, nothing gets more commentary from my wife and daughter, neither of whom swears so far as I know.

This life change will be difficult because there are certainly times when swearing seems to be the right thing, at least in my mind. I mean, if you stub your toe….what are you going to do if you cannot curse? On the other hand, these are after all just words….can "God damn it" be easily substituted with "gosh darn"….not sure, but I can try. I will try. This is a life changing experience, after all.

I think part of the problem is that I am a sponge, especially when it comes to words and language… and I note that swearing has become almost a cottage industry in many movies and various comedians cannot utter a sentence with out dropping the F-bomb. It seems as if some folks get paid per f-bomb they drop, hence they drop it an awful lot. In fact, some times the words themselves are intended to make the joke funny. Thanks Lenny.

When I sit up late and watch “The Daily Show”…they simply silence the swear words, but they are still in the script…if anything, this calls MORE attention to the words. Perhaps John Stewart says “Karl ‘fucking’ Rove” while what you hear is “Karl –pause for silence—Rove” as he clearly mouths the word “fucking”--the impact, seems to me anyway, funnier than if he simply said it out loud…everyone watching the show knows what he said, and no one would be the least bit offended had the word not been censored out, but they have found a way to actually make it funnier, by calling attention to it, BECAUSE it has been excised from the soundtrack. Like spraying orange paint on a scratch or dent on your car (assuming of course, you don’t drive an orange car).

I opted to deal with this bad habit early in my personal journey so I would not be inclined to use profanity in later writings….I can easily see that tackling some bad habits (“I drink too much Coffee” or “I eat too much sugar”) might cause me to swear simply on principle alone…and in truth, as much as curse words flow out of my mouth, I almost never enjoy reading them in print. Somehow it seems when writing…when afforded with the time to select the right word, then it should almost never be ‘shit’ or even ‘crap’ (which is NOT a curse word, but seems to lack grace anyway)…sometimes those are the right words, but at some level it seems lazy. When speaking however, there is often not time to find the right word. You are driving along and someone cuts you off, causing you to swerve and spill that hot bucket of Starbucks all over your shirt. It hurts. If it makes your lap, it hurts a lot. Your clothes are a mess (and quite possibly ruined) and now you need to stop and get more coffee. This merits AT LEAST a “God Damn it!” and more likely a string of expletives. And the finger. Definitely the finger.

I will have to search inside myself to see if I consider the”finger” a bad habit or not. It is such a personal act…most of the time the “other guy” does not even see it given to him. On the other hand, if he does, it may precipitate a much worse confrontation…but is it the same as swearing, or a bad habit all its own? My sister had wanted to purchase a bumper sticker she saw that she thought appropriate…”Horn Broken…Watch for Middle Finger”. I suppose if she has that impression, perhaps it is a habit I need to break. OK, for now, no “finger” either…such a shame…just saying “flip ‘em the bird” has such a poetic lilt to it. I’ll miss this more than the words, I suspect.

This is also a relative issue…..some words that might be offensive to some would be wholly reasonable to others. I guess I am speaking of words that they would bleep out on TV….”tit” and “fart” are both harmless, even though they might not be able to say them on Letterman. I do not use them enough to matter, and frankly when I do, it is completely in context. “Tit” seems at least as cute and harmless as “boob”, and the alternatives to “fart” (pass gas, flatulence, etc) are simply laughably contrived…a fart is a fart folks…get over it. “Ass” is not a swear word…it is part of the body or a smallish horse…and actually, I think the word “butt” is funnier than “ass”, and no one considers “butt” a swear word. Hell is a location, if not in fact, at least in mythology. “Dick” and “cock” are a little rougher, and though I use “dick” as in “that guy is a dick” or even “I caught my dick in the zipper again, and so I am on the shelf for a few days”--can’t really use any other word in that situation. I pretty much never use the word “cock”, and I have no explanation for why that would be…but besides, it is also a rooster…I think John Stewart can say “dick” on TV…so that will be the bar we set….if he can say it on the Daily Show, it is not a swear word, and therefore, I can use it. I think we are really talking about 3 words and/or expressions: “fuck”, “shit” and “God damn” and all their related modified states (i.e.: motherfucker)

So…in giving up swear words, I need to be fair to myself. It will not happen overnight…there will be slip ups. (Again, I am not running marathons yet, even though I have begun exercising…baby steps people, baby steps!) And, there will be occasions that it is totally necessary. For instance…the word “shit”, when preceded by the word “dog” creates a noun that is part of the language with no reasonable alternative. If I observe dog shit on the lawn, that is a fair use of the word. I have never been fond of the expression “dog crap”…seems somehow harder to say and crap is much better as a verb…as in “that dog crapped on our lawn” Dog poop seems juvenile, dog scat seems too scientific, dog mess too British, dog stuff too constipated. So, until I can be convinced otherwise, “shit” is still fair game if it sits on the lawn.

‘Shit’ also makes a wonderful descriptor of a gathering of debris, usually personal, in a place it ought not to be…as in “can you get all your shit off the dining table so we can eat dinner?” Somehow, “can you get your pile of books and math homework off the dining table so we can eat dinner” lacks urgency and emphasis. ‘Shit’ is your stuff that I have no regard or need for….it is important only to you, and now it is in my way. And I cannot think of a better single word that describes that circumstance, and around my house that circumstance is all over the place…yep, there is shit all over my house.

And of course, there is no word that deals more eloquently with the matter of the unflushed toilet. OK…I know there are other words…stool, feces, bowel movement, defecation…even crap…but give me a break….this is not a clinic or laboratory…it is my house…if you do not flush the toilet, there is shit in it…simple as that. Of course, if the toilet always got flushed, we would not have to have this discussion.

Shit will be a difficult word to stop using…but I will try not to use it casually, and will only use it in the descriptive sense where it is appropriate and proper. Fuck is a different matter. It seems to be a universal word—really THE universal word…used as a modifier, (you’re fucking kidding me), a noun (get the fuck out of here), surely a verb (don’t fuck with me!)... and as an expression of confusion (what the fuck is that?)...but it is also a word that simply occupies space in simple sentences….(“I fuckin’ hated that fuck of a movie”, or “fuck if I fuckin’ know”)…and NONE of these uses are really descriptive of the actually meaning of the word….describing the sex act seems to be the last possible use of the word nowadays, and it is never used when there is any true love or feeling involved…”can you believe that John is fucking Sheila?” is not nearly the same as “can you believe that John slept with Sheila?”, or the far more hopeful “can you believe that John and Sheila are hooking up?”.

Fuck is also still the shock word of choice, which is odd since it gets used so generically and without regard to its intended or really any meaning. “Fuck you!” still carries a fair amount of weight when uttered directly and with little modification. It seems to get used casually, indiscriminately, and then suddenly it emerges as a resonant word filled with meaning—usually anger or confrontation. A word for all seasons, a word for all reasons. A powerful word that seems to offend 50% of the population, while it rolls easily and frequently off the tongue of the other 50%. It is divisive. It is a Blue State word, in a Red State World. Oddly, it seems I use it most when discussing our highest ranking Red State politician.

I have noted that as we grow more used to hearing this word, it seems to need to be used more in order to create the same shock value….Generation Y and Z (by the way, who comes after Z? Do we start at A again?) today seem to use the word more than they should (perhaps THEY should give up this habit…right along with me)…in fact, if you eliminated the following words from their lexicon, it would be hard for some to have a conversation at all: fuck, like, uhh, nope, whatever, party, chill, and dude.

But I will give up the word “fuck”….no more “f-bomb” for me…I will limit my use of the word “shit” to appropriate circumstances and context. “God damn” seems almost quaint when measured against other words, but it is offensive to some and surely there are alternatives that I can use. When I slip up, I will try to apologize to whomever hears me. (assuming there is someone present---I sometimes swear at inanimate things! In fact, this will help me with a future life change as well (Life Change #34: I have trouble apologizing).


Update on Previous Life Changes (Day Three):

Seems an odd side effect, but even after increasing my water intake for just one day (Life Change #2: I Don’t Drink Enough Water), I cannot help but feel like I am a bit more thirsty…that’s OK…that should make it even easier to get my quota in today. Disaster struck on the exercise front…yesterday’s dead I pod battery morphed into a dead I pod…I still managed to get in my whopping 32 minutes on the elliptical trainer, but I suffered with out the music…Life Change #3B…I NEED A NEW IPOD!!!

Life Change #2: I Don’t Drink Enough Water

I realized immediately after exercising--I was thirsty. If I am going to do one life change (exercise), I really ought to do the obvious other life change (drink more water). This seems to be an easy enough habit to avoid. I basically don’t drink enough water for one simple reason: I forget, at least when I am not exercising!

Water is the most perplexing of drinks…it has no real flavor, but good cold water really tastes good….and when you drink water that does not taste good, well, you know it, don’t you? Some water has a sort of thickness to it which is really not thirst quenching and I suspect it is not that good for you either. Some water veers toward saltiness, some water leaves a sourness on the tongue. Most of us have water delivered through the tap in our home, but as a nation we still spend a tremendous amount of money on bottled water, some of it sparkling, some of it imported from distant lands, some purports to have health benefits, and all seem to claim that theirs tastes better than everyone else’s. And yet, with all this water available in stores, restaurants, kitchens, bathrooms,…even gardens (though I suppose you are not actually supposed to drink out of the hose), it is said, by whoever says these things, that we do not drink enough water.

We are supposed drink 8 (eight!) 16 ounce glasses of water everyday…and though I cannot say for sure that I will hit that objective everyday, I have decided to add several glasses of water to my daily beverage list, and perhaps thereby eliminate some, if not all of the juice, soda, beer, wine, cocktails and coffee that I drink. Except, I will not eliminate the coffee. (I will still drink my two tall cups of coffee each morning). I expect, as a result of this additional water intake, I will need to make another related change in my life (Life Change 2A: Pee A Lot More).
For me, water has to be COLD. Not tap water cool, but at least refrigerator cold, but I am most fond of water with ice. The stuff you buy in the stores starts out nice and cold, but on those hot days when you really want it cold…it warms up too fast unless you guzzle it down right away…I guess that is why they make such small bottles…so you can drink one and leave the others on ice, but for me, I like a big bottle, or a big glass of water, with condensation forming liberally on the outside of the vessel. I also like a wide mouth. The little bottles with standard necks require you to sip…water is meant to be drunk…not sipped. Aquafina makes a bottle with a wide mouth…they get almost all of my bottled water business. Of course, the standard Nalgene bottle, popularized by backpackers, sets the bar…a large enough mouth so that it allows, if you wish, for a trickle to stream down on either cheek--if you really want to get into drinking water demonstratively…or not.

We are confounded with so many options other than water…ironically, most of them are simply water liberally polluted with sugar, and juice or infused with tea, vitamins or carbonated and mixed with a healthy does of artificial this and that to create a drink that could never be found in nature (what is cola, really?). To say nothing of the sports drink concept….the beverage which is “better than water”. How did we mange to break any kind of sweat without replacing those valuable electrolytes. Pass the salt shaker, please.

These selections don’t count as water, or so they say (at some point, we will have to look into who “they” are, but for now, let us assume they are learned and have our best interests at heart). These alternatives to water are like the junk food of the beverage world…lots of calories, not so much benefit. Despite my enjoyment of water, I find that sometimes, against all better sense and even contrary to my own taste bud’s desires, I will select a soda over water even though I am quite thirsty and water would be a much better choice…something about “it’s just water, and I want something a bit less watery when trying to quench my thirst”. Must be the mind control substances in the sodas that cause us to select them…no way they do their job as well as water.

Think about a hot dusty day…out in the sun, working hard…the back of your throat is dry; your tongue feels swollen and shriveled all at once. YOU are thirsty….what is it gonna be?…A Coke? Pepsi? or…WATER?. Of course it is water! (with deepest apologies to beer…though to be fair, no one has suggested that we, as a nation, do not drink enough beer!)…And though, a vigorous argument could be made for lemonade, perhaps with a sprig of mint leaves along for the ride, surely, it will be water that does a better job of slaking that thirst. I have heard it said that sugary drinks actually increase your thirst…not sure how that gets measured, but in terms of actually making me feel like my thirst has lessened, water is top dog!

Even if water is what we should be drinking in lieu of Snapple and 7up, there is still peril, or so it seems. Is our drinking water safe as delivered through our kitchen faucet? Some seem to question that….perhaps I should buy a filter!…replacement cartridges are only about $30…and when the filters are disposed of, it says you are supposed to treat them as a BIOHAZARD. Yikes!…so, one day, we are drinking the water that flows through this contraption, the next day, we are disposing of it at the bottom of some 2000 foot deep salt mine in the Nevada dessert for fear of what may be growing in it…what exactly is it taking out of our water? Should that stuff be in there to begin with?

And what about those bottles of water that are so convenient and stocked in plentiful supply at every convenience store in the land. I wonder if the bottled water boom isn’t a sort of plot by a coalition of petrochemical manufacturers….there is a lot of plastic surrounding all that water. Most of it is labeled “Pure Spring Water” or “Bottled at the Source” wherever that might be. If, as we assume but don’t readily acknowledge, those bottles are simply filled at some tap in a bottling facility in Pennsylvania, or Virginia or Arizona, who is to say that those taps are any safer than the one in my kitchen…assuming of course that it is safe! Do they have a filter?…(how do they get rid of theirs?). Troubling stuff indeed…what happens if my eight glasses a day kills me...won’t be very good for any future bad habit remediation…though I will admit it is a pretty powerful life change (Life Change #2347: I Don’t Breathe Enough Air).

I wonder sometimes about these “sources”. When I was a kid, I used to spend a great deal of time in the Rockies, near the head waters of the Colorado River. We would hike and fish and spend all day in or around water, and when we got thirsty, we’d simply cup our hands and dip them into the freezing stream and lift as much water as we could hold to our mouths and drink the freshest coldest water you could imagine; likely it was snow earlier that day, and it quenched the thirst, it tasted so good, almost sweet, but with a clean finish that suggested pine and it slipped down your throat like a shoe on a mossy rock….and we never got sick…we drank all we wanted, left plenty for the fish, and never thought about anything in the water that might hurt us….
Those same streams now are replete with the Giardia bacteria, (so called Beaver Fever) and no one drinks from the streams without elaborate treatment devices and tablets….water that used to flow into the town’s water supply now needs filtration, ozonation, chlorination, and all sorts of other “nations” in order for it to be deemed safe. SO…what is that “source” that is advertised on some bottles, and how is their source more protected than other sources? Sort of makes me wonder if I should make this change at all.

The one “nation” liberally added to water is “carbonation”. I have wondered if water ever really occurs naturally carbonated. I guess in fact I have not wondered very much, since I could probably “Google” it and find out, but in any event, I have noted that despite the fact that, though bottled water already costs more than gasoline, to really maximize profits, a water producer can simply carbonate the water and then really bump up the price. Is it expensive to add carbonation? Perhaps so, or not, but either way, this gives water a snobby cousin…SPARKLING WATER….and they bring it to us from super cool places like Italy, France and Northern California. Folks add a lemon or a lime and pour it over ice, and I am left to wonder….do they make carbonated ice?

I also think it funny that some folks scoff that “water costs more than gasoline” at least in terms of the price in bottles….it seems pretty clear to me…shouldn’t it be? Isn’t it far more important to have water than gasoline? If we took all the gasoline away, we would be able to use our cars for planters or storage or really big paper weights, but without water, we’d use up all the gasoline driving around looking for water.

Since I LIKE water and water seems available without much effort, I will happily add this to my list of Life Changes, commencing today, and see if the results are worthwhile. I can see already one other change headed my way: Life Change #9: Put the Toilet Seat Down!
So I filled and froze a Nalgene bottle (warning: if you try this at home, only fill the bottle about 2/3 full to allow that pesky ice to expand, otherwise, you will need a generous supply of Nalgene bottles). I slurp down about 3 full bottles over the day (the equivalent of 6-7 glasses of water). Some of it streams down my cheek and misses my mouth, thereby giving the back of my hand the chance to purposefully wipe the liquid from my lips and face. I supplement this with a glass of water before bed, and I will be darn close to the target. Just like I didn’t run a marathon the 1st day of exercise, there seems to be no strong reason to drain the swimming pool the first day of expanded water intake. However, instead of lemonade, or Orange Juice at lunch, I stuck with water…that felt pretty good, except now I gotta go pee….

Update on Previous Life Changes (Day Two):
Well I made it…but it is after all only day two (Life Change #1: Start exercising). I weathered the worst of all possible stumbling blocks as in fact I had failed to plug in my I Pod overnight…YEP…dead. Oh well…I turned up the radio loud and worked through it…it was hot as well, but since I am drinking all this ice cold water…

Life Change #1: I Don’t Get Enough (or any) Exercise

My wife says I need to lose weight. My mother says I need to lose weight, my daughter says I need to lose weight….I have acquired nicknames ranging from “jelly belly” to “fatty”…all of course intended to be terms of endearment as opposed to outright slanders….Thing is, losing weight is not so much a change I can make (Surely, if I could lose 50 pounds today, I would do it!---and man would I look good!)…No, I think losing weight is a goal, not a change, so I will start with the change that makes most sense….EXERCISE!

Like most Americans, I have been on some kind of diet since I was about 22 years old….and really, I was on a diet before that, just headed the other way…The first time I ever heard my weight challenged was in high school while playing basketball….the coach told me I was too skinny, and that I got knocked around too easily on the boards…I was not amazingly tall, just over 6’-0”….skinny players who are not too tall have a nickname….they call them “Subs”. I became familiar with the sights and sounds at the end of the bench….and I seldom had to shower or launder my uniform after a game. But since the coach did not like how much I weighed, I figured I would do something about it…..Chocolate Mint Ice Cream! It was my favorite…bright green with all those flecks of chocolate…just about a carton every day…all in the name of gaining some weight and perhaps getting a bit more playing time. I ate ice cream, extra helpings at dinner, two bowls of cereal in the morning…my mom would pack two sandwiches (I never liked that part…I think she gave me the same amount of meat, just laid between four slices of white bread rather than two). I never thought twice about what or how much I ate...

Thing is…even though I was not playing in the games, I was still practicing every day…running jumping, sweating…playing basketball…pretty much every day. In fact the days that I got almost no exercise were, ironically, game days…on those days, I would rest up! I gained not a single pound, so far as I could tell…and if I did, it sure was not obvious to the coach…I was still skinny…but I was eating a lot of ice cream, so life was good!

And when I stopped playing basketball, and as you might guess, I stopped eating all that extra food. Well, not exactly. That would have been a smart plan, but actually, I was pretty set in the rhythm…open up the freezer each day around 4pm and whittle away at a half gallon of ice cream, drain a bottle of apple juice, and then sit down to dinner and eat a full plate or two, depending on if I liked it or not. And then, ice cream for dessert. I sure never stopped to add it all up, but I think it might have been about 8,000 calories in about a 4 hour time span.

Initially, I stopped playing basketball, because I blew my knee out, had surgery, and got to sit on my ass for like 6 weeks. Seems pretty obvious now, but I had no idea at the time what that would mean…all that time just lounging about (pre video games, if you can imagine) watching TV and eating to kill the time….and when I was sort of done with the recuperation time…finally, I noticed, I had gained a little weight!...Too late for basketball season, and pretty much none of it above my waist where I could really use it trying to grab rebounds. NO, at age 18, I had a little paunch…kinda cute at the time…my legs and arms were still skinny, my butt as flat as the bench in our high school gym, but the beginnings of a belly…

After my knee was healed up, I went back to playing sports of all kinds, mostly pick up basketball games, softball, flag football…all the sort of things you play in college intramurals, and with friends…and I didn’t gain any more weight, but I don’t recall ever losing the little belly that had joined me. And I noticed that when I went home from college for holidays, ate well, and neglected the activity for even a few days, the pants got a little more snug…the belly grew just a bit…weight gain seemed to be a one way street….

I finally got the clue…obviously too late, that eating a ton of food and then not exercising is not such a good idea…and since I have sworn that I will not buy any larger pants than the size 38 waist I presently wear, I figure it really is time to stop “adding to the belly”—otherwise I’ll need to simply walk around in my boxer shorts…since none of my pants will fit, and frankly, that has a real sad ring to it. If I stick with the exercise, perhaps at least I will stop growing, and then perhaps when I get to one of my later Life Changes (“Eliminate Food from my diet”, or something like that), I can finally start to reverse the 30 year growth trend that is my belly!
I am not alone. Many of the folks that suggest that I lose weight, should also lose weight themselves…I have never known if a proper retort would be something like, “I’ll drop 20 just as soon as you Buck-o!” I am pretty sure if I said it to my wife, she’d help me to stop eating by knocking out all my teeth. Really though…we are all fat, or so many are, that I wonder if maybe this is the way we are supposed to be. Everyone, thick or thin, seems to be on a sort of continual diet that is nothing more than an expression of guilt over their eating habits. I always thought it interesting that the word “diet” starts off with the word “die”, and though it seems so ripe for some sort of clever pun or joke, I can never think of one. Maybe the thin people are really just too skinny, and they should consider a half gallon of ice cream a day as a sort of therapy so they can catch up!

There are some people that remember me skinny (hard to imagine, since I really cannot recall that myself), and they are the some of the most biting critics….”why you used to be thin as a rail, and just look at you now!” The tough ones are the few folks that I know that have no weight problem at all. They often barely say a thing, but instead mutter asides barely audible but loud and clear all the same…as if to say, “You are weak…why cannot you be like me and show some self control?” I imagine them saying that in a sort of Arnold Schwarzenegger voice, and I resent them, because, in my heart of hearts, they are right. After so many years of trying to “diet” or exercise or whatever else you can do to lose weight (which in my case was pretty much confined to thinking about losing weight), I was pretty much a failure…I have managed to add a pound or two…maybe even more, every year that I live…the slow, inexorable march toward obesity…or at least to a size 40 waist!

The critics that most ably break down my defenses are those that play the health card. “You really should lose weight…you don’t want to wind up like your father”. He lay dead on the bathroom floor of my parents home at the age of 61…far too young for a man with ambition and a lengthy “things to do” list. Nope, I was hoping not to wind up like that…and if something like that can’t scare you into change, then it truly is a long uphill fight. I know there is the health thing, the heart attacks, the diabetes, the huffing and puffing up the stairs…and for some folks that is (or should be) the most important thing. I think I am in that group…but the fear lays dormant in favor of my taste buds that still want that second helping or a bowl of ice cream just before bedtime (another wildly bad “no-no”!....).

I still think it is mostly because we want to all “look” a certain way…sort of like Jason Bourne or even Indiana Jones (in the early days)…I’d love to take my shirt off at the beach or the pool, but frankly, I just could not put those folks through the trauma of that, to say nothing of how mortified my son or daughter would be! But the fact that I still WANT to take my shirt off but refusing to do so puts me in that category of folks who are still uncomfortable with how they have let themselves go to seed. I admire, in some weird way, those dudes that peel off the shirt only to expose the huge mound of flesh that is their belly, jiggling, usually pale and pasty, sometimes hairy, but primarily BIG. What self confidence! Or cluelessness…or perhaps I am witness to the simple acceptance of reality. Perhaps that is it. I have failed to grasp what is obvious to everyone else…I’m a fat guy.

Thing is…I don’t feel that fat…it is that belly thing again…it keeps growing…but my feet are not fat…nor are my legs or hands, or arms…or even my butt….sure, I could lose a pound or two in the face, but it is still all about the gut! I am just a good Photoshop session away from looking marvelous….at least in my own brain…of course in that same brain I am also about 22 years old and were it not for my gut, I’d have to scrape the hotties off with a spatula. Maybe it is because I buy loose fitting clothes (Translation: XXL!) and it hides the girth a bit. Sort of like wearing a tent as a disguise, or standing next to something huge, so that by comparison, I appear small. Just a thought…but maybe if they slid all the sizes down, so that what passes for an XL today, might morph into a Medium….at least we could feel a bit better about ourselves.
I marvel at the self confidence some folks have when they pack themselves into tight fitting shirts daring the buttons to pop….in the case of women, I think there is some sort of brainwashing going on that tells them to wear it tight whether they are a size 8 or says 18. Perhaps none of us feel fat…even if we are. Perhaps we all see ourselves as svelte 18 year olds. Perhaps we all buy clothes assuming we are about to lose weight. I have a fair assortment of pants that I hang onto just in case…

Exercise takes time, or so it seems despite all the claims that you can lose a pound a day by shoving this thing between your knees and squeezing for just 10 minutes a day, and then the whole contraption slides under the bed for easy storage…that way that you can more easily forget that it is there….and that you spent 3 easy installments of $29.99 on a piece of crap that probably cost about $1.50 to make in China (Free! Lead paint included!). Because they sell so much of this stuff, I must be the only person that reads that part of the ad that says “Individual Results may Vary”, or “Results not typical”….that seems to drain all the water out of the bucket for me, so I have never made the purchase, and so the underside of my bed is reserved for old shoes, cat hair and a lost remote or two. Perhaps I need to heed the request from my wife that I stop being so cynical about everything I read or see on TV. I’ll add that to the list of things I intend to change…”stop being cynical”…that shouldn’t take more than a day…

Oh but today we are all about the exercise. Like so many Americans, my days are filled with sitting at a desk, pounding away at a computer terminal, and compressing the cushions on the chair on which I sit. Exercise does not seem to erupt spontaneously in my day. No one stops by with a basketball under their right arm and suggests we head down to the park and shoot some hoops for a while. Frankly, the walk back and forth from the coffee machine is not much exertion, though I have detected lately that I grow winded even doing that….I either need to get in shape, or perhaps give up coffee so I no longer even need to make that walk…a change I am not presently willing to make, despite the fact that I have heard it said I should do it. I believe the only people who suggest that you give up coffee are people that DON’T DRINK COFFEE. Currently, the folks at Starbucks are hunting all those whacko's down and so they won’t bother me much longer….still I might add it to the list…”Give up Coffee”…yeah, right.

See how exercise seems to get pushed aside? Even as I write these words about adopting exercise as a life change, I keep getting off message. Same way in real life. I find so many things to do instead of exercising…cleaning my desk (Life Change # 23), or Surfing the Net in search of football news (to be addressed in Life Change #19). Somehow, everything seems more important than exercise. So I made it number one on the list. I figured it could use the emphasis such a declaration would add. Even still, I imagine I will need, at some point, to make Life Change #7: I find too many excuses (not to exercise, wear sun block, etc); though hopefully I will never again have to make Life Change #27 (Start exercising again).

The odd thing is: I really love it RIGHT AFTER I AM DONE….there is this sort of high…I have heard it is the result of endorphins, but I thinking it is really the absence of guilt about what I will have for lunch or dinner…I feel like I have taken my body out for a test drive and rather than staying in the parking lot or in the residential areas of town, I have taken it out on the freeway (though perhaps not into the fast lane just yet!), and pressed the accelerator pedal just a bit. I feel more alert and focused all day long, and I always wonder why didn’t I do this sooner…why do I put off exercising?

For me, the toughest part is the continuity, and the question of how much is enough, and how much is too little. If I exercise 3 times a day…basically every other day…that seems like not enough. Though I am sure that exercising 7 days a week is probably the best solution, it sometimes is simply not convenient. Work, travel, and life’s little complications all seem to conspire at times to keep me from making my appointment with my cardio vascular system…and if two days in a row are like that, it often derails my progress entirely. If I keep up steady progress, then I miss it when I don’t do it…but if I don’t do it for more than a couple of days, I shift from missing it to dreading it…and it becomes all too easy to find easy excuses not to do it …”I have a hangnail today”, or “I have no clean socks in which to sweat”…or the worst, most legitimate excuse: MY IPOD BATTERY IS DEAD!

On the other hand, on those few times where the momentum has truly taken over and I sustain my effort for several weeks…there is that moment…I put on my pants, cinch up my belt tight, and …”WHAT IS THIS???!!!—do I need to tighten my belt to a previously undiscovered notch?” Or…when a person you have not seen for awhile sees you and asks “have you lost weight?” WOW…better than any drug I have tried or could imagine (Life Change #84: Give up Drugs).
As far as ownership of this particular habit, I know I am in a really big club…maybe the biggest club of all. You cannot spend any time channel surfing without stumbling on an infomercial selling Bow Flex, or some sort of exercise programs involving weights or judo, or dancing or yoga or big round balls, or spring loaded contraptions that look so cool on the screen and promise dramatic results in as little as 5 days! QVC sells a parade of similar crap, and there are countless books, tapes, and thousands of health clubs around the country. Exercise, it seems is everywhere….why then are we so fat?

I stop to think about all the things I have bought that were intended to help rediscover my love of exercise…..mountain bike, jump rope, punching bag, boxing gloves, tennis racket, rowing machine, bike rack for the car (so I could haul around previously mentioned bike), countless gym memberships, a basketball, a volleyball, a canoe, walking shoes, stair master, weight set, stationary bicycle, and an elliptical trainer. I think I still have most of this stuff, but the elliptical trainer sits in my office (the only place in the house that it would fit) and so I see it every day…just as soon as I knock the cobwebs off and give it a thorough dusting, I climb aboard that machine and begin my first life change…to start exercising.

After 27 minutes at level 3, I figure that is enough change for one day, I climb down, dripping wet, thirsty, but on my way to the greatest reclamation project in (my) history.